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Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza – Mother Jones
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Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza – Mother Jones

The Khamis Ghaban family, who fled Israeli attacks and took refuge in the Legislative Council building destroyed during Israeli attacks due to lack of shelter, is struggling to survive in difficult conditions in Gaza City.Mahmoud Issa/AP

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In an almost 300 pages report Published on Thursday, Amnesty International concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide.

“Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intention to physically destroy them,” said Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, in a press release. She stressed: “Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. This must stop now.

Amnesty reiterates its call for the UN Security Council to impose a “complete arms embargo” on Israel and Hamas. He also supports targeted sanctions such as freezing the assets of Israeli officials most involved in the genocide.

Amnesty’s report, which focuses on the period between October 2023 and July 2024, comes as South Africa files a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. The ICJ found South Africa’s case plausible and issued a series of legally binding interim measures that Israel largely ignored. The International Criminal Court has also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity and using starvation as a weapon of war.

President Joe Biden called the decision to issue arrest warrants “outrageous” in a statement. The United States provided almost entirely unconditional military and diplomatic support for Israel throughout the war.

The report’s summary clearly shows the extent of the destruction the United States has permitted in Gaza:

The Israeli military offensive has killed and seriously injured tens of thousands of Palestinians, including thousands of children, many in direct or indiscriminate attacks, often wiping out entire multigenerational families. Israel has forcibly moved 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents, most of them multiple times, to increasingly narrow and ever-changing plots of land lacking basic infrastructure, forcing the people to live in conditions that exposed them to a slow and calculated death. He deliberately obstructed or refused the importation and delivery of vital goods and humanitarian aid. It restricted electricity supplies, which, combined with damage and destruction, led to the collapse of water, sanitation and health systems.

Widespread death and destruction is not enough for something to be considered genocide under international law. The actions must be committed with the “intent to destroy” the group “in whole or in part.” Amnesty has determined that Israel’s actions have passed this high bar.

To establish intent, the organization looked at both the structure of Israel’s actions and statements made by senior government officials who called for the destruction of Gaza – and not just by Hamas. The group interviewed 212 people, including “Palestinian victims, survivors and witnesses of airstrikes, displacement, detentions, destruction of farms, homes and agricultural land, as well as individuals facing the impact of restrictions imposed by Israel on humanitarian aid.

Palestinians displaced from Beit Lahia arrive in Jabalia, in the northern Gaza Strip, on Tuesday.Omar Al-Qattaa

As I have writingThe word genocide was coined in 1941 by Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer from Eastern Europe who fled the Nazis. Lemkin defined genocide as a process in which an oppressor group erased the “national model” of a victim group and then imposed its own. He insisted that genocide was not limited to mass extermination. Other actions – such as the destruction of universities or the deprivation of food – could be genocidal if they aim to destroy the “essential foundations” of the victim groups so that they “wither and die like plants that have suffered from ‘a scourge’. The “machine gun” was for Lemkin the “last resort” of genocide.

After the war, Lemkin succeeded in getting the international community to criminalize genocide. But in doing so, Lemkin’s conception of genocide was significantly diluted by world powers who feared that their actions – whether Jim Crow in the United States or political purges in the Soviet Union – might one day be found accused of the crime.

Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians would almost certainly have met Lemkin’s original definition well before October 7 of last year. (Amnestywith others international And Israeli human rights groups, have argued in recent years that Israel apartheid regime due to its systematic oppression of Palestinians.) Amnesty’s conclusion Thursday reflects how human rights groups and international lawyers increasingly believe its actions in Gaza constitute genocide under the definition narrow adopted in 1948.

In March, I asked Omer Bartov, Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University and one of the world’s leading experts on Nazi atrocities, whether he thought the actions of Israel in Gaza met the legal criteria for genocide. Bartov, who was born and raised in Israel and served in the Israel Defense Forces, said he believed Israel was on the brink.

“I don’t know exactly where we are right now,” he said. “But we are very close.” Bartov believed that Israel’s actions in the future would help determine how to properly assess the initial phases of the war.

Bartov has since concluded that Israel was engaged in genocide.

In a conversation with journalist Peter Beinart last week, he delivered a chilling account of the latest phase of the Israeli campaign in Gaza, which targets the northern area of ​​the Gaza Strip.

“Most of the population has already been expelled and Jabalia, the main refugee camp, has been almost completely destroyed,” Bartov said. “We see this as a microcosm of a larger operation, which clearly aims to make Gaza completely uninhabitable for the Palestinian population. Tighten it more and more towards the south and then say either: the Palestinians will die there, or someone will welcome them but they will not be in the Gaza Strip.