Israel is committing genocide. Its enablers can be held to account.
Palestinians carry some salvaged belongings as they leave the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza strip after they returned briefly to check on their homes on 30 May 2024
Thomas Becker and Emily Wilder write in Mondoweiss on 2 June 2024:
Less than 48 hours after the world’s top court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), ordered Israel to “immediately halt its military offensive and any other action” near the southernmost Gazan city of Rafah, Israel increased its deadly strikes on the already beleaguered area. Over Sunday night, Israel dropped massive bombs, including United States-made warheads, on an encampment of displaced civilians Israel had designated a “safe zone.”
At least 45 people were killed and 200 injured in the bombing and subsequent fires, most women and children. People were burnt beyond recognition and reduced to ash; in one video of the horrors, a man wordlessly held up a beheaded baby to the camera, the background ablaze.
This most recent attack is not Israel’s first defiance of the ICJ and basic human rights principles; nor, unfortunately, is it the last. Despite global outrage, Israel has continued to bombard Rafah in the days since. Indeed, over eight months, Israel has besieged and bombarded Gaza in a pattern of conduct that has amounted and continues to amount to genocide.
Genocide is among the most loaded charges one might levy. Often considered the “crime of crimes,” an aspiration to prevent genocide is in many ways foundational to the modern international legal system.
The conclusion that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinian people in Gaza is based on a thorough legal analysis of the international jurisprudence surrounding the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, or the Genocide Convention. Since the October 7, 2023 attacks, we at the University Network for Human Rights (UNHR), alongside scholars at programs, clinics, and projects at Boston University, Cornell, University of Pretoria, and Yale, sought to determine whether Israel’s actions meet the legal threshold of genocide. This meticulous analysis is delineated in painstaking depth and detail in a report published earlier this month. In it, we found the evidence of genocide was clear and overwhelming.