Amnesty International accuses Israel of genocide; Israeli official calls claim "entirely false and based on lies"
The rights group Amnesty International has accused Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and called on the United Nations' International Criminal Court "to urgently consider adding genocide to the list of crimes it is investigating and for all states to use every legal avenue to bring perpetrators to justice."
Israel has repeatedly rejected accusations of genocide in Gaza, insisting that it has a right to defend itself after the Palestinian territory's Hamas rulers carried out their brutal attack on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 others hostage. Since the start of the war in Gaza, at least 44,580 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's military offensive, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry, and most of its residents have been internally displaced.
In a report published Thursday, the London-based rights group said it had found "sufficient basis" to conclude Israel had and was continuing to commit the crime of genocide in Gaza.
Genocide consists of "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group," according to the 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide.
"Amnesty International's report demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza," Agnès Callamard, the group's secretary general, said in a statement. "These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them. Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now."
The rights group said countries that supply weapons to Israel, including the United States, "must know they are violating their obligation to prevent genocide and are at risk of becoming complicit in genocide."
Amnesty said such countries "must act now to bring Israel's atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza to an immediate end."
"The deplorable and fanatical organisation Amnesty International has once again produced a fabricated report that is entirely false and based on lies," Israel's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Oren Marmorstein said on social media in response to the report.
Amnesty International's own branch inside Israel said it did not accept the main findings of the report accusing the country of genocide, but it called for an immediate end to the war and an investigation into serious violations of international law and crimes against humanity.
The report comes two weeks after the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, as well as for a Hamas leader who Israel says was killed in an airstrike over the summer.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, an Israeli strike on a tent camp where many displaced people are living in southern Gaza killed at least 21 people and wounded 28, the director of Nasser Hospital located in the nearby city of Khan Younis, Atif al-Hout, said.
The Israeli military said it had hit senior Hamas militants "involved in terrorist activities" in the area, The Associated Press reported. Earlier Israeli strikes in Gaza killed eight people, four of them children, the AP reported.
