There are “reasonable grounds” to believe that Israel has committed “genocide” in Gaza, according to a new UN report. It also says there are clear signs of “ethnic cleansing” and that Israel should be subject to an arms embargo.
Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories, said in her report Anatomy of a Genocide that there are clear indications that Israel has violated three of the five acts listed in the UN Genocide Convention.
“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”, the report said.
The report notes that Israel views all Palestinians, and therefore their infrastructure, as terrorists and acts accordingly by targeting all of them or simply accepting the civilian destruction that occurs.
“In this way, no Palestinian in Gaza is safe by definition”, the report says. “This has had devastating, intentional effects, costing the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians”.
“Process of annihilation”
Albanese also stresses that Israel’s war against the Palestinians did not begin on October 7, when the current war began, but has been going on for some time.
“Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a longstanding settler colonial process of erasure”.
Since Israel has failed to comply with the ICJ’s measures ordering it to “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian aid”, it should be immediately placed under an arms embargo.
The Israeli diplomatic mission in Geneva said it “utterly rejects the report”, which it sees as “simply an extension of a campaign seeking to undermine the very establishment of the Jewish State”.
