All That Remains: A resident walks through the rubble of residential buildings after Israeli air-strikes in Gaza Strip on October 19, 2023 | Photo: Getty Images All That Remains: A resident walks through the rubble of residential buildings after Israeli air-strikes in Gaza Strip on October 19, 2023 | Photo: Getty Images On October 25 this year, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, issued a grim warning that the “darkest moment” of Israel’s war is unfolding in northern Gaza as the “Israeli military is subjecting an entire population to bombing, siege and starvation”. Türk urged world leaders to stop the coming genocide because, “under the Genocide Convention, State parties also have the responsibility to act to prevent such a crime, when risk becomes apparent”. His assessment was justified within a week when 15 UN and humanitarian organisations—including the WHO, the UNDP, the UNHCR, the UNICEF and Oxfam—revealed how hospitals attacked by Israel were “almost entirely cut off from supplies... killing patients, destroying vital equipment, and disrupting life-saving services”.
Their statement also mentioned how schools serving as shelters were either bombed or forcibly evacuated; tents sheltering displaced families shelled and people burned alive, and rescue teams deliberately attacked and thwarted in their attempts to pull people buried under the rubble of their homes.
In conclusion, the 15 organisations warned that the situation is “apocalyptic” to the extent that the entire Palestinian population in North Gaza “is at imminent risk of dying of disease, famine, and violence”. Death is imminent also because on October 28, Israel’s parliament declared the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) a terror organisation and banned it from conducting any service inside Israel. To understand the scale of the impending cataclysm, it is enough to know that Israel’s ruthlessness has been so brutal that it has displaced the entire population in Gaza. More than 2.2 million Palestinians are now living—or about to die—in an area of roughly 38 square kilometres in uninhabitable conditions. In North Gaza alone, an estimated 400,000 civilians are hoping to survive amid destroyed buildings and shattered infrastructure.
According to Türk, over 150,000 people have been killed, wounded or missing since the assault on Gaza began. An article published in November 2024 in the Israel-based +972 Magazine contains this quote from 31-year-old Nermine Labed, who fled the North Gaza town of Beit Lahiya on foot with her four children on November 17: “While leaving the town, I saw many bodies lying on the ground, and dogs were devouring some of them... I also saw men and women who were wounded, still alive but drowning in their own blood, with no one to help them. This is not life; we are dying slowly.”
Toshiyuki Mimaki, co-chair of Nihon Hidankyo, a grassroots movement of survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs that won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, was so moved by the situation in Gaza that he fought back tears to recount how “children are being covered in blood and living every day without food, having their schools destroyed, stations destroyed and bridges destroyed”.
“The people are wishing for peace,” he said, but “politicians insist on waging war, saying, ‘We won’t stop until we win’. I think this is true for Russia and Israel, and I always wonder whether the power of the United Nations couldn’t put a stop to it.”
Is this Genocide?The UN appears to be helpless. But its Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Michael Fakhri, in his July 2024 report on starvation and the right to food in Gaza, stated that there is “clear evidence that Israel has committed genocide against the Palestinian people since at least October 2023”.
Fakhri blamed “third-party countries and businesses” for not only being “responsible for the illegal supply of weapons for Israel’s starvation campaign and genocide” but also being “complicit for years in the illegal destruction of the Palestinian food and water systems, and the illegal settlements of Palestinian territories”.
Fakhri’s report confirms the finding of the International Court of Justice, which, in its January 26, 2024 order, had accepted that “at least some of the acts and omissions alleged by South Africa to have been committed by Israel in Gaza appear to be capable of falling within the provisions of the [Genocide] Convention”. Article II of the Genocide Convention lists five crimes, and states that the commission of any one of them would amount to genocide if the intent is “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. The five crimes include: “(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
Scholar of Holocaust and genocide studies, Raz Segal, believes that Israel is guilty of all these crimes. For him, the assault on Gaza is “a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes”.
