Opinion: Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza? We asked 5 legal and genocide experts how to interpret the violence

Melanie O'Brien International law and genocide scholar

Yes, the evidence clearly shows a genocide is occurring in Gaza.

Genocide is defined in the 1948 Genocide Convention as a list of five crimes committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

To determine if genocide is happening, we must walk through the different parts of this definition.

Do Palestinians fall within one of the listed groups?

Yes, Palestinians could fall within any or all of these groups; for example, they are nationally Palestinian.

Is there an "intent to destroy" the Palestinians?

This is known as the "special intent" (the legal Latin term is dolus specialis). It's the most difficult part of genocide to prove.

This special intent may be shown through statements made by military or civilian leaders. Since October 2023, Israeli leaders, as well as prominent community members, journalists and soldiers, have made statements about the intention to deny Palestinians necessities of life, forcibly displace Palestinians from Gaza, and "destroy" and "erase" the Gaza Strip.

Dehumanising statements have also been made, such as referring to Palestinians as "human animals" or "monsters".

Intent may also be inferred from a pattern of conduct. For this, we must look at the actions on the ground against the target group.

In Gaza, this includes direct killings through indiscriminate bombings of civilian areas, the denial of health care, and imposing conditions that have clearly led to starvation, famine, dehydration and death due to malnutrition and disease.

All these actions indicate an intent to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza.

Are the specific genocide crimes being committed?

The first genocide crime is killing members of the group.

The death toll in Gaza has now surpassed 60,000 people, more than half of whom are women and children.

Palestinians have been killed in attacks on medical facilities, open firings on those trying to access food, and the bombings of civilian areas, including refugee camps and schools.

The second genocide crime is causing serious bodily or mental harm.

More than 146,000 people have been wounded in Gaza. There are also credible reports from UN experts, human rights groups and media outlets of the detention and torture of Palestinians, including sexual violence.

Causing mental harm is the constant fear of injury or death, the loss of loved ones, a general denial of human rights, and living in conditions of deprivation and dehumanisation, with no ability to escape.

The third genocide crime is deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction.

International courts and tribunals have previously said this includes:

• the systematic expulsions of people from their homes
• the denial of medical services
• deprivation of food
• forced displacement
• creating circumstances that would lead to a slow death (such as a lack of proper housing, clothing or hygiene).

All of these acts are occurring in Gaza.

The fourth genocide crime is imposing measures intended to prevent births.

There has been significant harm to the reproductive capacity of girls and women due to starvation and a lack of access to water and sanitation.

Human rights groups say girls and women have suffered miscarriages and other childbirth complications, due to a lack of healthcare professionals and facilities.

Direct attacks have also taken place on sexual and reproductive healthcare facilities, including maternity wards and a fertility clinic holding 4,000 embryos, which UN experts alleged was intended to prevent births.

Genocide is a process, not a single event. Taken together, all of these actions serve as evidence that the crime of genocide is being committed by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza.

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Eyal Mayroz Genocide scholar
Israel's military campaign, for many months, has reached the high threshold of genocide.

Debates about genocides often lead to protracted, complex contestations in the public domain. On some occasions, these matters also end up before the courts.

These debates have had much to do with the vague language of the 1948 Genocide Convention and later failures to develop enough case law to clarify ambiguities in the definition of "genocide" and, by extension, the duty of state parties to prevent it from occurring.

I'm not a lawyer, but as a genocide scholar I have spent years studying these debates. In my opinion, there is sufficient evidence to conclude that Israel's deadly military campaign in Gaza has, for many months now, crossed the high threshold of genocide.

When scholarly debates about this issue began shortly after the devastating October 7 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, the deliberations focused mainly on whether an intent to commit genocide existed among top-level Israeli officials.

The vengeful, incendiary statements by key politicians that dehumanised all Gazans and promised to destroy the strip – potential indicators of the international crime of incitement to genocide – did not seem sufficient to me, at the time, to substantiate the high level of intent required for such a determination.

However, as the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza (including areas designated as “safe”) continued in 2024 – along with forced displacements, intentional starvation and the withholding of other critical aid to civilians – genocidal intent became increasingly evident in Israel’s official rhetoric and actions.

Israel and its defenders have put forward two key arguments to push back against the allegations. Neither is sufficient to change my assessment.

The first claim is that the Israeli government would not have allowed any aid into Gaza at all or warned civilians ahead of bombings or other military operations if it was intending to perpetrate genocide.

International courts are investigating these claims. However, much of the information coming out of Gaza, including from Israeli sources, suggests any cautionary measures undertaken by Israel, vastly insufficient as they were, would not have prevented it from committing a slower-paced genocide.

Moreover, these measures could have been aimed, at least in part, at reducing international pressure or hiding intent.

