Israel guilty of ‘extermination’ in attacks on schools, mosques: UN
People walk in front of Gaza City’s 17th-century Qasr al-Basha, or the Pasha’s Palace, on 5 January 2024
Al Jazeera reports on 11 June 2025:
Israel has committed the crime against humanity of “extermination” by attacking Palestinian civilians sheltering in schools and religious sites in Gaza, an independent United Nations commission report says.
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, made the accusation in a report released on Tuesday.
The report also said Israeli forces have committed war crimes, “including directing attacks against civilians and wilful killing, in their attacks on educational facilities that caused civilian casualties”.
“We are seeing more and more indications that Israel is carrying out a concerted campaign to obliterate Palestinian life in Gaza,” commission chair Navi Pillay, a former UN high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement.
The report said Israel has damaged or destroyed more than 90 percent of the school and university buildings in Gaza and destroyed more than half of all religious and cultural sites in the territory. “While the destruction of cultural property, including educational facilities, was not in itself a genocidal act, evidence of such conduct may nevertheless infer genocidal intent to destroy a protected group,” the report said.
“Israel’s targeting of the educational, cultural and religious life of the Palestinian people will harm the present generations and generations to come, hindering their right to self-determination,” Pillay continued.