By Stephanie van den Berg
THE HAGUE (Reuters) – Amnesty International accused the state of Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza war in a report published on Thursday, an allegation Israel angrily denied.
The London-based human rights group said it reached the conclusion after months of analysing incidents and statements of Israeli officials. Amnesty said the legal threshold for the crime had been met, in its first such determination during an active armed conflict.
The 1948 Genocide Convention, enacted in the wake of the mass murder of Jews in the Nazi Holocaust, defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
Israel has repeatedly rejected any accusation of genocide, saying it has respected international law and has a right to defend itself after the cross-border Hamas attack from Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023 that precipitated the war.
“The deplorable and fanatical organisation Amnesty International has once again produced a fabricated report that is entirely false and based on lies,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Oren Marmorstein wrote on X.
Amnesty’s own branch in Israel distanced itself from the findings of its parent group, saying it had played no part in the research and did not believe Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
However, in a long statement, it said the killing and destruction in Gaza had reached “horrifying levels” and called for an investigation into possible crimes against humanity.
The United States disagrees with Amnesty International’s conclusion that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza war, State Department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel told reporters on Thursday, adding that Washington continues to find allegations of genocide in Gaza unfounded.
Patel said there are a number of deliberative processes about the situation on the ground in Gaza.
Israel launched its air and ground war in Gaza after Hamas-led fighters attacked Israeli communities across the border 14 months ago, killing 1,200 people and taking over 250 hostages back to Gaza, according to Israeli tallies.
“The genocidal massacre on October 7, 2023, was carried out by the Hamas terrorist organisation against Israeli citizens,” the foreign ministry spokesman said.
Gaza’s Health Ministry says that Israel’s military campaign since then has killed more than 44,500 Palestinians and injured many others.
Palestinian and U.N. officials say there are no safe areas left in Gaza, a tiny, densely populated and heavily built-up coastal territory. Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been internally displaced, some as many as 10 times.
In Gaza on Thursday, some Palestinians taking part in funerals for loved ones killed by Israeli military strikes the day before were aware of the Amnesty report and said they hoped it would support efforts to bring Israeli leaders to justice.
“We don’t see anyone from the whole world standing by us or helping us in this situation,” said Abu Kamal Al-Assar, a resident and witness to an Israeli bombing of a tent encampment in al-Mawasi that killed 20 people.
“We want them to stop this crazy war that is killing all the people, without having mercy on anyone, not the elderly, or the children, men or women. It is enough. People are going through incredible suffering,” he added.
The Israeli military accuses Hamas of planting militants within populated neighbourhoods for operational cover, which Hamas denies, while accusing Israel of indiscriminate strikes.
ARREST WARRANTS
Amnesty’s report came just two weeks after the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence chief for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict. They have both denied the allegations.
Presenting the report to journalists in The Hague, Amnesty International Secretary General Agnes Callamard said the conclusion had not been taken “lightly, politically, or preferentially”.
She told journalists after the presentation: “There is a genocide being committed. There is no doubt, not one doubt in our mind after six months of in-depth, focused research.”
Amnesty said it concluded that Israel and the Israeli military committed at least three of the five acts banned by the 1948 Genocide Convention, namely killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about a protected group’s physical destruction.
These acts were done with the intent required by the convention, according to Amnesty, which said it reviewed over 100 statements from Israeli officials.
Callamard said Amnesty had not set out to prove genocide but after reviewing the evidence and statements collectively, she said the only conclusion was that “Israel is intending and has intended to commit genocide”.
She added: “The assertion that Israel’s war in Gaza aims solely to dismantle Hamas and not to physically destroy Palestinians as a national and ethnic group, that assertion simply does not stand up to scrutiny.”
Amnesty urged the ICC prosecutor to investigate alleged genocide. The office of the prosecutor said in a statement that it is continuing investigations into alleged crimes committed in the Palestinian territories and is unable to provide further comment.
(Reporting by Stephanie van den Berg with additional reporting by Crispian Balmer in Jerusalem, Nidal al-Mughrabi in Cairo and Simon Lewis in Washington; editing by Anthony Deutsch, Mark Heinrich and Deepa Babington)
