Israeli occupation forces accused of committing genocidal acts in Gaza

Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories affirmed that there are “reasonable grounds” to determine that the Israeli occupation committed several acts of “genocide,” warning also of “ethnic cleansing.”

“The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group,” she said in a report.

This report finds that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the following acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has been met: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to groups members; and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

She also affirmed in her report that photos of dead civilians after their displacement to southern Gaza, accompanied by statements by some senior Israeli officials declaring their intention to forcibly displace the Palestinians out of Gaza and replace them with Israeli settlers, lead logically to the conclusion that the “evacuation orders and safe zones have been used as genocidal tools to achieve ethnic cleansing.”

The report continued that “genocidal acts” were approved and carried out following statements expressing “genocidal intent,” issued by senior military and government officials, affirming that “Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a longstanding settler colonial process of erasure.”

Since 7 October 2023, the death toll from the Israeli aggression continued in the Gaza Strip and has risen to 32,414 martyrs and 74,787 wounded, the majority of whom are children and women.