'Unequivocal': Israeli Human Rights Orgs Describe Gaza Assault as 'Genocide' for the First Time

As Israel's military campaign in Gaza inflicts unprecedented levels of human destruction, two leading Israeli human rights organizations have at last called their nation's actions in the enclave a "genocide."

Many international human rights groups—such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—have long described Israel's 22-month assault on Gaza in such grave terms, as have several bodies within the United Nations.

In two reports released Monday, B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel became the first within the country to reach the same conclusion.

"We never thought we'd write this report," said Yuli Novak, the executive director of B'Tselem. "But we also never believed this would be our reality."

The U.N.'s 1948 Convention on the Crime of Genocide defines it as the intent to destroy—in whole or in part—a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.

As Dr. Shmuel Lederman, a genocide researcher for B'Tselem, describes it, "The victims of genocide are not only the individual members, but the group as a group."

Following the examination of 20 months of data, the group wrote that Israel's "military onslaught on Gaza" has "included mass killing, both directly and through creating unlivable conditions, serious bodily or mental harm to an entire population, decimation of basic infrastructure throughout the strip, and forcible displacement on a huge scale, with ethnic cleansing added to the list of official war objectives."

Over 59,000 Palestinians have been directly killed—the overwhelming majority uninvolved civilians—since October 2023, according to official estimates. However, indirect deaths due to hunger and disease likely put the death toll much higher.

B'Tselem's report states that "Israel is destroying Gaza's food system and using food as a weapon against the Palestinian people."

A blockade on food entering the strip has contributed to mass starvation that has resulted in at least 127 deaths, including 85 children since, October 2023. Half of those deaths have occurred over the past month.

According to a statement from UNICEF on Sunday: "The entire population of over two million people in Gaza is severely food insecure. One out of every three people has not eaten for days, and 80% of all reported deaths by starvation are children."

Virtually all of Gaza's population of 2 million has been displaced, with 92% of residential buildings destroyed or damaged. The people of Gaza overwhelmingly live without water and electricity as infrastructure has been destroyed.

"Soldiers who served in the Strip have testified that the systematic demolition of homes, public buildings, infrastructure, and farmland...has become a goal in and of itself," the report said.

Meanwhile, Gaza's health infrastructure lies in ruin. "In the very first weeks of the assault," B'Tselem's report said, "most hospitals and clinics in Gaza could no longer provide even basic medical care."

The report from Physicians for Human Rights expands upon these findings.

"Over the past 22 months, Israel has systematically targeted medical infrastructure across the Gaza Strip, attacking 33 of 36 of Gaza's hospitals and clinics, depriving them of fuel and water," the report states. "More than 1,800 of Gaza's medical staff have been killed or detained."

The report concludes:

This is not a temporary crisis. It is a strategy to eliminate the conditions needed for life. Even if Israel stops the offensive today, the destruction it has inflicted guarantees that preventable deaths—from starvation, infection, and chronic illness—will continue for years.

This is not collateral damage. This is not a side effect of war. It is the systematic creation of unlivable conditions. It is the denial of survivability. It is a genocide.

B'Tselem's report cites statements from the highest levels of the Israeli government to demonstrate that these acts were carried out not incidentally, but as part of a plan to force the permanent removal of Palestinians from Gaza.

Israeli leaders have openly endorsed this plan, which was first floated publicly in February by U.S. President Donald Trump, who suggested permanently removing the Palestinians from Gaza in order to turn it into the "Riviera of the Middle East."

The report cites evidence of intent from Israel's leaders to use mass destruction to hasten the removal of Palestinians, saying that "Beginning in May 2025, senior Israeli officials explicitly declared Gaza's ethnic cleansing as a central objective of the war, stating that the destruction of the Strip and Israel's control over humanitarian aid were means of realizing this goal."

The report quotes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said in early May: "We are destroying more and more homes, and Gazans have nowhere to return to. The only inevitable outcome will be the wish of Gazans to emigrate outside of the Gaza Strip."

It also quotes Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, also an official in Israel's defense ministry, who last week hosted a gathering in the Israeli parliament to discuss the forced transfer of Palestinians from Gaza in order to make room for Israeli settlers.

"Gaza will be completely destroyed," Smotrich said in May. "Its civilians will be concentrated... and from there, they'll depart in large numbers to third countries."

Earlier this month, Israel's defense minister Israel Katz revealed plans to corral more than 600,000 Palestinians into a so-called "humanitarian city"—a tent city built on the ruins of Rafah—which they would not be allowed to leave except to go to other countries. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has described it as "a concentration camp."

"An examination of Israel's policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated, deliberate action to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip," B'Tselem's report says. "In other words: Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip."

The report comes as a small but growing number of Israelis have come out in opposition to the war, including the atrocities against Palestinians, according to The New York Times. However, they still appear to represent a vocal minority.

According to a June survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Jerusalem, three-quarters of Jewish Israelis thought that Israel's military planning should not take into account the suffering of the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza, or should do so only minimally.

Over the years, B'Tselem has been one of relatively few voices in Israel to advocate for equal treatment of Palestinians, previously decrying Israel as a practitioner of "apartheid" and a "regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea."

"For decades, Gaza has been built up as a black hole in Israelis' minds," Novak said. "The people who live there can be blockaded and indiscriminately bombed."

As the report says, the past 22 months have only hardened that instinct further:

The widespread public support in Israel for this initiative made it clear that the practice of forced displacement, or expulsion, is now perceived as a legitimate and desirable solution to the "Palestinian problem," that problem being the very presence of Palestinians in areas under Israeli control.

B'Tselem urged the international community to take swift action, using all available mechanisms of international law to intervene to stop the genocide.

"This isn't the first time the world has stood by while genocide is happening," said Sarit Michaeli, B'Tselem's international advocacy director. "World leaders are well aware. But they still have not demanded from the government of Israel: Stop!"

"Preventing genocide is not just a moral duty. It's also a legal obligation," she continued. "So the leaders cooperating with Israel's policies are accomplices to this crime."

"Genocide is never supposed to happen," Novak said. "Not here, not anywhere, not at all."