{"id":29159,"date":"2025-09-21T12:17:14","date_gmt":"2025-09-21T12:17:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/29159\/"},"modified":"2025-09-21T12:17:14","modified_gmt":"2025-09-21T12:17:14","slug":"a-un-commission-finds-israel-responsible-for-genocide-in-gaza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/29159\/","title":{"rendered":"A UN Commission finds Israel Responsible for Genocide in Gaza"},"content":{"rendered":"

( Middle East Monitor <\/a>) \u2013 Yet another blistering addition to the ghoulish accounts of cruelty regarding the ongoing actions of Israel in Gaza made its appearance on September 16.\u00a0 It came in the form of a report<\/a> by the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, a lashing publication finding Israel guilty of committing genocide on the Strip.\u00a0 Of the five elements outlined in the 1948 Genocide Convention, Israel was found guilty of four.\u00a0 (The state\u2019s interest in transferring Palestinian children from one group to another is yet to show itself.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

The relevant acts outlined in the report include instances of killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction, and imposing measures intended to prevent births, all conducted with the specific intent to destroy the Palestinian people as a group. \u201cToday we witness in real time how the promise of \u2018never again\u2019 is broken and tested in the eyes of the world,\u201d said<\/a> the Commission\u2019s chair Navi Pillay in a press conference following the report\u2019s release.<\/p>\n

This report finds itself in the adhesive if gruesome company of such publications as Amnesty International\u2019s December 2024 effort, You Feel Like You are Subhuman<\/a> to the August 2025 conclusions<\/a> of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.\u00a0 The Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories, occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese, has also been admirably busy drumming up interest<\/a> in the links between genocide and starvation.\u00a0 Such bountiful material has yet to convince the Israeli authorities to pause their efforts in Gaza, now culminating in the systematic destruction of Gaza City and the displacement of its population.<\/p>\n

The Commission authors, all sound and weighty figures of international jurisprudence, also found that Israeli President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant \u201cincited the commission of genocide and that Israeli authorities have failed to take action against them to punish this incitement.\u201d\u00a0 More broadly, Israel\u2019s political and military leaders responsible for prosecuting the war strategy \u201care ultimately responsible for the commission of the underlying acts of genocide by members of the Israeli security forces\u201d, with such leaders being \u201cagents of the State of Israel\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The mental state for establishing genocide had been established by relevant statements made by members of the Israeli authorities.\u00a0 In addition to this, there was \u201ccircumstantial evidence of genocidal intent and that genocidal intent was the only reasonable inference that could be drawn from the totality of the evidence.\u201d\u00a0 Israeli authorities and security forces \u201chad and continue to have the genocidal intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Commission also makes various recommendations, including the obvious one of ending the commission of genocide and Israel\u2019s compliance with the three provisional orders of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) made in January, March and May last year; the immediate implementation of a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and conclusion of military operations in the occupied Palestinian territory that entail genocidal acts; the restoration of the United Nations aid model, unimpeded; and the investigation and punishment of acts of genocide and incitement to genocide against the Palestinians in the Strip.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pointed words are also reserved for the international community, among them that all Member States pull their weight in insuring the prevention of genocidal acts in the Strip, cease the transfer of arms and equipment to Israel or third parties \u201cwhere there is reason to suspect their use in military operations that have involved or could involve the commission of genocide\u201d, ensure that corporations and individuals within their territories and jurisdiction are not part of the genocidal program, and facilitate necessary investigations and prosecutive proceedings against the State of Israel and corporations and individuals regarding genocide, its facilitation and incitement.<\/p>\n

The Commission arose in 2021, when it was established<\/a> by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate alleged violations of international law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel. The September report makes much of three previous reports issued by the COI, and three papers relevant to international law violations committed by all the parties to the conflict.<\/p>\n

To have reached findings of genocidal intent is a tall order indeed.\u00a0 The mental threshold needed to satisfy genocidal intent is a dizzyingly high bar to meet.\u00a0 The ICJ, even as it considers Israel\u2019s own actions in Gaza at the litigious prodding<\/a> of South Africa, has shown itself reluctant to identify the destructive intent (dolus specialis) against an identifiable group as protected by the UN Genocide Convention.\u00a0 In the Bosnia v Serbia<\/a> case, Serbia was not found to be responsible for the commission of genocide, but for its failure in preventing it with respect to the killings of over 7,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in July 1995.\u00a0 The Court imposed a giddy standard of proof: that the pattern of acts in destroying the identifiable group should \u201chave to be such that it could only point to the existence of such intent\u201d.\u00a0 It was a standard criticised by Judge Awn Al-Khasawneh in his dissenting opinion<\/a>, feeling that such acts as \u201cpopulation transfers\u201d and \u201cevidence of massive killings systematically targeting the Bosnian Muslims\u201d evidenced obvious genocidal intent.<\/p>\n

In 2015, the ICJ also found<\/a> that neither Serbia or Croatia had committed acts of genocide against each other\u2019s populations during the disintegration of Yugoslavia, despite killings and the infliction of serious bodily or mental harm to both groups by virtue of them being members of an ethnic group.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Image of Gaza by hosny salah<\/a> from Pixabay<\/a> <\/p>\n

Judge Ant\u00f4nio Augusto Can\u00e7ado Trindade, in his dissenting opinion in Croatia v Serbia, proffers a salutary observation: \u201cperpetrators of genocide will almost always allege that they were in armed conflict, and their actions were taken \u2018pursuant to an ongoing military conflict\u2019; yet, \u2018genocide may be a means for achieving military objectives just as readily as military conflict may be a means for instigating a genocidal plan\u201d.<\/p>\n

There is certainly much to draw upon, be it the Commission\u2019s findings, or the excoriating report<\/a> by UN Special Rapporteur Albanese.\u00a0 The latter tartly exposes the misuse of international humanitarian law as an instrument of Israeli advancement, making a mockery of aid to the very people the state seeks to dislocate, kill and humble.<\/p>\n

The response from Israel is also instructive in terms of how that state fits within the law of nations, which it has sought to reinterpret with postmodern elasticity.\u00a0 A statement<\/a> from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs makes short work of the report as \u201cdistorted\u201d and \u201cfalse\u201d, accusing the authors as \u201cHamas proxies, notorious for their antisemitic positions\u201d and demanding the \u201cimmediate abolition of this Commission of Inquiry.\u201d\u00a0 That would be all too convenient.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.<\/p>\n

Via Middle East Monitor <\/a><\/p>\n

\"Creative<\/a> Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor<\/a> is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"( Middle East Monitor ) \u2013 Yet another blistering addition to the ghoulish accounts of cruelty regarding the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29160,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,3795,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-29159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-israel-palestine","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29159\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}