https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2025/11/12/18881436.php
War or genocide: The growing consensus on Israel’s Gaza offensive
by David Goeßmann
[This article posted on 8/13/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.telepolis.de/article/Krieg-oder-Voelkermord-Der-wachsende-Konsens-zu-Israels-Gaza-Offensive-10516547.html.]
Palestinians try to get food in the Mawasi region of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on April 26, 2025.
When can we actually speak of genocide? And are the criteria met in the case of Gaza? What experts say. (Part 2)
In the first part of the analysis, we saw that neither the US nor Germany is talking about genocide in relation to Israel’s actions in Gaza. But it is not only UN authorities that have come to a different conclusion.
### ICJ: Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide
On December 29, 2023, South Africa had already filed a lawsuit before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) alleging that Israel was committing genocide in the Gaza Strip and violating the UN Convention. Nearly two dozen countries, including Spain, Turkey, the Republic of Ireland, and Brazil, joined the lawsuit, and many alliances of states, such as the African Union (55 countries), the Arab League (22 countries), and the Non-Aligned Movement (121 countries), support it. France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, among others, sided with Israel against the lawsuit.
The then German Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck (Green Party) stated: “One can criticize the Israeli army for acting too harshly in the Gaza Strip, but that is not genocide.” Former Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Green Party) stated that “Israel’s self-defense” against the “terrorist organization Hamas” could not be considered genocide.
However, in its historic order of January 26, 2024, the ICJ considered it plausible that Israel’s actions constituted genocide and issued six provisional measures—the final ruling is not expected before the end of 2027.
### Ignored measures
Israel was called upon by the International Court of Justice to take all measures to prevent genocide. Among other things, it must prohibit and punish incitement to genocide, allow aid and services to reach Palestinians in Gaza, and secure evidence of crimes committed in Gaza.
In March 2024, the court added further measures, demanding that humanitarian aid be allowed. In May, it ordered the cessation of the Israeli offensive against the southern city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip and the reopening of the Rafah border crossing from Egypt for aid deliveries. Israel almost completely ignored the measures demanded by the ICJ and rejected the accusation of genocide as “outrageous and false.”
### Amnesty: Palestinians as “subhuman”
Leading human rights organizations also speak of genocide. Amnesty International’s (AI) 300-page report, “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza” (“Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip”), concluded on December 5, 2024, that … Israel has committed acts that constitute genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention. Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza”) concluded on December 5, 2024, that …
Israel has committed acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention with the specific intent of destroying the Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, the infliction of serious bodily or mental harm, and the deliberate creation of living conditions for Palestinians in Gaza aimed at their physical destruction. Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a group of subhumans unworthy of human rights and dignity, thereby expressing its intent to physically destroy them.
The report examines in detail Israel’s violations in Gaza during the nine months between October 7, 2023, and early July 2024. A total of 212 people were interviewed, including Palestinian victims and witnesses, local authorities in Gaza, and medical personnel.
### Over 100 genocidal statements
In addition, field research was conducted and extensive visual and digital evidence, including satellite imagery, was analyzed. The report evaluated 102 statements by senior Israeli government and military officials and official Israeli bodies that dehumanize Palestinians, incite or justify genocide or other crimes against them.
This language was also frequently repeated, including by Israeli soldiers on the ground, as evidenced by audiovisual content reviewed by Amnesty International showing soldiers calling for Gaza to be “wiped out” or made uninhabitable and celebrating the destruction of Palestinian homes, mosques, schools, and universities.
Finally, the AI report documents a series of genocidal killings in which entire families were wiped out by attacks unrelated to military targets. The total blockade (electricity, water, fuel) since October 7, 2023, the multiple evacuation orders to unsafe areas, the waves of expulsions, the destruction of vital infrastructure, and the prevention of minimum humanitarian standards are, clear indicators that living conditions are being deliberately created that will eventually lead to the destruction of the Palestinians in Gaza.
### “Our genocide”
Human Rights Watch (HRW) also states in its 179-page investigation “Extermination and Acts of Genocide: Israel Deliberately Depriving Palestinians in Gaza of Water“ from December 2024, Human Rights Watch (HRW) also refers to ”Israel’s crime of extermination“ and ”acts of genocide in Gaza.” By deliberately withholding drinking water, a situation is being created in which parts of the Gaza population are being deliberately destroyed. Coupled with statements by Israeli officials who want to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza, the Israeli authorities are responsible for acts of genocide, according to HRW.
The international organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) also stated in a report at the end of 2024 that the reality in Gaza corresponds to what legal experts and organizations describe as genocide:
The teams of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) are witnesses to a genocide in Gaza committed by Israeli forces. We are seeing the effects of mass killings, forced displacement, the destruction of vital civilian infrastructure, and a punitive siege that denies access to food, water, medicine, and other humanitarian supplies. The Israeli authorities are systematically destroying the livelihoods of the Palestinian population in Gaza. No one is spared.
