Renowned Israeli professor says Israel committing genocide in Gaza
Palestinians queue for a portion of hot food distributed by a charity kitchen in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza on 15 July 2025
Middle East Eye reports on 15 July 2025:
A renowned professor of Holocaust and genocide studies has called Israel’s war on Gaza an “inescapable” case of genocide, joining a chorus of prominent Israeli and Jewish scholars coming to the same conclusion about Israel’s 21-month war on the besieged enclave.
Omer Bartov, a professor at Brown University and a former Israeli army soldier, wrote in The New York Times on Tuesday that after deliberating and examining Israel’s war, his “inescapable conclusion… [is] that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people”.
“Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could,” he wrote.
“But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one,” he added. Bartov is considered one of the world’s leading scholars of the WWII Holocaust and an expert on genocide. One of his most well-known books is Anatomy of a Genocide.
Bartov’s article comes on the heels of a report by Dutch newspaper NRC, which interviewed seven renowned genocide and Holocaust researchers from six countries – including Israel – all of whom described the Israeli campaign in Gaza as genocidal.
Leading human rights organisations have also reached the conclusion that Israel is committing genocide. In December 2024, Amnesty International became the first major organisation to conclude that Israel had committed genocide during its war on Gaza, while Human Rights Watch more conservatively concluded that “genocidal acts” had been committed. Francesca Albanese, the UN’s top expert on Palestine, authored two reports last year suggesting that genocide was taking place in Gaza.