A Comment on the New UN Report on Gaza

I devote a chapter of my forthcoming book, Gaza’s Gravediggers, to the point that describing the situation in Gaza as a “war” rather than a “genocide” egregiously distorts what is happening there. In a postscript to this chapter, reprinted below, I comment on the new UN report that found Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

In September 2025, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry released a new report in which it found that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.[1] It reached this conclusion after extensively documenting (from UN sources and respected human rights organizations) that Israel had willfully committed acts defined by Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention—Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group—“with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”[2] The report explicitly addressed Israel’s contention that it was engaged in a “war of self-defense” against Hamas.[3] It found that, on the contrary, if not this or that “discrete” or “individual” incident but, instead, the “totality” or “overall factual situation” of the Israeli assault was scrutinized[4]—the absolute number of Gazans, and proportion of civilians versus combatants, killed and injured; [5] the systematic targeting of civilians along evacuation routes and in safe zones;[6] the systematic targeting of homes, vital infrastructure, and healthcare facilities (as well as medical personnel);[7] the systematic denial of basic necessities (food, water, fuel, electricity, medicine) to the civilian population and use of “starvation as a method of warfare”;[8] the systematic targeting of children, including “toddlers,” in the head and chest,[9] as well as the targeting of Gaza’s only IVF (in vitro fertilization) clinic;[10] the systematic targeting of cultural, educational, and religious sites;[11] the systematic resort to sexual and gender-based violence, including “many cases of rape”;[12] etc.—then it was impossible to reconcile the “overall factual situation” with a defensive “war” against Hamas. The report thus eschewed the terminology of the laws of war. There was, for example, no mention of “disproportionate” attacks anywhere in it. A disproportionate attack presupposes that a legitimate military site was targeted but an excessive number of civilians were killed. The report found, however, that, overwhelmingly, it was Gaza’s civilian population and infrastructure that was targeted. Indeed, the massive death and destruction was proportionate to Israel’s genocidal goal. Further to this point, the report only occasionally paused to examine an Israeli claim that it was targeting Hamas in this or that attack:[13] in the grand scheme of things, beside the magnitude of death and destruction visited on Gaza, the lethal incidents in which a Hamas militant might have been present amounted to a trifle and an irrelevance.[14] The report’s upshot was that the quantity (gross numbers) and quality (selection of targets) of the Israeli attack couldn’t be squared with the paradigm of a war: “[T]here was no military necessity to justify the pattern of conduct.”[15] It was palpably not Hamas but the entirety of Gaza’s population that was being targeted; indeed, the “war” aspect of the hostilities was, all told, a fiction.[16] The body of this chapter expounded that the laws of war and genocide frameworks are mutually antithetical. The Commission’s latest report confirmed this: as it concluded that Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza, it dispensed with the language and investigative modus operandi of a “war” situation.

To clinch its case that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, the Commission had to demonstrate not only that Israel willfully committed acts listed in Article II of the Convention, but also that the “intent” behind Israel’s commission of these acts was to physically destroy the Gazan population. The report found that from right after 7 October forward, senior Israeli officials repeatedly uttered genocidal statements;[17] that the Israeli security forces dispatched to Gaza understood these to be genocidal orders, weren’t subject to “any genuine investigations or prosecutions” for committing acts prohibited by the Convention, and that, on the contrary, Israeli officials were “encouraging , permitting and authorizing such criminal behavior to continue”;[18] that Israel’s genocidal intent could reasonably be inferred from the quantity and quality of the criminal acts committed by Israeli forces.[19] The report thus concludes that “Israeli political and military leaders possess the specific intent to commit genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, based on their statements and the pattern of conduct of those under their command since 7 October 2023.”[20] A slightly more nuanced analysis would perhaps read like this:

Israel intentionally committed acts that perforce resulted in the destruction of the Gazan population. The inevitable massive death and destruction that Israel visited on Gaza traced back to primal vengeance, [21] Israel’s perceived need to restore the Arab world’s fear of it, [22] and its determination to “solve” the Gaza Question once and for all—an historical opportunity long coveted and then miraculously gifted on 7 October, that Israel was dead-set on exploiting, come what may, to the hilt. The genocide commenced immediately after Hamas’s attack—the initial public statements by senior Israeli officials perfectly, indeed eerily, foreshadowed what would unfold in the next two years—but it was necessarily calibrated to take account of the response abroad. If Israel didn’t outright nuke Gaza, that’s because, functioning as Israel must within the constraints, albeit feeble, imposed by the vicissitudes of international public opinion, it couldn’t. But even as Israel’s overarching objective was not to annihilate but rather to ethnically cleanse Gazans, [23] it was also prepared to kill off as many civilians and pulverize as much infrastructure as was politically feasible in order to “persuade” the population to leave or “persuade” the international community to take it in. This is not idle speculation, it’s a fait accompli: Israel has already committed genocide in Gaza. Absent external political constraints, and if Gazans prove unwilling or unable to leave, then Israel, its leadership as well as Israeli Jewish society en masse—this was a national project—won’t recoil at totally annihilating Gaza’s population. Far from it. If need be, Israel won’t just be “intent to destroy, in whole or in part,” Gaza’s population, it will be positively gleeful and relish the prospect. Whereas Heinrich Himmler, cognizant at some level of his criminality, feigned anguish in his infamous Posen speech at the onerous burden placed by History on the shoulders of Germany to rid the world of the Jews, Israeli security forces danced the hora and then flaunted their foul deeds on social media. It was the giddiness of a child, magnifying glass in hand, burning ants.

