A UN human rights expert on Monday said there were reasonable grounds to determine Israel had committed several acts of genocide in its war on Gaza, which also sparked ethnic cleansing.
Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, said there were clear indications that Israel had violated three of the five acts listed in the UN Genocide Convention.
“The magnitude and scale of Israel’s attack on Gaza and the devastating living conditions it has created reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group,” he said in a report, which Israel immediately rejected as an obscene reversal of Israeli actions and reality.
Albanese, an independent expert appointed by the UN Human Rights Council but not speaking on behalf of the UN, said he had found “reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of… acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has been met”.
The report entitled “Anatomy of a Genocide” lists these acts as follows: “killing members of a group; causing serious physical or mental harm to members of a group; and deliberately causing conditions of living in a group that are expected to result in its physical destruction . in whole or in part”.
The accusation is outrageous
Israel’s diplomatic mission in Geneva said its country completely rejected the report, describing it as simply an extension of a campaign seeking to undermine Israel and the establishment of the Jewish State.
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“Israel’s war is against Hamas, not against Palestinian civilians,” he said in a statement, condemning Albanese’s outrageous accusations.
Israel has long been harshly critical of Albanese and his mandate.
Last month they imposed a visa ban on him after he made comments denying the October 7 Hamas attack, which sparked the war in Gaza, was anti-Semitic.
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The attacks resulted in about 1,160 deaths in Israel, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
The militants also held around 250 hostages, of which Israel believes around 130 are still in Gaza, including 33 people thought to be dead.
Israel’s relentless bombing and ground attacks on Gaza have killed more than 32,300 people, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-ruled Palestinian territory.
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South Africa has filed a complaint against Israel with the International Court of Justice, alleging its attack on Gaza is a violation of the genocide convention.
The court has yet to rule on the underlying issue, but earlier this year ordered Israel to do everything it could to prevent acts of genocide during its campaign and also to allow in humanitarian aid.
Ethnic cleansing
In Albanese’s report, which he will present to the Human Rights Council on Tuesday, he said Israel’s genocidal actions were followed by statements of genocidal intent.
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Statements by several senior Israeli officials outlining intentions to forcibly evict Palestinians and replace them with Israeli settlers, he said, show evacuation orders and safe zones have been used as genocidal tools to achieve ethnic cleansing.
The report also found Israel treats all Palestinians and their infrastructure as ‘terrorists’ or ‘terrorist supporters’, thereby turning everything and everyone into targets or collateral damage.
“This way, by definition, no Palestinian in Gaza is safe,” he said.
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“This had a devastating and deliberate impact, causing the loss of lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians.”
The report also emphasized that Israel’s persecution of Palestinians had not yet begun on October 7.
“Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza is an escalation stage in the long-standing process of settler colonial eradication,” he said. (AFP/Z-3)
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