Former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier and genocide historian, Omer Bartov, agrees. In an August 2024 article, he wrote that Israel was indeed acting “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part”, the Palestinian population in Gaza, “as such, by killing, causing serious harm, or inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group’s destruction”.
Another genocide researcher, Amos Goldberg, wrote: “Yes, it is genocide. It is so difficult and painful to admit it, but despite all that, and despite all our efforts to think otherwise... we can no longer avoid this conclusion.”
Pope Francis too is now convinced that “what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide”. In a recent book, he called for a careful investigation “to determine whether it fits into the technical definition formulated by jurists and international bodies”.
60 free spins no depositOn December 5, Israeli historian Lee Mordechai released a report in which he alleged that “what Israel is currently doing to the Palestinian population in Gaza is consistent with the definition of genocide”.
On the same day, an Amnesty International report alleged that “Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza”. Agnès Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International, said: “Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now.”
Although Amnesty International’s chapter in Israel disagreed with Callamard and refused to call it genocide, it nevertheless stated that “the scale of the killing and destruction carried out by Israel in Gaza has reached horrific proportions and must be stopped immediately”.
The Land GrabIn the final analysis, even if the quibbling over the use of the term ‘genocide’ is ignored, it cannot be denied that what Israel is doing in Palestine and Lebanon is a crime of “horrific proportions” that needs to be stopped for not just being a blatant violation of international law, but also for making a mockery of the Bible, which is otherwise exploited by the Jewish state to claim the whole of Palestine as its “Promised Land”.
The Ten Commandments found in the second and fifth books of the Old Testament—Exodus and Deuteronomy—among others, warn: “You shall not murder”; “You shall not steal”; “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbour”; “You shall not set your desire on your neighbour’s house or land... or anything that belongs to your neighbour”.
Israel has violated all these injunctions with ghoulish relish as if to say that even the Bible would be atheistically scoffed at if it comes in the way of the plot to capture the entire Palestine. True to form, the Knesset—the legislature of Israel—on July 17, 2024, passed a resolution stating that it “firmly opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state west of Jordan” because it will “pose an existential danger to the State of Israel” and “destabilise the region”.
“The final was really intense; the Chinese were breathing down our necks throughout the game and made it really difficult for us to create a clear goal scoring chance,” Harmanpreet said in a Hockey India release.
Astonishingly, some commentators consider Israel’s expansionist agenda as nothing more than political posturing by the power-mad Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regime, as though a post-Netanyahu regime would enthusiastically work for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the 11,592 sq km (42.88 per cent of original Palestine) allotted for it in UN resolution 181 (II) of November 29, 1947.
Among those hoping for this utopia are Hiba Husseini, former legal advisor to the Palestinian peace process delegation, and Yossi Beilin, former Israeli minister of justice.
In the name of pragmatic realism, their undisguised one-sided proposal, ‘The Holy Land Confederation as a Facilitator for the Two-State Solution,’ seeks to fob off on the Palestinians a formula that endorses Israel’s brazen land grab by reducing the territory allocated to the Arabs by the UN from 42.88 per cent to just 22.5 per cent (6,205 sq km). The remaining 77.5 per cent is magnanimously gifted to the Zionist state.
Wishful thinkers such as Husseini and Beilin don’t seem to understand that Israel would not accept anything less than 100 per cent. In October 2024, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich described repeated attempts to reach a two-state solution as wrongheaded. He said there should be an “unequivocal Israeli statement to the Arabs and the entire world that a Palestinian state will not be established”.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar agreed with Smotrich and said that Israel must abandon any policy based on concessions and “put up a political iron wall” against international efforts for a two-state solution.
If the international community, especially the West, continues to display its unbelievable apathy, the entire population of Gaza could be wiped out in a short time to say nothing about the concurrent land grab.
(Views expressed are personal)
A. Faizur Rahman is Secretary-General of the Islamic Forum for the Promotion of Moderate Thought. He can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter at @FaizEngineerpera play