Second, as many have pointed out, Israel portrays its actions as a forced response to Hamas' horrific atrocities against mostly Israeli civilians on October 7, and later against its own people in Gaza. However, this also doesn't hold up, since one crime or set of crimes cannot justify or absolve others.

How useful or effective has the extensive focus on the genocide label been? The preliminary results seem mixed.

On the one hand, the moral clout of the term has helped to maintain unprecedented international attention on the ongoing atrocities in Gaza for many months. It also seems to have been helpful in applying pressure on foreign governments to act more meaningfully than in the past.

Early on, though, the invocations of genocide were used by Israel's defenders to argue for overreach in applying the term.

And in Israel itself, the claims have fostered a damaging siege mentality: the entire world is against us, ignoring the massacres perpetrated by Hamas, and its promise to carry out more, so we’ll have to forever "live by our sword”.

This seige mentality likely undermined the mobilisation of a much stronger and more vocal opposition to the war within Israel.

Ultimately, the genocide label is not a panacea for atrocity prevention. A legally respected determination of genocide, which can only be made by a competent court such as the International Court of Justice, could take years to be issued. By then, countless more innocent Palestinians will have been killed.

When large numbers of civilians are systematically and indiscriminately being bombed, shot and starved, states have a legal obligation to stop the violence, regardless of the label applied.

Morally, this obligation should extend beyond governments to journalists, members of civil society, academics, business people and ordinary citizens. The people of Gaza, as well as those in the occupied West Bank, Sudan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Myanmar and many other less visible places where atrocities are occurring, need our help.

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Shannon Bosch International humanitarian law
Israel's warfare tactics have met the threshold for genocide in Gaza.

There is significant independent evidence indicating Israel’s conduct in Gaza violates at least three of the five acts listed in Article 2 of the 1948 Genocide Convention:

• killing members of the group
• causing serious bodily or mental harm
• deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction in whole or in part.

These acts need to be accompanied by a specific genocidal intent "to destroy a national, racial, ethnical or religious group, in whole or in part" in order for the ICJ to make a final determination of genocide.

To satisfy the legal test for this, the ICJ will need to determine that genocidal intent is the "only reasonable inference" that can be drawn from the evidence.

However, that is not to say genocidal intent must be the sole motivation. It can co-exist with other motives (such as military aims or personal gain) and still meet the definition.

As Amnesty international has explained,

[...]it is critical to recognize genocide when it occurs in the context of armed conflict, and to insist that war can never excuse it.

The official dehumanising rhetoric of Israeli officials not only indicates this genocidal intent, but it also incites genocidal acts. This includes speech such as:

• "the government is rushing to erase Gaza" and "all of Gaza will be Jewish"
• "now we conquer, cleanse and stay" and "what remains of the strip is also being wiped out"
• "we are fighting human animals and we act accordingly".

Beyond explicit statements like these, genocidal intent can also be inferred from documented operational policies and patterns, the sheer scale of destruction, and the indiscriminate nature of attacks on civilians.

Then there are the foreseeable consequences of state-sanctioned campaigns of mass violence and depriving civilians of the essential means for survival. These include:

• vows to enact a complete siege of Gaza with "no food, no fuel, no electricity"
• policies that deliberately deny and restrict access to humanitarian aid
• the systematic destruction of Gaza’s health-care infrastructure.

Israel’s warfare tactics, therefore, meet the threshold of genocide. In particular, this threshold is met through the deliberate imposition of conditions of life incompatible with human survival.

This conclusion has been endorsed by a number of experts, including:

• the UN Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People
• the special rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian territories
• more than 20 other UN-appointed experts and four UN working groups
• two major Israeli human‑rights organisations, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights‑Israel
• Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and
• other legal professionals, jurists, and academics.

Ultimately, from a legal perspective, the ICJ will decide whether the threshold for genocide has been met. But William Schabas, a world-leading legal authority on genocide, described it as:

the strongest and most credible genocide case before any international court.

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Ben Saul International law
While the legal case is complex, it is "reasonably arguable" that Israel's actions amount to genocide.

In a case brought by South Africa against Israel under the Genocide Convention, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has found it "plausible" the Palestinian people have a right to be protected from genocide in the current circumstances in Gaza.

That case is obviously going to take some time to play out – probably another couple of years. So, we won't have a conclusive ruling until then.

That would, of course, be the most authoritative statement of whether genocide has occurred. The court would have the benefit of considering all of the extensive and quite complex factual evidence. It would also examine the legal arguments the parties bring to the case.

I can't say conclusively "yes" or "no" as to whether genocide has occurred because I cannot see all of the factual and legal arguments the court can see. It is a very complex case, which requires that level of forensic examination to confidently draw a conclusion one way or the other.

