Of the thousands of bombs that have fallen – and fall still – on Gaza, there is one to which Navi Pillay returns: a lone shell, fired by the Israel Defense Forces at the Al-Basma fertility clinic in December 2023. A single strike that wiped out 4,000 embryos in a moment.
The strike was “intended to prevent births” among Palestinians in Gaza, says Pillay, the former chair of the UN’s Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Territory of Palestine and Israel.
“That clinic stands alone in the grounds, separate from the rest of the hospital buildings. They didn’t fire on the hospital – if the excuse is that Hamas is hiding in the hospitals, they didn’t touch the hospital. They came straight to this building and targeted and hit the nitrogen tanks that kept the embryos alive.”
Pillay cites the attack not as a totality, but signal example, one among “a great number” of incidents, that led to Pillay’s commission finding Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.
“Children who were meant to be born from these … reproductive specimens will never exist,” an expert medical witness told the commission’s investigation. “Families will be forever changed and bloodlines may end.”
On Thursday, in part for her “tireless advocacy for accountability”, Pillay will receive the Sydney peace prize.
‘The prohibition on genocide is absolute’
Over her long career – the first non-white woman to open a law practice in Natal, the first non-white woman to sit as a judge on the high court of South Africa, the longest-serving high commissioner for human rights in UN history – Pillay recognises the life of a pioneer is often lonely, often isolated.
But she says she has been surprised at the opprobrium – the unvarnished ad hominem attacks – the four years she has spent on the commission (predating the 7 October attacks) has generated.
The reports issued by the commission have forensically recounted – in unflinchingly precise detail – the prosecution of the conflict in Gaza. They have detailed war crimes committed by Hamas, the effects of bombardment on Palestinian children, and the targeting of Gaza’s fragile healthcare and education systems.
The most recent report – Pillay’s last as she resigned from the commission in July – found Israel had committed genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza.
“The international community cannot stay silent on the genocidal campaign launched by Israel against the Palestinian people in Gaza,” she said, launching the report in Geneva. “When clear signs and evidence of genocide emerge, the absence of action to stop it amounts to complicity.”
But the report has not brought the response she expected, nor hoped for. Inaction, she says, still rules.
“It is the responsibility of all states, they have a legal obligation to stop the commission of genocide, to prevent the commission of genocide, and to protect against genocide happening.
“Why have states not responded to this legal obligation? They should be telling us the steps they’ve taken or the laws they passed to address this. It’s such a serious, huge crime.”
International law is unyielding, Pillay says. There is no justification of self-defence, or necessity, to genocide. It is always unlawful.
“The prohibition on genocide is absolute.”
Witnessing a genocide in real time
Contrast, Pillay tells the Guardian, the response of states to those of the people she meets in her country and around the world.
“They say ‘Why are you reporting this genocide now? We know this, we are all witnesses. We saw what’s happening on our TV screens.’
“That’s what’s so unusual about this genocide,” Pillay says, who also served as a judge on the international criminal court, and sat on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
“We are all witnesses to it. It’s happening in real time. We see it on our screens every day.”
Pillay sees echoes of the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi in 1994 in the current conflict in Gaza.
Leaders in Rwanda told Hutu mobs to “exterminate this scum … these cockroaches”.
In 2023, then Israel defence minister, Yoav Gallant, announced a complete siege on Gaza, claiming Israel was fighting “human animals”.
“The idea comes from the politicians to destroy this group in all or in part,” Pillay says. “I see comparisons between the genocide in Rwanda and here [in Israel-Palestine] when I look at the statements made by the political leaders.”
Pillay says she and her fellow commissioners, cognisant of the gravity of the crime, did not reach their conclusion of genocide lightly.
“We did our own investigations for over two years. There’s nothing we put in our report that we didn’t personally verify.
“I see us as working like a court of law. We’re not a court of law. But until the international court of justice (a case is now before that court) determines the issue, we are the most authoritative voice on that.”
Israel has dismissed the commission’s finding: the foreign ministry issued a statement saying it “categorically rejects this distorted and false report and calls for the immediate abolition of this Commission of Inquiry”, while attacking Pillay and her fellow commissioners as “Hamas proxies, notorious for their openly antisemitic positions”.
In relation to the Al-Basma fertility clinic strike: Israeli security forces stated they take extensive measures to mitigate civilian harm and did not deliberately target civilian infrastructure, including IVF clinics.
‘I never thought apartheid would end in my lifetime’
As a young lawyer in deeply segregated apartheid South Africa, Pillay was a key part of the protest movement against the laws that benighted the country. It was, she concedes, a fight she never expected to see the end of.
“We suffered huge humiliation under apartheid. I was a lawyer. I had four degrees, but I was treated like dirt just because of my skin colour. But we learned not to succumb to that.
“I never thought apartheid would end in my lifetime, but did we stop fighting our liberation struggle? We didn’t.”
Pillay says she and her fellow activists found succour in the support of people around the globe.
“We had the collective support of civil society the world over. We loved the Australians when the news filtered down to us – because all news was censored, newspapers couldn’t publish it – but I remember we somehow saw pictures of Australian students protesting against rugby tours.
“Now, at that time it must have seemed such a small thing. Would it really help end this huge monstrosity of apartheid if we stopped playing this all-white team or stopped attending their matches? Yes, it does: the smallest act, that’s what gave us strength in our struggle, those others who assisted from all over the world.”
In 1971, one of those protesters was a student, then the president of the University of Sydney SRC, who demonstrated against the all-white South African Springboks rugby team tour of Australia.
Half a century later, that student, Australian international lawyer Chris Sidoti, would sit alongside Pillay as a co-commissioner on the UN panel.
Pillay says she still meets today people who tell her they, as children, stopped eating South African oranges in protest at the apartheid regime.
“You might think, well, how is it going to help the struggle if I stop eating an orange? Well, it did. Collective action helped achieve the impossible.”
Apartheid was ended, in part, Pillay says, because the world outside said “no more”.
‘Justice has to be universal to succeed’
Pillay welcomes the Trump-negotiated ceasefire in Gaza, even in its fragility and inconsistency.
But she says the current truce falls far short of a peace agreement. It fails, she says, to address the occupation that is the root cause of the conflict, or to grant a seat at the table for the Palestinian leadership.
“Palestinians have a right to self-determination. They know how to govern themselves. I wouldn’t even say they should be consulted: no, they should have the leading role here. The people for whom this matters most must be at the table.”
Pillay takes solace from her own country’s history and from other conflicts once regarded as intractable by the international community, but which found a path, however imperfect or inconsistent, towards resolution.
In Israel-Palestine too, she believes a just and lasting peace can be found.
“I do believe that. And most importantly, the civilians living under those conditions believe they will get peace. That’s why they refuse to leave their land: their love for their land and for the future of Palestinians. They’re not any different from you and me. They have the same dreams and hopes for their children.”
But there must, Pillay cautions, be a reckoning for the violence that has occurred, and all of the alleged crimes that have been committed. For more than two years, the international multilateral system failed to prevent a genocide, she says, and that same system cannot grant its perpetrators impunity.
“People want justice and accountability, and justice has to be universal to succeed.”
