Yet another blistering addition to the ghoulish accounts of cruelty regarding the ongoing actions of Israel in Gaza made its appearance on September 16.  It came in the form of a report by the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, a lashing publication finding Israel guilty of committing genocide on the Strip.  Of the five elements outlined in the 1948 Genocide Convention, Israel was found guilty of four.  (The state’s interest in transferring Palestinian children from one group to another is yet to show itself.) 

The relevant acts outlined in the report include instances of killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction, and imposing measures intended to prevent births, all conducted with the specific intent to destroy the Palestinian people as a group. “Today we witness in real time how the promise of ‘never again’ is broken and tested in the eyes of the world,” said the Commission’s chair Navi Pillay in a press conference following the report’s release.

This report finds itself in the adhesive if gruesome company of such publications as Amnesty International’s December 2024 effort, You Feel Like You are Subhuman to the August 2025 conclusions of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.  The Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories, occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese, has also been admirably busy drumming up interest in the links between genocide and starvation.  Such bountiful material has yet to convince the Israeli authorities to pause their efforts in........

© Middle East Monitor