Juan Cole
Informed Comment / December 5, 2024
Ann Arbor – Amnesty International has just put out a detailed report based on its own fieldwork and masses of other evidence finding that Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The organization joins several other international bodies in coming to that conclusion, and it is one that I endorsed in my recent book, Gaza Yet Stands .
They quote a multiply displaced refugee father: ““Here in Deir al-Balah, it’s like an apocalypse… You have to protect your children from insects, from the heat, and there is no clean water, no toilets, all while the bombing never stops. You feel like you are subhuman here.”
On the very day the report came out, AP reported that “an Israeli strike on a Gaza tent camp kills at least 21 people.” An airstrike on a tent camp? Who does that?
It isn’t just Amnesty. The government of South Africa is mounting a massively documented case against israel for genocide at the International Court of Justice. This fall, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant for their conduct of the campaign against Gaza.
AI was founded in London in 1961 by British attorney Peter Benenson. Initially it focused on wrongfully imprisoned inmates such as two youths imprisoned for thought crimes in fascist Portugal under dictator António de Oliveira Salazar. It also organized people to write letters on behalf of prisoners in Communist-ruled countries. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, I used to write letters for Amnesty. I can remember the dread and hopelessness of writing to the Czechoslovak Communist apparatchiks protesting their imprisonment of some poor intellectual. I had similarly gloomy feelings about writing Israel concerning their Palestinian prisoners. The Israelis always wrote back with a big sheaf of papers to justify themselves, even though there was no justification for their illegal occupation of the stateless Palestinians.
Then Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe and by December 29, 1989, dissident playwright Václav Havel had become president. I still can’t get over it. Unfortunately, however, no similar good news emerged in Israel/ Palestine, despite the false dawn of the 1993 Oslo Accords, which Netanyahu assiduously destroyed. In fact, Israel-Palestine deteriorated alarmingly.
And now we have a full-on Israeli genocide carried out before the astonished yet apparently paralyzed eyes of the world. Amnesty’s key findings include deliberate attacks on civilians, obstruction of humanitarian aid, and forced displacement of nearly 1.9 million Palestinians. Statements from Israeli officials and systemic apartheid policies point to genocidal intent. The report documents severe violations of international law, including indiscriminate airstrikes, destruction of essential infrastructure, and the imposition of life-threatening living conditions.
Israeli authorities, despite repeated warnings about the humanitarian crisis, have maintained blockades and denied life-saving aid. Amnesty argues that these actions demonstrate calculated intent to physically destroy the Palestinian population “in whole or part,” in the language of the Genocide Convention of 1948 and the Rome Statute ratified in 2002.
The organization says that Palestinians are clearly a people, with a common language and culture. The Netanyahu government in Israel is trying to destroy them in whole or part in Gaza.
AI writes, “In determining what constitutes ‘part’ of the group, international jurisprudence has adopted a requirement of substantiality rather than a specific numeric threshold. This standard requires that the perpetrator must intend to destroy at least a ‘substantial part’ of the group in question, which must be ‘significant enough to have an impact on the group as a whole’. In applying it to Israel’s offensive, Amnesty International considers that Palestinians in Gaza constitute a ‘substantial part’ of the whole group of Palestinians, in line with the ICJ’s preliminary finding…”
Amnesty also found clear signs of Israeli intent. It analysed 102 genocidal pronouncements by Israeli officials.
It considered and dismissed the argument that the high civilian casualty rate could be blamed on Hamas tactics of using civilian shields. They also dismissed the argument that the Israelis are fighting an anti-Hamas war in good faith but have just been a little reckless with civilian life. They point out, “regardless of whether Israel sees the destruction of Palestinians as instrumental to destroying Hamas or as an acceptable by-product of this goal, this view of Palestinians as disposable and not worthy of consideration is in itself evidence of genocidal intent.”
That sentence may be one of the more incisive ever written as part of a finding that a state is involved in genocide.
AI adds, “A state’s actions can serve the dual goal of achieving a military result and destroying a group as such.” That is, that Israel is committing a genocide in the pursuit of war goals is no defense. A lot of genocides have been precisely of that nature (Pol Pot’s mass killings in Cambodia come to mind).
Moreover, it isn’t even true that most civilian deaths were produced by war-fighting. Amnesty did a deep dive into 15 instances of Israeli mass killings of civilians and found that there simply was no military target. They found a “pattern of repeated direct or indiscriminate attacks by the Israeli military in Gaza.”
Indiscriminate killing is a term of art in international law and is a war crime in and of itself.
Genocide involves infliction of mental or bodily harm. The report says, “In one illustrative case, on 20 April 2024, an Israeli air strike destroyed the Abdelal family house in the Al-Jneinah neighbourhood in eastern Rafah, killing three generations of Palestinians, including 16 children, while they were sleeping.”
As for “inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction,” AI points to “damage to and destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure and other objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population; the repeated use of sweeping, arbitrary and confusing mass “evacuation” orders to forcibly displace almost all of Gaza’s population; and the denial and obstruction of the delivery of essential services, humanitarian assistance and other life-saving supplies into and within Gaza.”
Depriving people of food is also genocidal. AI writes, “By June 2024, UNOSAT found that approximately 63% of the permanent crop fields and arable land in Gaza showed a significant decline in health and density. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) attributed this extensive destruction to ‘razing, heavy vehicle movement, bombing, and shelling’.” The Israelis are creating ever larger “buffer zones” (i.e. they are stealing Palestinian land yet again), in the course of which they are destroying agriculture. Amnesty found that the Israelis went on destroying agriculture even after they took control of a region, so that there was no Hamas around. They were doing it to do it.
Denial of food, water, medicine, civilian infrastructure, housing and even stability for deliberately-created refugee populations is consistent, they say, with genocidal intent.
Amnesty over and over refutes feeble Israeli excuses for what it is doing, and repeatedly finds intent to harm non-combatants: “the Israeli authorities also actively, deliberately and repeatedly prevented enough aid and other essential supplies from reaching certain areas of Gaza, particularly those north of Wadi Gaza.”
The organization also criticizes states supplying arms to Israel, asserting their complicity in the atrocities.
The report underscores the urgency of international intervention, emphasizing that mere expressions of regret are insufficient. Amnesty International calls for concrete measures, including halting arms transfers to Israel, holding leaders accountable through international courts, and applying targeted sanctions against those implicated in crimes under international law. That is, it supports the warrants issued by the International Criminal Court and seems to want more of them. It does not say so, but Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir are clearly guilty of war crimes and should have warrants issued against them, too.
Key to Amnesty’s study is its finding that the impunity granted the Israeli government to commit war crimes against Palestinians over the decades has produced the current genocide. Halting it requires an end to impunity– it requires diplomatic isolation, arms embargoes and prosecutions of war criminals. It requires strong-arming the Israelis into ceasing their blockade of the civilian population of Gaza. The Israelis must be made to cease their illegal occupation of the Palestinians and to end their systematic discrimination against them.
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment; he is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author of, among others, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
