YESTERDAY, the Israeli Zionist state started its ground attack on Gaza City following weeks of heavy bombardment that has reduced it to rubble accompanied by an intense campaign of leaflet drops ordering Palestinians to flee or stay and be slaughtered.
Israeli defence minister Israel Katz boasted that Gaza is ‘burning’ adding: ‘We will not stop and we will not retreat until we accomplish our mission.’
Katz was revelling in the prospect of the mass murder of Palestinians remaining in Gaza City, and promising any forced to leave that the entire Strip is ‘burning’ so there will be no ‘safe place’ for the over two million Palestinians anywhere.
On the same day that the Zionists launched their ground attack, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory released its final report that officially found the Israeli state guilty of committing the crime of genocide.
The detailed 72-page report found that Israel has committed four of the five acts that are prohibited under the 1948 Genocide Convention and that Israeli leaders had the intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a group. In order to fulfil the legal definition of genocide, it must be established that the perpetrator has specific intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group – in this case Palestinians.
The four acts of genocide it ruled Israel had committed were:
Killing members of the group – that the deliberate killing of large numbers of Palestinian civilians along with the deliberate creation of conditions inevitably leading to death;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm – the report referred to proven cases including Palestinians suffering torture, rape, sexual assault, and severe mistreatment in detention;
Inflicting conditions of life calculated to destroy the group – which included denial of medical care, forced displacement and blocking food and water;
Preventing births within the group – this refers to the Zionist attack on Gaza’s fertility clinic that destroyed thousands of embryos which experts told the Commission would prevent thousands of Palestinians from ever being born.
On this basis, backed by a mountain of circumstantial evidence detailed in the report, the Commission found that genocidal intent was the ‘only reasonable inference’. The report cited public statements made by Israeli authorities including President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant, as direct evidence of genocidal intent.
The report states: ‘Israeli political and military leaders are agents of the State of Israel; therefore, their acts are attributable to the State of Israel.’ In other words, the entire Israeli State, not just individual leaders, stands accused of genocide.
Just two weeks ago, Labour’s former Foreign Secretary David Lammy wrote in a letter: ‘The government has not concluded that Israel is acting with that intent’ to commit genocide despite ‘appalling’ civilian deaths.
Lammy might be appalled but this didn’t stop Keir Starmer having an unofficial meeting last week with Herzog in London – the same Herzog named in the report for inciting genocide.
Being appalled hasn’t prevented the Labour government from continuing supplying the very aircraft components and military intelligence used by Zionist forces to carry out a deliberate campaign of genocide.
The promised recognition of the State of Palestine by the UK similarly will be no more than a gesture designed to placate the millions of workers and youth who are demanding real action to end Zionist genocide.
This UN report will not put an end to the genocide being carried out on behalf of, and with the support of, US imperialism and backed to the hilt by Starmer’s Labour government.
Only the working class has the power to end imperialist-backed genocide in Gaza by forcing the leaders of the trade unions in the UK, Europe and US to immediately call general strikes to bring down their Zionist-supporting governments and bring in workers’ governments.
Workers governments will decisively break with the genocidal Israeli state, recognise the independent state of Palestine and supply all the weapons and support required for the victory of the Palestinian revolution.
This is the way forward.