“Genocide is never supposed to happen,” said the executive director of B’Tselem, one of Israel’s leading human rights groups. “Not here. Not anywhere. Not at all.”

As Israel’s military campaign in  Gaza inflicts unprecedented levels of human destruction, two leading Israeli human rights organisations have at last called their nation’s actions in the enclave a “genocide.”

Many international human rights groups — such as Amnesty International and  Human Rights Watch — have long described Israel’s 22-month assault on Gaza in such grave terms, as have several bodies within the United Nations.

In two reports released on Monday, B'Tselem and  Physicians for Human Rights-Israel became the first within the country to reach the same conclusion.

“We never thought we’d write this report,” said Yuli Novak, the executive director of B’Tselem. “But we also never believed this would be our reality.”

The UN’s 1948 Convention on the Crime of Genocide defines it as the intent to destroy — in whole or in part — a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

As Dr Shmuel Lederman, a genocide researcher for B’Tselem, describes it, “The victims of genocide are not only the individual members, but the group as a group.”

Following the examination of 20 months of data, the group wrote that Israel’s “military onslaught on Gaza” has “included mass killing, both directly and through creating unliveable conditions, serious bodily or mental harm to an entire population, decimation of basic infrastructure throughout the Strip, and forcible displacement on a huge scale, with ethnic cleansing added to the list of official war objectives”.

More than 59,000 Palestinians have been directly killed — the overwhelming majority uninvolved civilians — since October 2023, according to official estimates. However, indirect deaths due to hunger and disease likely put the death toll much higher.

B’Tselem’s........

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