ISRAEL’S treatment of Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip amounts to genocide, Amnesty International declared in a new report that shatters any pretence of legal or moral justification for the atrocities committed over the past year.
The organisation’s Secretary General, Agnès Callamard, says Israel has shown a callous, calculated intent to physically annihilate Gaza’s population.
‘Amnesty International’s report demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza,’ she states, condemning the unrelenting carnage as indefensible.
The landmark report, ‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza’, reveals that Israel’s military offensive, has unleashed unimaginable suffering.
In nine months, more than 42,000 Palestinians were killed and over 97,000 injured, including thousands of children, many obliterated with entire families in vicious air strikes on densely populated areas.
‘Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity,’ Callamard charges.
Amnesty International’s investigation shows that Israel’s behaviour is neither reckless nor accidental.
Instead, it emerges as a methodical campaign of extermination, facilitated by draconian restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid and deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure.
The organisation notes that repeated ‘evacuation’ orders uprooted nearly the entire population, forcing them into unsafe enclaves devoid of basic necessities, where diseases, hunger and fear run rampant.
‘Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call,’ says Callamard. ‘This is genocide. It must stop now.’
Such brutality, according to Amnesty International, is fully in line with horrifying public statements by Israeli government and military officials who repeatedly used dehumanising language and openly contemplated genocidal acts.
The organisation reviewed over 100 statements, including 22 from senior figures directing the war effort, that called for mass destruction and justified mass killing.
‘Whether Israel sees Palestinians’ physical destruction as a means to eradicate Hamas or simply as an acceptable by-product of that goal, the result is the same: an organised campaign to wipe them out,’ the report concludes.
Israel’s attempts to dress up its onslaught as a lawful war against Hamas are dismissed as hollow.
Amnesty International finds no evidence that Israel’s claims about fighters hiding among civilians, or so-called diversion of aid, justify the relentless targeting of schools, hospitals, farmland and basic utilities.
Instead, these arguments serve as thin cover for a ruthless annihilation of Gaza’s population, which Israel has refused to halt despite overwhelming evidence of mass human suffering and repeated, legally binding international orders to allow humanitarian assistance.
The organisation demands the international community abandon its shameful inertia and hold Israel to account.
It calls for an immediate end to arms transfers, a rigorous application of universal jurisdiction, urgent ICC investigations into genocide, and sanctions against Israeli officials.
‘Governments must stop pretending they are powerless. No one who commits genocide should escape punishment,’ Callamard insists.
