Is Israel committing genocide? Reexamining the question, a year later.
Genocide is often referred to as the “crime of crimes,” a designation developed after the Holocaust and reserved for a very specific form of mass atrocity that deserves the highest condemnation. It should be unthinkable that Israel, home to the descendants of many Holocaust survivors, would perpetrate such a crime, and yet it has been accused — by human rights groups, academics, and even South Africa — of committing genocide in Gaza.
Those accusations aren’t new. They became more widespread shortly after Israel responded to the October 7, 2023, attack by Gaza-based militant and political group Hamas with a bombing and ground campaign that left more than 5,000 dead in the first weeks of fighting. But in the year since the war in Gaza began, the question is whether the evidence supporting these claims has grown.
Last October, my Vox colleague Sigal Samuel and I interviewed scholars about how to think through those allegations of genocide. At that time, some were willing to definitively call what was happening in Gaza a genocide. But most were hesitant, citing the high threshold required to establish genocide under international law. Several said “crimes against humanity” or “war crimes,” which hold equal weight under international law, had likely been committed, but withheld judgment on genocide.
The debate has evolved since then, along with conditions on the ground in Gaza, which is in ruins. The Palestinian death toll now exceeds 40,000. A Refugees International report published in September found evidence of a “severe hunger crisis in Gaza and found consistent indications that famine-like conditions occurred in northern areas during the first half of 2024,” in part due to Israel’s obstruction of aid deliveries.
South Africa has brought its case accusing Israel of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which has issued preliminary rulings ordering Israel to improve access to humanitarian aid in Gaza and to halt its operation in Rafah, the enclave’s southernmost city. Israel has also tightened its grip on occupied Palestinian territory in the West Bank. And there is no end to the fighting in sight: Long-feared regional war has now come to Lebanon, and ceasefire negotiations have repeatedly stalled.
In light of those developments, I went back to the scholars we cited and spoke to last fall to see if their thinking about allegations of genocide against Israel had changed over the last year. Of the five who responded, most of them were now more confident the legal requirements for genocide had been met. If an official determination of genocide by the ICJ follows, that could have critical legal and political consequences.
Here’s what the scholars had to say.
How genocide is defined
First, some background: There are different ways to conceptualize genocide, but the ICJ is concerned only with its legal definition under the Genocide Convention, the international treaty criminalizing genocide that went into effect in 1951 and has been ratified by 153 countries, including Israel and its closest ally, the US.
The ICJ is the judicial branch of the United Nations and handles disputes between nations, typically involving resources and borders, though it has heard genocide cases in the past. It is distinct from the International Criminal Court, which prosecutes individuals accused of war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity; that’s where arrest warrants for top Israeli and Hamas leaders have been sought.
A nation must bring genocide charges against another at the ICJ, providing evidence that the state itself (not just certain individuals) committed genocide. The accusing nation can also petition for provisional measures before a final ruling, including an interim court order to stop the violence, though the ICJ has no means of actually enforcing such rulings. For the court to have jurisdiction, both parties generally have to be signatories of the Genocide Convention. They will then make their case to the court through written briefs and oral arguments. A final ruling often takes years.
Under the Genocide Convention, genocide is “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”:
- 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
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
Those five physical acts can be measured, but it turns out “intent to destroy” is incredibly difficult to prove — and that has been the sticking point in the debate over whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, where the physical component of the crime is already demonstrably satisfied given the overwhelming number of Palestinian civilian casualties.
Intent has been central to nearly every other debate over genocide as well, and the high bar for proving intent has made international court findings of genocide rare.
Only three genocides have been officially recognized under the definition of the term in the Genocide Convention and led to trials in international criminal tribunals: one against Cham Muslim and ethnic Vietnamese people perpetrated by Khmer Rouge leaders in Cambodia in the 1970s, the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and the 1995 Srebrenica Massacre in Bosnia. (The Holocaust occurred before the adoption of the 1948 Convention.)
UN investigations found the mass killings of the Yazidis by ISIS in Iraq and of the Rohingya in Myanmar constituted genocide. Though the US called the killing of the Masalit and other ethnic groups in the Sudanese region of Darfur between 2003 and 2005 “genocide,” a UN investigation ruled it was not. That may have caused the conflict to extend longer than it would have if a finding of genocide had been made, and gave the Sudanese government diplomatic cover to continue its campaign, despite widespread international condemnation.
Is Israel committing genocide?
One of the first scholars to say Israel was committing genocide was Raz Segal, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, who called it a “textbook case” in Jewish Currents just days after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Ahead of the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s attack, he told me he wished he had been wrong.
“I fully stand behind my description of Israel’s attack on Gaza as a ‘textbook case of genocide’ because we’re still actually seeing, nearly a year into this genocidal assault, explicit and unashamed statements of intent to destroy,” he said. “The way that intent is expressed here is absolutely unprecedented.”
He said public statements by people with command authority in Israel — including state leaders, Cabinet ministers, and senior army officers — have repeatedly demonstrated genocidal intent that has been realized in the scale of the violence and destruction in Gaza. Other scholars I spoke to pointed to statements from Israeli officials last October, cited in the ICJ’s January preliminary ruling:
- Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called for a “complete siege” on Gaza and stated “we are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly,” apparently in reference to Hamas.
