ISRAEL has engaged in “widespread crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide” in Gaza, the world’s foremost experts have said.
A resolution passed by the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), the world’s leading group of experts on the topic, declared that “Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in Article II of the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948)”.
Israel is currently facing a genocide trial at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), brought by South Africa. In January 2024, the court said that Palestinians’ right to be protected from genocide was facing a “plausible” risk.
The association further noted that “leading global international law organisations and UN bodies, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Forensic Architecture, DAWN, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, and the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, have conducted extensive investigations and issued reports concluding that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza”.
IAGS said that “international civil society has a responsibility to prevent genocide by encouraging and assisting states to fulfil their obligations under the Genocide Convention to prevent, suppress, and punish genocide”.
It concluded by calling upon “all states to actively pursue policies to ensure respect for their obligations under international law, including under the Genocide Convention, the Arms Trade Treaty and international humanitarian law, with regards to Israel and Palestine”, and calling for “the government of Israel and all other United Nations members to support a process of repair and transitional justice that will afford democracy, freedom, dignity, and security for all people of Gaza”.
It is the IAGS's first resolution passed since September 2024. The resolution was passed by an 86% vote in favour. Out of the IAGS’s 500 members, 28% took part.
The intervention comes after Omer Bartov, the dean's professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at the Ivy-league Brown University in the US, warned that silence from "legal and scholarly experts" on the Palestinian genocide would "cause unmitigated damage not just to the people of Gaza and Israel but also to the system of international law established in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust".
Responding to the IAGS, Israel’s Foreign Ministry claimed that the “statement of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) is an embarrassment to the legal profession and to any academic standard”.
“It is entirely based on Hamas’s campaign of lies and the laundering of those lies by others” the Israeli government statement added.
It further claimed that Israel was the victim of genocide, not the people of Palestine.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted for arrest by the International Criminal Court over allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
