Even as Israel’s defense minister declared that “Gaza is burning” because “the IDF strikes with an iron fist “, a United Nations inquiry insisted that Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip.
Israel immediately denounced the genocide allegations as an antisemitic “blood libel”.
After a painstaking legal analysis of Israel’s actions and intent, the inquiry named Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog as being main inciters. It demanded that the international community should end the genocide and take steps to punish everyone responsible for it.
The allegations were contained in a deeply researched 72-page document prepared by a three-person independent “Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel”.
It was chaired by Navi Pillay, a UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014 who earlier served as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda that sentenced 62 people over the 1994 genocide of more than half a million Rwandans.
Herzog condemned the Commission’s findings. “While Israel defends its people and seeks the return of hostages, this morally bankrupt Commission obsesses over blaming the Jewish state, whitewashing Hamas’s atrocities, and turning victims of one of the worst massacres of modern times into the accused,” he said.
Daniel Meron, Israel’s ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, branded the report as “scandalous” and “fake” and authored by “Hamas proxies”.
“Israel categorically rejects the libelous rant published today by this commission of inquiry,” he told reporters at Geneva’s UN Human Rights Council which does not include Israel and the US as members.
The report concluded that Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces committed four of the five genocidal acts defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to which Israel is a signatory.
The four acts are: killing; causing serious bodily or mental harm; deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the Palestinians in whole or in part; and imposing measures intended to prevent births.
Pillay said the Commission “finds that Israel is responsible for the commission of genocide in Gaza. It is clear that there is an intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza through acts that meet the criteria set forth in the Genocide Convention.”
“The responsibility for these atrocity crimes lies with Israeli authorities at the highest echelons who have orchestrated a genocidal campaign for almost two years now with the specific intent to destroy the Palestinian group in Gaza,” she added.
Although the Commission and the UN Human Rights Council cannot take action against a country, the findings could be used by prosecutors at the International Criminal Court or the U.N.’s International Court of Justice (ICJ).
A 2024 ICJ ruling found it plausible that Israel’s acts could amount to genocide. It issued provisional measures ordering Israel to prevent any acts contrary to the 1948 Genocide Convention but did not order Israel to suspend its military campaign in Gaza. Israel rejected the rulings.
Pillay’s Commission said Israel must end its policy of starvation, lift the siege and ensure the unimpeded access of humanitarian aid at scale.
It called for an immediate end to activities of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a controversial American group staffed mostly by former US soldiers who critics charge have repeatedly killed Palestinians, including children, seeking food aid at its distribution sites.
The Commission’s report arrived just as IDF ground troops began a large scale invasion of Gaza city to confront up to 3,000 Hamas combatants that the IDF believes are still holed up there.
“Gaza is burning,” Defense Minister Israel Katz posted on X. “The IDF strikes with an iron fist at the terrorist infrastructure and IDF soldiers are fighting bravely to create the conditions for the release of the hostages and the defeat of Hamas.”
Reportedly, the ground invasion is defying warnings from European leaders but seems to have Washington’s blessing conveyed by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio during his visit to Jerusalem over the weekend.
Bombs also continue to fall on Gaza City as families try to flee. Speaking from south Gaza, Tess Ingram of UNICEF, the UN’s agency for children, said it was “inhumane to expect nearly half a million children battered and traumatized by over 700 days of unrelenting conflict to flee one hellscape to end up in another.”