I would say it's reasonably arguable that Israel's actions amount to genocide – and this argument has strengthened the longer the conflict has gone on.

One of the questions for the court will be precisely determining at what point genocidal intent on the part of Israel crystallised, if it in fact did.

This means filtering out all the white noise, polemics, lobbying, advocacy and politics around the conflict and determining at what point Israel's actions crossed that line.

But the longer this has gone on, the fewer rational or plausible other explanations can be made for the nature and level of violence we are seeing in Gaza.

Essentially, genocide is the commission of certain acts with the specific intent to destroy a group in whole or in part, based on national, ethnic, racial or religious grounds.

There are five acts in the Genocide Convention, three of which are broadly considered relevant in Gaza: killing members of the group, inflicting serious bodily or mental harm, and inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group's physical destruction.

The key question is whether the violence in Gaza has been done with the intent of exterminating Palestinians as a group.

The complexity in this case comes down to the way in which the ICJ has interpreted the requirement of that specific intent to destroy a group.

Most recently, in the genocide case between Bosnia and Serbia relating to the 1990s Bosnian War, the court said the intent to destroy a group has to be the only inference that could be reasonably drawn from the acts in question.

In Gaza, then, one argument is that, even accounting for this very strict standard, Israel's acts would qualify as genocide, because nothing else can adequately explain the level of destruction.

A second line of argument is that the court's test – the "only" inference that can be drawn – does not require genocide to be the "exclusive" reason for the violence, since there are always multiple motives for violence in war.

Genocidal intent, as long as it explains the conduct overall, can therefore co-exist with aims such as rescuing hostages, destroying Hamas regardless of the cost to civilians, or collectively punishing all Palestinians for Hamas' violence.

A third line of argument is that if "only" does mean "exclusive", then the court's test is simply too strict and unrealistic and it should reinterpret or change its approach.

So, essentially, there are a number of legal arguments about how the ICJ might approach the case, and what the legal test for genocide is, or should be.

And once the legal question is settled, there is a factual issue that must be considered: whether some, or enough, of the violence in Gaza can be explained by that genocidal intent, as opposed to other reasons unrelated to genocide.

Of course, some of the violence is simply the horror of war, including excessive violence constituting potential war crimes or crimes against humanity.

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Paul James Social theorist
While genocide remains a contested term, there are other ways to describe the atrocities being committed in Gaza.

At one level, as I've argued in a recent journal article, this question seems irrelevant as the media brings us daily news of starvation, shootings and more deaths around food distribution points in Gaza.

So far, the accusations of genocide have seemingly made no difference to the brutality of the war. And yet, the question of genocide is everywhere. Too often, it is now turned into a statement of fact.

Answering the question of whether a genocide is taking place requires examining the evidence and determining if Israel's actions entail a systematic and abiding intention to destroy Palestinians simply because of their ethnicity, religion or nationality.

This is the definition of genocide handed down to us from the Jewish scholar, Raphael Lemkin. It depends on intent. And given the current evidence, all we can conclude, like the International Court of Justice (ICJ), is that there is a case to be investigated.

Proving genocide requires naming the perpetrator precisely, determining what they did (or are doing), and discerning what they intended to do. This means distinguishing genocide from other atrocities, such as ethnic cleansing (the explusion of a group from a certain area), domicide (the wiping out of homes to force them to move or achieve a political end) and extermination.

It is understandable that people around the world quickly reach for the term "genocide". It provides a sense of active engagement in the face of helpless bystanding.

However, this means the concept of “genocide” risks being stripped of its meaning, much like the way the words “fascist” or “terrorist” have become ill-defined and contested. The deployment of such terms has too often become a performative gesture, a marker for identifying oneself with a particular politics.

Make no mistake, there is strong evidence that crimes against humanity are being committed in Gaza. And the ICJ has made a provisional ruling on the plausible right of Gazans to be protected from genocide. It is due to make a final ruling in the coming years.

As we wait its judgement, I would argue there are other, less contested terms to describe the types of crimes that many agree are being committed in Gaza.

One is the crime of extermination, which is defined in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court as including:

the intentional infliction of conditions of life, inter alia the deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population.

It was further defined as having numerous elements, including:

the perpetrator killed one or more persons, including by inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population.

Proving extermination still requires intention, but not an intention to massacre people because of who they are – their national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.

And the evidence for extermination in Gaza is chilling. For example, it has been reported that an AI-powered killing system, Habsora (“The Gospel”), can determine how many civilians would be killed as “collateral damage” in order achieve military ends. It generates targets at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible.

Extermination is part of the process of treating Gazans as abstract others, as inconsequential means to another end.

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