- Israeli President Isaac Herzog said it was “an entire nation out there that is responsible” for Hamas’s attack on Israel in reference to Palestinians.
- And Israel Katz, former Israeli minister of energy and infrastructure, vowed “no electric switch will be turned on, no water tap will be opened and no fuel truck” would enter Gaza until Hamas returned its Israeli hostages, suggesting Palestinians would face collective punishment.
Several other scholars who Vox spoke with last fall, at that point reluctant to say Israel was committing genocide as defined by the Genocide Convention, now appear to agree with Segal.
“Any early hesitation I had about applying the ‘genocide’ label to the Israeli attack on Gaza has dissipated over the past year of human slaughter and the obliteration of homes, infrastructure, and communities,” said Adam Jones, a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia who has written a textbook on genocide. “There is plenty of this demonization and dehumanization on the other side as well, but whatever peace constituency existed in Israel seems to have vanished, and there is a growing consensus for genocidal war, mass population transfer, and long-term eradication of Palestinian culture and identity.”
Among other things, Jones noted Israeli leadership’s recent plans to expel the entire remaining civilian population of northern Gaza and turn the territory into a military zone where no aid would be allowed as influencing his thinking on the issue. There is no indication of whether civilians would ever be allowed to return. This could be taken as an example of the kind of “state or organizational plan or policy” necessary to prove genocidal intent, he said. Though the plan, if it has been implemented, has not yet been seen to completion, it can still serve as evidence of intent.
Ernesto Verdeja, a professor of political science and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame, said it could be “called a genocide, even in a narrow legal sense, for several months now” given the accumulation of Israeli attacks clearly and consistently targeting the civilian population in Gaza.
A major tipping point for Verdeja and many other human rights experts was Israel’s ground offensive in Rafah in May. The Israeli military had been pushing civilians increasingly into the southern city, which connects Gaza and Egypt, telling them it was a safe zone while it pursued Hamas to the north. But by August, an estimated 44 percent of all buildings in Rafah had been damaged or destroyed in heavy bombing. Israeli forces took over and shut down the Rafah border crossing, limiting the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza. They killed civilians camping in tents in a humanitarian zone. When the ICJ ordered Israel to stop its offensive in Rafah, Israeli officials condemned the ruling and said it was open to interpretation, despite the fact that many human rights lawyers argued it was unambiguous. The assault on Rafah continued.
“I wouldn’t say [Rafah was] necessarily the defining moment, but I think it’s indicative of a broader pattern where we see a genocidal campaign really crystallizing,” Verdeja said.
Michael Becker, a professor of international human rights law at Trinity College, Dublin, said, overall, the above incidents and others mean “South Africa has an ever-expanding repository of evidence that it can put before the [ICJ] as further evidence of genocidal intent,” which includes evidence suggesting Israel “has not meaningfully sought to comply” with the ICJ’s orders so far.
Some scholars still disagree. Dov Waxman, a professor of political science and Israel studies and the director of the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, wrote last year in response to Segal’s piece in Jewish Currents that accusing Israel of genocide required “stretching the concept too far, emptying it of any meaning.”
Waxman has since qualified his stance, but still believes “Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip — though too often brutal, inhumane, and indiscriminate — do not meet the international legal criteria of the crime of genocide.” He told me that he “can understand why many regard those actions as genocidal” given the extent of the death and destruction in Gaza and the “bellicose and extreme rhetoric of some Israeli officials, including senior government ministers, can be characterized as potentially genocidal because of the way Palestinians are dehumanized.”
But he still finds evidence of the requisite “intent to destroy” lacking. He said “a few horrendous public statements” made by Israeli politicians serve as only “quite limited and weak” support.
“Based on my understanding of the motives behind the Israeli government’s actions, I do not think there is an intent to commit genocide,” Waxman said.
Of the scholars we cited in our previous story, he was the only one who responded to my request for new comment who still did not think Israel’s actions qualify as genocide.
Does it matter if the ICJ calls it genocide?
The question is how much calling Israel’s incursion in Gaza genocide will make any practical difference. It will not reverse the death and destruction. The ICJ has no means of stopping the Israeli government even if the court eventually finds it guilty of genocide. That ruling may be years away, and the ICJ’s rulings against other countries have been previously ignored.
But the word “genocide” carries a certain weight in the public consciousness.
“I do think it is really important, simply because of the symbolic status of genocide,” Verdeja said. “To be guilty of genocide is, at least in public discourse and also in terms of just global politics, something that’s such a strong condemnation that it really signals the barbarity of the Israeli state’s policy.”
Such condemnation could lead to significant political changes: Should the ICJ find Israel did commit genocide, that could limit the degree to which the US and its allies can continue to support Israel, Verdeja added.
At the same time, it’s unclear how the ICJ will rule. And even if it does not issue a finding of genocide, that does not preclude the international community from taking action to stop what’s unfolding in Gaza, Segal said.
“I don’t think we have to sit on our hands and wait for these institutes to tell us yes or no genocide when we all see genocide in front of our eyes,” Segal said. “The process of radical change in the system has already begun. Israel is very isolated today in the world, and the US is also isolated.”