____________________________________

1 Legal Analysis of the Conduct of Israel in Gaza Pursuant to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Conference Room Paper of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel (16 September 2025, A/HRC/60/CRP.3; https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/sessions-regular/session60/advance-version/a-hrc-60-crp-3.pdf).

2 The Commission did not find evidence of a fifth act defined by Article II of “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” (Legal Analysis, para. 16).

3 Ibid., para. 177.

4 Ibid., paras. 144, 158, 160, 254.

5 Ibid., paras. 180-86; see also ibid., paras. 48, 50. A classified Israeli intelligence report found that 83 percent of Gazans killed were civilians (ibid., paras. 21, 180).

6 Ibid., para. 182; see also ibid., paras. 49, 58-59.

7 Ibid., paras. 187, 204-8; see also ibid., paras. 87-90, 93-106. A military expert stated that “Israel is dropping [more bombs] in less than a week than what the United States was dropping in Afghanistan in a year, in a much smaller, much more densely populated area” (ibid., para. 22).

8 Ibid., paras. 190-203; see also ibid., paras. 48, 85-86, 96, 100, 104, 110-126. The report noted that “The denial of entry for special infant milk, resulting in the starvation of new-born and young infants, is especially powerful evidence of an intention to destroy the population” (ibid., para. 190).

9 Ibid., 214-19; see also ibid., paras. 28, 30, 32, 46, 56 (“toddlers” at paras. 28, 215). The report observed that “The targeting of children is relevant to infer the genocidal intent of the Israeli authorities because … the extensive and deliberate targeting of Palestinian children shows that the military operations were not conducted solely to defeat Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups, nor can they legitimately contribute to the other stated goals of defending the state of Israel and securing the release of Israeli hostages (ibid., para. 218). On a related note, the Commissioner General of UNRWA stated that “10 children lost one or both legs in the war every day,” and another UN organization reported that “Gaza is home to the largest cohort of child amputees in modern history” (ibid., paras. 53, 214).

10 Ibid., para. 207; see also ibid., paras. 57, 79, 151-54.

11 Ibid., paras. 188-89; see also ibid., paras. 91-92, 146.

12 Ibid., paras. 209-213; see also ibid., paras. 65-71 (“many cases” at para. 66), 73, 80. The report states that “the nature and scale of these acts [of sexual and gender-based violence] do not support and cannot justify Israel’s claims that its military operations were conducted in self-defense, to defeat Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups, or to secure the release of Israeli hostages” (ibid., para. 212).

13 Ibid., paras. 35-44, 95, 103, 118, 185. Incidentally, in just one single instance did the Israeli alibi hold up, if only in part.

14 Israel’s critics fixated on to its use of AI to liquidate alleged Hamas militants as they returned home, killing many family members. See Yuval Abraham, “‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing in Gaza,” +972 Magazine (3 April 2024). But this too was largely an irrelevance and a distraction: long before AI came along, Israel routinely killed many civilians as it targeted alleged Hamas militants in densely populated civilian neighborhoods; of the more than 200,000 Gazan homes damaged or destroyed since 7 October, it’s implausible that AI was implicated in more than a tiny fraction of the attacks; harping on the use of AI to track down alleged Hamas militants obscured the crux that, overwhelmingly, Israel wasn’t even targeting Hamas but instead the entire civilian population. The criminality wasn’t that Israel committed disproportionate attacks, in which an excessive number of civilians were killed when targeting Hamas, but that it was committing genocide as it targeted not Hamas but the Gazan people.

15 Legal Analysis, para. 179.

16 One indicative juxtaposition is that, during the period March-August 2025, 50 Israelis versus 12,000 Gazans, 11,000 of them civilians, were killed. A global ratio of 1:240 or combatant ratio of 1:20 betokens at minimum a slaughter or extermination not a war. The figure of Hamas militants killed can itself be misleading: most of them almost certainly died not on the battlefield but alongside Gazan civilians in the course of Israel’s genocidal assault. For the numerical data, see International Crisis Group, The World’s Shame in Gaza (2 September 2025), and ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data), “Gaza after Two Years” (17 September 2025).

17 Legal Analysis, paras. 221-33; see also paras. 162-176.

18 Ibid., paras. 163, 184, 232, 237, 242.

19 “Considering the evidence in totality, the Commission has found that Israeli authorities were aware of the high probability that their military operations, the imposition of a total siege, including the blocking of humanitarian aid in Gaza, and the destruction of housing and of health systems and facilities would lead to the physical destruction of Palestinians, in whole or in part in Gaza. Importantly, in relation to the blocking of humanitarian aid, Israeli authorities were put on notice by the International Court of Justice, the Security Council and various human rights experts and groups. . . . The Commission therefore finds that Israeli authorities knowingly and deliberately inflicted such conditions of life to bring about the destruction of Palestinians in Gaza”; “[T]he Commission finds that genocidal intent was the only reasonable inference that could be drawn based on the pattern of conduct of the Israeli authorities” (ibid., paras. 144, 220).

20 Ibid., para. 238.

21 “[V]engeance is a great value. There is vengeance for what they did to us. . . . [I]n 100 years they will know that you don’t mess with the Jews”—senior Israeli security forces officer (ibid, para. 173).

22 “The fact that 50,000 have already been killed in Gaza is necessary and required for future generations. . . . They need a Nakba from time to time to feel the price”—head of Israel’s Military Intelligence (ibid., para. 175).

23 The report mistakenly infers that Israel’s intention was to “trap Palestinians in Gaza, creating such conditions that would prohibit them from escaping and ultimately lead to their destruction” (ibid., para. 201).