Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip amounts to genocide against the Palestinian people, Amnesty International concludes in a just-released report. Tel Aviv has rejected the accusations.
The London-based human rights group obtained "sufficient evidence" that:
The Jewish state unleashed “hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity".
Israel "committed prohibited acts under the [1948] Genocide Convention, namely killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction" with the "specific intent to destroy Palestinians" in the area.
The Israeli military staged “direct deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructures where there was no Hamas presence or any other military objectives, the use of heavy explosive weapons with a wide radius of destruction in densely populated residential areas.”
Commenting on the report, Amnesty chief Agnes Callamard said in a statement that the group’s “damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now."
Since the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched a surprise attack inside southern Israel on October 7, 2023, at least 44,532 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in Gaza, per the Health Ministry.