Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Most Israelis are too focused on the atrocities that Hamas committed on October 7 to acknowledge, much less denounce, the atrocities their government is committing on an ongoing basis in Gaza. The Israeli public is desperate to save the 20 or so remaining Israeli hostages that are being hidden somewhere in that besieged strip. Israelis seem less concerned that the entire Palestinian population of Gaza is being held hostage by the Israeli military.

In a recent dispatch from Israel for The New Yorker, David Remnick describes this Israeli response as “zones of denial.” This echo of The Zone of Interest, the novel by Martin Amis about the indifference of Nazi families living next to the genocide in Auschwitz, is unmistakable.

This indifference to the suffering of Palestinians is not universal inside Israel. Amid all the starvation, the killings, and the displacement in Gaza, Israelis are finally beginning to utter the “g” word. This week, two Israeli human rights organizations—B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel—concluded that the Israeli government is indeed engaged in an attempt to systematically wipe out the Palestinian population in Gaza by killing, starving, or forced removal.

“The systematic destruction of the health care system, the denial of access to food, the blocking of medical evacuations and using humanitarian aid to advance military objectives—all indicate a clear pattern of conduct, a pattern that reveals intent,” says Guy Shalev, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel.

This is also the conclusion of Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov, who specializes in Holocaust studies at Brown University. He has identified

a pattern of operations that conformed to the statements that were made in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack, which was to systematically destroy Gaza. That is to destroy schools, universities, museums, everything – hospitals, of course, water plants, energy plants. In that way to make it uninhabitable for the population and to make it impossible, if ever this is over, for that group to reconstitute its identity as a group by completely erasing everything that is there.

A group of 31 prominent Israeli figures have also

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