As the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem issues a damning report titled “Our Genocide”, concluding that Tel-Aviv’s actions in Gaza constitute a deliberate campaign of annihilation, a group of Israeli public figures are calling for “crippling sanctions” on their own country. The group of 31 signatories, including artists, academics and former officials, have urged the international community to intervene as starvation and mass displacement ravage the besieged Palestinian enclave.
The signatories include some of Israel’s most celebrated cultural and intellectual voices: Oscar-winning filmmaker Yuval Abraham; former Israeli attorney general Michael Ben-Yair; Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Knesset; painter Michal Na’aman; poet Aharon Shabtai; filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz; and choreographer Inbal Pinto. Several are recipients of the prestigious Israel Prize, the country’s highest cultural honour.
“Our country is starving the people of Gaza to death and contemplating the forced removal of millions of Palestinians from the Strip,” the letter states. It concludes: “The international community must impose crippling sanctions on Israel until it ends this brutal campaign and implements a permanent ceasefire.”
The appeal comes as the death toll in Gaza surpasses 60,000 over the course of Israel’s 21-month military onslaught. Images of emaciated Palestinian children and repeated attacks on aid distribution points have intensified public outrage and drawn condemnation even from within Israeli society.
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The letter’s release coincided with the publication of two landmark reports by Israeli human rights groups B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, both of which for the first time concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide. The B’Tselem report, “Our Genocide”, frames the ongoing destruction in Gaza not as an aberration but as the culmination of a long-standing settler-colonial and apartheid regime.
Chapter Five of the report, titled “Genocide as a Process,” situates the current aggression on Gaza within a broader historical trajectory. It states: “The Israeli apartheid regime — demographic engineering, ethnic cleansing and separation — is designed to cement Jewish supremacy over Palestinians and render Palestinians as a group powerless and fragmented.”
According to B’Tselem, the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas became a pretext for Israel’s far-right government to exploit longstanding policies of segregation and dehumanisation, tipping the system into full-scale genocidal violence.
“In the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the Israeli regime implements laws, practices and state violence designed to cement the supremacy of one group — Jews — over another — Palestinians,” the report states. The authors conclude that the destruction of Gaza represents not a strategic failure, but “a coordinated attack on the essential foundations of Palestinian society in Gaza, with the intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a group.”.
In Israel, however, the official response has remained defiant. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to deny that famine exist in Gaza, despite overwhelming evidence from UN agencies and even former US president Donald Trump’s acknowledgment of “real starvation” in the besieged enclave.
READ: Israel rejects claims of genocide in Gaza raised by Israeli rights groups