Relatives and loved ones of Palestinians who lost their lives in Israeli attacks mourn for the deceased on Tuesday.Imago/Zuma
Leading genocide scholars have ruled that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide.
In a resolution issued Sunday by the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), the scholars argue that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide under the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. That document, which has been ratified by more than 150 member states, characterizes genocide as crimes “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
The IAGS resolution cites several figures and examples from Israel’s war in Gaza to make its cases: more than 59,000 reported fatalities and 143,000 reported injuries, according to the UN; deliberate attacks on journalists, aid workers, and medical professionals; the aid blockade; and the destruction of Palestinian schools and cultural sites.
The resolution calls on the Israeli government “to immediately cease all acts that constitute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza” and asks both the Israeli government and the UN “to support a process of repair and transitional justice that will afford democracy, freedom, dignity, and security for all people of Gaza.” It also calls upon members of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to “surrender any individual subject to an arrest warrant,” seemingly referring to the arrest warrants the ICC issued last year for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
The resolution comes as international condemnation of Israel’s actions are ramping up. Several countries recently announced plans to recognize Palestinian statehood, with Belgium becoming the latest as of Tuesday morning. Amnesty International also concluded Israel is committing genocide in Gaza in a 300-page report issued in December, as my colleague Noah Lanard reported at the time, and the Israeli human rights groups B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel both determined the same in July. South Africa is also pursuing a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in the Hague. And last month, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a coalition of 21 organizations—including Save the Children, UNICEF, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization—confirmed that an “entirely man-made” famine is taking place in Gaza City and that other nearby cities are also at risk.
The United States, though, has consistently remained an outlier as other countries have moved to speak out against Israel and call for peace. President Donald Trump, for example, has not publicly addressed the IPC’s designation of famine in Gaza, though he has previously acknowledged starvation in Gaza. Spokespeople for the White House and the State Department did not immediately respond to an inquiry from Mother Jones on Tuesday about the IAGS resolution.
The US has funded Israel’s war to the tune of nearly $18 billion since Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which killed more than 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages, including a dozen Americans. The IAGS resolution also says the October 7 attack against Israel “constitutes international crimes.”
On Sunday, the same day the resolution was issued, the Washington Post reported that a postwar plan for Gaza circulating throughout the Trump administration would put it under US control for a decade and would include the so-called “voluntary” displacement of Palestinians—a plan that experts have called ethnic cleansing.
Israeli officials have repeatedly denied allegations of genocide against Palestinians. On Monday, the Israel Foreign Ministry slammed the IAGS resolution in a statement on X, calling it “an embarrassment to the legal profession and to any academic standard” and alleging that the claims within it were unverified and “entirely based on Hamas’s campaign of lies.”
Tim Williams, the vice president of IAGS and professor of insecurity and social order at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich, told the UK’s Channel 4 News that the organization’s were not surprised by the Israeli reaction, but hoped their determination would provide “a certain amount of academic credentials to anyone now claiming that it is genocide.”
As Lanard has written, the definition of what constitutes a genocide has been both contested and narrowed since its original formulation:
The word “genocide” was coined in 1941 by Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer from a Polish family, who combined the Greek word for a people (genos) and the Latin translation for killing (cide). At its most basic, genocide meant systematically destroying another group. Lemkin laid it out as a two-phase, often colonial process in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: First, the oppressor erases the “national pattern” of the victim. Then, it imposes its own. Genocide stretched from antiquity (Carthage) to modern times (Ireland).
[…]
Since the Genocide Convention’s adoption, international courts have arrived at a narrow reading of the already narrow interpretation of Lemkin’s concept, says Leila Sadat, the James Carr Professor of International Criminal Law at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. The emphasis of the law is determining whether a country or individual has killed massive numbers of a group of people, and whether they did so with a provable intent to destroy that group. This poses a problem for prosecutors since most perpetrators of genocide are not as transparent as Adolf Hitler.
Williams gestured toward these difficulties in his appearance on Channel 4 News:
Genocide is not just mass killing. It’s also other crimes, like I was saying, for instance, also the deliberate destruction of foundations of life. But also there is a high bar set by the intent to destroy. The perpetrators of genocide have to want to eradicate the target group in whole or in part, I think that’s where there’s been most debate. But we have seen many [Israeli] government leaders, cabinet ministers and senior army officials making explicit statements over the last now almost two years. And through that, I think eventually our members see that the bar has been fulfilled.
