UN committee says Israel warfare in Gaza 'consistent with genocide'

Jordanian army carrying out an airdrop of humanitarian and relief aid to the southern Gaza Strip on November 12, 2024 as the war between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement continues. [AFP]

Israel's warfare in Gaza is consistent with the characteristics of genocide, a special UN committee said Thursday, as a Human Rights Watch report said Israel's displacement of Gazans amounts to a "crime against humanity".

Israel said HRW's claims were "completely false", insisting its "efforts are directed solely at dismantling Hamas's terror capabilities and not at the people of Gaza", though it had not yet responded to the UN report.

The UN Special Committee pointed to "mass civilian casualties and life-threatening conditions intentionally imposed on Palestinians", covering the period from Hamas's deadly October 7, 2023 attack in Israel to July.

The committee said Israel's siege, blocking of aid, and targeted attacks and killing of civilians, despite UN and International Court of Justice (ICJ) orders, was "intentionally causing death, starvation and serious injury".

Israel's warfare practices in Gaza "are consistent with the characteristics of genocide", the committee said in the first use of the word by the UN in the context of the current war in Gaza.

Israel, it said, was "using starvation as a method of war and inflicting collective punishment on the Palestinian population".

It's not the first time Israel has faced such accusations.

South Africa brought a case before the ICJ last year, arguing the Gaza war breached the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, an accusation Israel has denied.

A UN-backed assessment at the weekend warned famine was imminent in northern Gaza, the site of an intense Israeli offensive since early October.

The operation had forced at least 100,000 people to flee northern Gaza for Gaza City and nearby areas, UN Palestinian refugee agency spokeswoman Louise Wateridge told AFP.

HRW, in a separate report, said "statements by senior officials with command responsibility show that forced displacement is intentional and forms part of Israeli state policy and therefore amount to a crime against humanity".

It added that "given the evidence strongly indicates that multiple acts of forced displacement were carried out with intent, it amounts to war crimes".

Nadia Hardman, an HRW researcher, said the 172-page report's findings were based on interviews with displaced Gazans, satellite imagery, and public reporting conducted until August.

Although Israel says the displacement is justified for civilians' safety or by military imperatives, Hardman said that "Israel cannot simply rely on the presence of armed groups to justify the displacement of civilians".

Israel would have to demonstrate each time that displacing civilians was "the only option", to fully comply with international humanitarian law, Hardman said.

Israel dismissed the HRW report.

"Time and again, Human Rights Watch's rhetoric regarding Israel's conduct in Gaza is completely false and detached from reality," foreign ministry spokesman Oren Marmorstein said on X.

The Israeli army accused HRW of "anti-Israel bias" and of making "certain blatant misrepresentations" in a statement to AFP.

The United States said it disagreed with the UN committee's findings.

"We think that that kind of phrasing and those kind of accusations are certainly unfounded," said State Department spokesman Vedant Patel.

According to the United Nations, 1.9 million Palestinians were displaced in Gaza as of October 2024. Before the start of the war on October 7, 2023, the territory's official population was 2.4 million inhabitants.

One of those displaced, Iman Hamad, a 41-year-old mother from the northern town of Beit Hanun, said she had been forced to move "more than 10 times".

"I used to think they wanted to displace us. Now I realise they want to kill and wipe us out," she told AFP.

But Ashraf Abu Habl, a 50-year-old who worked as a taxi driver, refused to leave his home in Jabalia, also in the north.

"I won't run," he said. "It's better to die instantly from a shell than die a thousand times over with the humiliation of displacement, hunger and destitution."

Thursday's UN report documented how Israel's extensive bombing campaign in Gaza had decimated essential services and unleashed an environmental catastrophe with lasting health impacts.

Mahmud Basal, head of Gaza's civil defence agency, told AFP earlier Thursday that at least 10 people were killed and 30 wounded, all civilians, in Israeli air strikes throughout the Palestinian territory.

According to HRW, "Israel's actions appear to also meet the definition of ethnic cleansing" in the areas where Palestinians will not be able to return.

The HRW report pointed in particular to the Philadelphi and Netzarim corridors, which have been "razed, extended, and cleared" by Israel's army to create buffer zones.

The UN committee stressed the obligations of third-party countries to urgently act to halt the bloodshed, accusing other countries of being "unwilling to hold Israel accountable and continue to provide it with military and other support".

HRW encouraged the International Criminal Court prosecutor to "investigate".