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Israel Is Also Committing Genocide In the West Bank

It’s not just Gaza—Israel wants to exterminate all Palestinians, everywhere. We are one people being destroyed as one people.

Family members and relatives mourn the loss of two brothers who were killed by Israeli settlers during a raid on the town of Qaryut in the southern West Bank, on March 3, 2026.

Watching Israel spread its genocidal violence to southern Lebanon and Iran, it is hard not to be reminded of the ongoing campaign to exterminate my people, the Palestinians. Even as Israel widens the scope of its brutality, the core of its national project—the genocide of Palestinians—continues, and we must never forget it.

What’s more, it’s time that we understood that Israel’s genocide is not limited to Gaza. It is also taking place in the West Bank. It might not be from bombs or the mass murders we see in the news from Gaza, although both have happened before. But it is genocide nonetheless.

Article II of the Genocide Convention defines genocide as acts committed with “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” The acts include killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to bring about physical destruction, imposing measures to prevent births, and forcibly transferring children.

The Geneva Convention does not require gas chambers. Nor does it require a minimum body count. In 2004, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia established that the destruction of a “substantial part” of a group could constitute genocide even when the group is geographically limited or numerically small. The Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica were 2.9 percent of all Bosnian Muslims, but the court ruled that they qualified as a “substantial part” because of their symbolic significance and the intent that the community would never reconstitute itself. The ICT for Rwanda (ICTR) Akayesu judgment ruled that genocidal intent can be inferred from “the general context” and “the perpetration of other culpable acts systematically directed against that same group.” The September 2025 UN Commission of Inquiry into Israel’s conduct in Gaza applied this standard and concluded that genocidal intent was “the only reasonable inference” from the totality of evidence.

Crucially, the Commission also raised “serious concern that the specific intent to destroy the Palestinians as a whole has extended to the rest of the occupied Palestinian territory…and to the period before October 7, 2023.”

In other words, there is a strong case to be made that Israel’s genocidal intent covers not just Gaza but the West Bank as well.

The intent was clear before Israel was established—as in 1937, when David Ben-Gurion wrote that “We [Zionists] must expel Arabs and take their places.” It continued long after—as in 1969, when Golda Meir infamously declared, “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people.” And it persists to this day. Israel spent decades denying that the Nakba happened, even passing a law in 2011 making it illegal to commemorate it. Then, in 2023, Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter bragged, “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.”

That same logic is being applied to the West Bank.

Article II(a) of the Genocide Convention refers to “killing members of the group” as part of a campaign of extermination. Israel’s conduct in the West Bank meets this standard.

Since October 7, 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have killed over 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank, a quarter of them children. That’s a rate of over one killing per day.

The names of the victims go on and on: 10-year-old Saddam Hussein Rajab, 19-year-old Palestinian American Nasrallah Abu Siyam, 14-year-old Palestinian American Amer Rabee, 55-year-old Mohammed Murra… to name just a tiny number of the people killed in the last few years alone. Earlier this month, Israeli forces slaughtered the Bani Odeh family—a mother, father, and two sons—while they were shopping for Eid. A surviving son recounted that the Israelis bragged about the murders, saying, “We killed dogs.”

In March 2025, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem reported that air........

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