There are “reasonable grounds” to believe Israel is committing genocide in the besieged Palestinian enclave of the Gaza Strip, according to a report issued by a United Nations-appointed expert.
In the report, issued late on Monday, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese said there are clear indications that Israel has violated three of the five acts listed under the UN Genocide Convention.
Albanese, appointed by the UN Human Rights Council but not an official voice on behalf of the United Nations, said she had found “reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of … acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has been met”.
“The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group,” she said.
The report was immediately rejected by Israel as an “obscene inversion of reality”.
Entitled Anatomy of a Genocide, the report listed the violating acts as: “killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to the group’s members; and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.
Albanese noted that Israel has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 7. A further 12,000 are reported missing, presumed dead under the rubble.
More than 70 percent of the recorded deaths have been women and children and Israel has failed to prove that the remaining 30 percent – adult males – were active Hamas fighters, she said.
Regarding the second violated act, Albanese said Israeli forces have wounded more than 70,000 Palestinians and detained thousands of Palestinian men and boys, subjecting them to torture and mistreatment.
On the third act, Albanese said Israel has destroyed or severely damaged most of Gaza’s life-sustaining infrastructure, including hospitals and agricultural land.
“The incalculable collective trauma will be experienced for generations to come,” Albanese said in a statement.
“Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure,” said said.
Additionally, calls for “violent annihilation” from Israeli high-ranking officials aimed at soldiers on duty on the ground serve as “compelling evidence of explicit and public encouragement to commit genocide,” Albanese added.
‘Outrageous accusations’
Israel’s diplomatic mission in Geneva said the country “utterly rejects the report”, describing it as “simply an extension of a campaign seeking to undermine the very establishment of the Jewish State”.
“Israel’s war is against Hamas, not against Palestinian civilians,” it said in a statement, slamming Albanese’s “outrageous accusations”.
Hamas fighters attacked southern Israel on October 7, during which about 1,200 people were killed. The armed Palestinian group also seized about 250 hostages, of whom Israel believes approximately 130 remain in Gaza, including 33 presumed dead.
A US official told AFP that Washington is “aware” of the report but has “no reason to believe Israel has committed acts of genocide in Gaza”.
The US insisted on Monday that it had no evidence Israel has violated human rights and that its ally has offered assurances that it has not used weapons it has donated to violate international humanitarian law.
In her statement, Albanese insisted that Israel’s “genocide of Palestinians” in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a “long-standing settler colonial process of erasure”.
She called for the “ongoing Nakba” to stop, referring to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine when Zionist militias expelled more than 750,000 Palestinians from their villages, destroying homes and killing thousands. The events were followed by the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
