World's top genocide scholars association says Israel committing it in Gaza
The world's leading genocide scholars' association says Israel has met the legal criteria for the crime during its ongoing onslaught in Gaza.
The president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), Melanie O'Brien, said on Monday that her organisation had passed a resolution stating that Israel had "engaged in systematic and widespread crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide".
The resolution states: “Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in article II of the United Nations convention for the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide (1948).”
Eighty-six percent of those who voted among the 500-member International Association of Genocide Scholars backed the resolution, which calls on Israel to "immediately cease all acts that constitute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza".
There was no immediate response from Israel, which is fighting a case at the International Court of Justice in the Hague that accuses it of genocide.
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More than 63,557 Palestinians have been killed and 160,660 wounded in Gaza since October 2023, when Israel launched its war on Gaza, driving the population into a catastrophic humanitarian crisis.
At least 34 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces since dawn on Monday, Al Jazeera Arabic has reported. The number includes 19 in Gaza City and seven aid seekers.
Last month, famine was officially declared in Gaza following months of severe Israel-enforced food shortages.
At least 340 people, including 124 children, have died from malnutrition during the genocide, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
The IAGS resolution said the "deliberate destruction of agricultural fields, food warehouses, and bakeries and other violence that prevents food production, in conjunction with denial and restriction of humanitarian aid, indicate the intentional infliction of unliveable conditions resulting in starvation of Palestinians in Gaza".
It added that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu endorsed a plan by US President Donald Trump to forcibly expel all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, with no right of return, "in what Navi Pillay, head of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, has said amounts to ethnic cleansing".
Israel’s actions in Gaza have drawn condemnation from human rights groups and governments worldwide.
The report echoes others by Israeli and major international rights groups which also characterise Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide, and call for action to stop the most serious crime under international law.
The International Court of Justice is investigating Israel for genocide, while Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant are facing arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Gaza.
Last week Palestine’s leading human rights group presented further evidence of genocide in Gaza, accusing Israel of seeking to annihilate Palestinians in the enclave.
In a 204-page report titled Voices of the Genocide, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) concluded that Israel has committed four of the five acts prohibited under the 1948 Genocide Convention, with the intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a group.
PCHR has previously labelled Israel's conduct in Gaza as a genocide, but Thursday's report is the culmination of the organisation's documentation of genocidal evidence over the past 22 months.
Leading experts in international law and the Holocaust have also told Middle East Eye that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal threshold for genocide.
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