Context: Genocide
The Crime of Genocide was codified in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which has now been ratified by 153 countries, including Israel and the United States. It is defined as follows:
“Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
At the end of 2023 South Africa made the case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that Israel was violating the Genocide Convention in its war on Gaza. Among the evidence it presented were numerous examples showing Israel’s deliberate intent to commit genocide in Gaza, which is the most difficult part of the definition to prove. On January 26, 2024, the ICJ ruled that the South African case was “plausible” and that Israel must “take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts” within the scope of the Genocide Convention. It could take years for the ICJ to decide whether Israel is actually guilty of the crime of genocide.
Rather than abide by the provisional measures ordered by the Court, Israel continued to employ genocidal aggression according to a number of reports, including Amnesty International’s You Feel Like You are Subhuman, Doctors Without Borders’ Gaza: Life in a Death Trap, Forensic Architecture’s huge Cartography of Genocide platform and several by UN bodies.
Building on Forensic Architecture’s work, Al-Haq’s How to Hide a Genocide details how the forced evacuation of residents to shrinking ‘safe zones’ accelerates the extermination of Gaza’s population. Israeli historian Lee Mordechai, an associate professor at Hebrew University, has compiled evidence of genocide in a report, Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War, and an extensive online database. Visualizing Palestine’s INTENT: the road to genocide presents the material in a graphically compelling way. Ha’aretz has featured articles about Israeli soldiers committing war crimes. “What is striking, and horrific,” writes Hebrew University professor emeritus David Shulman in the New York Review of Books, “is the fact that Israel has embraced cruelty and atrocity as a normative mode of waging war.”
That “normative mode” – spurred by a drastic loosening of a “system of safeguards meant to protect civilians,” as the New York Times reported, has been described by the Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy as “killing and killing and killing for the sake of killing.” The 140- square-mile Gaza Strip has been pulverized by more than by 100,000 tons of explosives, – dwarfing the Hiroshima atomic bomb with its explosive yield of 15,000 metric tons.
Water is life, and by cutting off Gaza’s water, fuel and electricity supply, blocking water-related aid from entering the Gaza Strip, and damaging or destroying over 84 percent of Gaza’s water and sanitation infrastructure Israel is “committing the crime against humanity of extermination,” according to a 185-page report released on Dec. 19, 2024 by Human Rights Watch. Extermination and Acts of Genocide: Israel Deliberately Depriving Palestinians in Gaza of Water details what it is like to live on between 2 -9 liters of water a day, when the WHO calculates that 50-100 liters are required for basic needs and it takes 24.6 liters for a single toilet flush. It describes people drinking seawater, diseases proliferating as sewage flows through the streets, and the army methodically wiring reservoirs with explosives, and bombing 31 of Gaza’s 54 water reservoirs, municipal wells and desalination plants, and then firing on workers trying to repair the damage. The report paints a harrowing picture of the impact of water denial and starvation on pregnant women and babies, and estimates that more than 60,000 Palestinians died from malnutrition between October 2023 and June 2024 alone.
On March 2, 2025 Israel intensified its use of deliberately-engineered starvation and the denial of water as weapons of war when it barred all humanitarian aid, including food, water, fuel, medicine, from entering the Gaza Strip. Malnutrition had soared by the time Israel accelerated its military offensive in mid May. On May 18, Netanyahu suggested that Israel might permit a “minimal” amount of food to enter Gaza in order not to jeopardize international support for its war. By that time genocide scholars from Israel, the Netherlands, the US, the UK, Australia, Croatia and Canada had all agreed that Israel was committing genocide as defined in international law.