Genocide is a process, not an event. When genocide happens, its roots, and the conditions that allowed it, often become visible only in retrospect. If those conditions remain unchanged and there is no accountability, there’s every reason to believe the violence will return, perhaps even worse, especially if it was never fully halted. This is exactly what we are seeing in the case of Gaza. Demanding accountability from Israeli leaders isn’t just about the past, it’s the only way to challenge a system designed to repeat such violence.
A strange kind of calm has settled over Israel in the weeks since the Gaza ceasefire was declared. The sirens stopped. The hostages who survived the 7 October attack and nearly two years in captivity came home. But this calm – which has not been extended to Gaza, where more than 200 civilians have been killed since the ceasefire supposedly went into effect is built around an unclear plan by Donald Trump that does not address the root causes of the violence, and is merely a mirage. Nothing has changed in the violent political system that Palestinians and Israelis live under. The machinery behind the violence remains intact. The logic of domination still rules.
For nearly two years, Israel waged a campaign in Gaza that meets the clearest definition of genocide: a systematic, often openly declared attempt to destroy a group of people, the Palestinians in Gaza, through killing, starvation, forced displacement, and the destruction of life-sustaining conditions. Genocide is not a metaphor here. It is the only term that fits.
Our organization, B’Tselem, published a report last July titled Our Genocide. We chose this name because we are not observers but part of this horrific story. Israeli and Palestinian researchers, investigators and fieldworkers worked together to document events in Gaza, the West Bank and within Israel. Our conclusion confirms what Palestinians and international experts have long said: this is genocide – a direct assault on a population aiming to destroy the group.
Palestinians in Gaza were bombed, then forcibly displaced, then deliberately starved. More than 68,000 people were killed, a third of them children and women. This number might be much higher, with tens of thousands more who are still missing. Hundreds of thousands were injured. Hospitals and journalists were systematically targeted. Children buried alive under rubble. Entire familial lines erased. Infrastructure demolished. Israeli officials openly stated the goal: to destroy Gaza and make it uninhabitable. By textbook definition, this is genocide: the deliberate targeting of people not for who they are as individuals, but because they are members of a group marked for destruction.
The origin of this genocide didn’t begin on 7 October 2023, nor did it end with the ceasefire deal. Its roots lie in decades of Israeli military rule over Palestinians, apartheid, impunity and dehumanization, driven by a system built to ensure Jewish supremacy over the entire land. That doesn’t mean this genocide was inevitable. Every genocide depends on enabling conditions and on events that move it forward.
The 7 October attack was horrifying for every Israeli, including me. It allowed the Israeli system to begin a large-scale, coordinated destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza, under the banner of self-defense. This was merely a continuation of more than half a century of military occupation,15 years of siege and blockade, and repeated military campaigns that killed thousands of Palestinians.
The international community, in particular the US and other western governments, allowed all of this to happen. This is what genocide looks like in the 21st century: not only in scale or method, but in how it’s normalized. How governments and leaders, especially in the US and Europe, watch the devastation and say nothing. Or worse, support and enable it.
But despite Israel’s propaganda, people in the US and around the world have recognized what’s happening. A growing movement of citizens is rising, not only against the genocide, but against the system that enables it. That system must be named: a regime of violent control over millions marked as inferior. An apartheid regime, led by an Israeli government that embraces racism, empowers settler militias to terrorize West Bank communities, runs torture camps holding thousands of Palestinians without trial, and carries out daily war crimes.
It’s tempting, especially for Israelis, to believe the worst is over. But in Gaza, genocide lives on in amputated limbs, untreated trauma, spreading hunger – Israel continues to block the entry of food and other humanitarian aid – and the loss of generations. The cost of normalizing this genocide won’t fall only on Palestinians. Its global implications are precisely why, after the second world war, the international community created a legal framework to prevent atrocities like genocide from recurring. When one nation is allowed to erase another without consequence, it tells future governments: you can do this too – and get away with it.
We must not look away. We must not move on. Those who wish to stand with us, all of us, the people of this land, must act to stop this violent, racist, increasingly fascist regime and hold its leaders to account. This is the only way to protect both Palestinian and Israeli lives.
Accountability is essential – not for revenge, but because there’s no reckoning without responsibility. Genocide must not be normalized. And a system that carries it out must not go unchallenged.
Yuli Novak is executive director of the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem
