A FORMER top judge has said that Israel is committing war crimes and that a court would "likely" rule its actions in Gaza amount to genocide.
Jonathan Sumption, a former justice of the UK supreme court, made the comments in an article for the New Statesman on Wednesday.
He said that while he had no ideological position on the conflict, he "sometimes wonder[s] what Israel's defenders would regard as unacceptable, if the current level of Israeli violence in Gaza is not enough".
"This is not self defence. It is not even the kind of collateral damage which can be unavoidable in war," Sumption wrote.
"It is collective punishment, in other words revenge, visited not just on Hamas but on an entire population.
"It is, in short, a war crime."
Sumption wrote that there is "a strong case" that Israel is guilty of war crimes, as he said that a court would also "likely" regard Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide.
He went on: "The most plausible explanation of current Israeli policy is that its object is to induce Palestinians as an ethnic group to leave the Gaza Strip for other countries by bombing, shooting and starving them if they remain.
"A court would be likely to regard that as genocide."
Sumption added that debate around Israel's actions in Gaza "is muffled by two dangerous falsehoods", adding: "One is the idea that this story began with the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023; the other is that any attack on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is anti-Semitic."
He continued: "The tragedy is that what Israel is doing in Gaza is not even in its own interest, although it may be in the personal interest of Netanyahu if it helps him to stay in power.
"Hamas is, among other things, an idea. It is an idea which will not disappear and which Israel will have to live with, for it will never have peace until it learns to recognise and accommodate the natural attachment of Palestinians as well as Israelis to their land.
"That will involve considerable concessions by Israel, but the alternative will be worse."
Sumption's comments come as at least 20 Palestinians were killed in a stampede at a food distribution centre run by the Israeli-backed American organisation Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
Witnesses said GHF guards threw stun grenades and used pepper spray on people pressing to get into the site before it opened, causing a panic in the narrow, fenced-in entrance.
The Gaza Health Ministry said 17 people suffocated at the site and three others were shot.
The United Nations human rights office has said that 875 Palestinians have been killed while seeking food since May. Of those, 674 were killed while en route to GHF food sites. The rest were reportedly killed while waiting for aid trucks entering Gaza.