On July 28, the two leading Israeli human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, also went public and described Israel’s Gaza offensive as genocide. The report “Our Genocide” states: “Israel is taking coordinated measures to deliberately destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip.” It is a “prime example of genocide.”
### The “textbook case”
Shortly after the start of the Gaza war, renowned Israeli historian, Holocaust and genocide researcher Raz Segal had already spoken of a “textbook case of genocide.” On October 13, 2023, he published an article with this title in the award-winning magazine Jewish Currents.
According to Segal, the intentions of the governments and authorities were explicitly genocidal and were being carried out accordingly through their actions against the population in the enclave. After the article was published, Segal lost a job offer from the University of Minnesota as a result of a campaign by a pro-Israel group.
### “Human animals” and “complete annihilation”
The genocidal statements made by officials in Israel are extensively documented in various studies and in South Africa’s lawsuit. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for example, declared that the Israeli armed forces would reduce parts of the Gaza Strip “to rubble and ashes” and called on “the residents of the Gaza Strip” to “leave now, because we will strike hard everywhere.”
At the same time, he reminded Israelis of “what Amalek did to you,” a quote that refers to a passage in the Bible in which the Israelites are called upon to kill “men and women, children and infants” of their ancient enemy. Time and again, government and military officials declared that they were fighting against “human animals,” that there were “no innocents” in Gaza, that they were “fighting Nazis,” and later called for “complete annihilation.”
Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of parliament, said Israel’s task must be to “wipe the Gaza Strip off the map.” The Israeli minister of cultural heritage, Amichai Eliyahu, even raised the possibility of dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza and later repeated this call when asked.
### The growing consensus
A number of genocide researchers were initially hesitant to speak of genocide in Gaza. Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University in the US, who was already quoted in the first part of the analysis, did not speak of genocide until May 2024, when the Israeli military (IDF) ordered one million Palestinians in Rafah to relocate to the Mawasi area on the coast, where there were no supplies for them. Rafah was then destroyed.
Since then, according to Bartov, the actions have been consistent with the genocidal intentions expressed, so that one must “inevitably” conclude that Israel is committing genocide. “I resisted this conclusion for as long as possible. But I have been teaching courses on genocide for a quarter of a century. I know one when I see one.”
This is not just his conclusion. According to Bartov, there is a growing consensus among genocide researchers that the events in Gaza should be described as genocide.
### Far from divided
After surveying genocide experts, the leading Dutch daily newspaper, NRC, concluded in May of this year that, contrary to media reports of polarization and division, the majority of academics in the field of genocide studies speak of genocide or genocidal violence in Gaza. The researchers pointed to an astonishing consensus regarding Gaza.
The growing chorus was joined by internationally respected genocide researchers, including many of Jewish-Israeli origin, such as genocide expert Shmuel Lederman, leading Canadian international law expert and genocide scholar William Schabas, who grew up in a family of Holocaust survivors (“absolutely” a genocide), Melanie O’Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Australian scholar A. Dirk Moses from the City University of New York, and British specialist Martin Shaw.
In an article, Uğur Ümit Üngör, professor at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, stated that there are probably scholars who do not yet consider Israel’s offensive in Gaza to be genocide, but “I don’t know them.”
While many Holocaust institutions continue to remain silent on the issue, Israeli Raz Segal and Holocaust researchers Amos Goldberg and Daniel Blatman from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem stated in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
### Beyond the Western mainstream
A number of experts on the Israel-Palestine conflict, intellectuals, and media outlets beyond the Western mainstream have also been talking about genocide for a long time. They include Israeli writer David Grossman, award-winning Haaretz correspondent Amira Hass, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University and former UN special rapporteur for Palestine Richard Falk (“the most transparent genocide in the entire history of humanity. It is the first time that daily atrocities have been broadcast live and followed by people around the world in real time.“) and fascism expert and son of Holocaust survivors, Jason Stanley.
Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad condemned Europe for supporting Israel’s ”genocide” in Gaza. And in November 2024, former Pope Francis already spoke of experts seeing genocide in Gaza and called for an investigation.
In many countries of the Global South, unlike in Western countries, Israel’s actions are unequivocally condemned in public as a cruel crime and described as genocide. This ranges from Al Jazeera in the Arab world to the South China Morning Post in Asia.
In addition, there are many independent and progressive media outlets, especially in the English-speaking world, such as Democracy Now, The Intercept, Common Dreams, Truthout, Dropsitenews, and The Nation, which refer to the growing consensus among experts and speak of genocide.