The Gaza Genocide

Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. It has killed Palestinians in their homes, tents, schools, hospitals, ambulances and food lines; destroyed the systems that sustain collective life; repeatedly displaced the population; and controlled the entry of food until famine took hold. Israeli leaders described destruction, siege and expulsion in public. The word operations conceals that record behind military administration.

The word comes from the IDF itself. This article answers an IDF page titled “Why is the IDF Operating in Gaza?” Throughout the article, operations refers to that official vocabulary: the military's term for its continuing campaign and presence in Gaza, not our neutral description of what Israel is doing.¹

The IDF's latest answer, published on 9 August 2026, is that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are rebuilding tunnels, weapons stores and rocket capacity and that fighters have approached the Israeli-defined Yellow Line.¹ It offers no public evidence that could make the destruction of Palestinian society a defensive necessity. On 26 January 2026, the IDF announced that every living and deceased hostage had been returned from Gaza.² Hostage recovery cannot explain anything Israel has done there since.

Nor is Gaza a foreign battlefield whose history began on 7 October 2023. It is part of occupied Palestine. In 2024, the International Court of Justice held that Israel's continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful and that Gaza remains part of that territory.³ The UN General Assembly has long recognized the legitimacy of peoples' struggle against colonial domination and foreign occupation, including armed struggle, in pursuit of self-determination.⁴ That recognition does not permit attacks on civilians. It does destroy the fiction that Palestinian resistance exists outside the occupation that produced it, or that Israel's invocation of a threat gives it an unlimited right to kill and destroy.

Gaza was made a refugee enclave

Gaza's people did not simply originate inside its present fence. UNRWA recorded 1,586,965 registered Palestine refugees there in 2023: Palestinians expelled or forced to flee during the Nakba of 1948 and their descendants.⁵ Their towns and villages were emptied while the narrow coastal strip became one of the world's most densely populated refugee enclaves.

Israel removed its settlements and permanent ground forces from Gaza in 2005 but retained decisive control over movement by land, sea and air, the flow of goods, imports and exports, and much of the civil registry. In June 2007 it intensified those restrictions into the blockade OCHA describes as a land, sea and air closure.⁶ The bombs fell on a population already confined, dispossessed and largely descended from refugees. Calling that population simply “Gaza's 2.1 million people” erases how they came to be trapped there.

The recorded dead are a minimum

By 26 August 2026, Gaza's Ministry of Health had recorded 73,438 people killed and 174,447 injured, figures reproduced by OCHA.⁷ That ledger is not a reason for doubt. It is a minimum assembled by a health system Israel has attacked and dismantled, while bodies remain under rubble and deaths from hunger, disease and the destruction of medical care are harder to trace.

The obstacles to outside verification were imposed. Israel barred independent foreign reporters from freely entering Gaza while Palestinian journalists were killed on an unprecedented scale. By 25 April 2026, the Committee to Protect Journalists had documented at least 207 Palestinian journalists and media workers killed by Israel in Gaza and found that at least 32 were deliberately targeted in reprisal for their work.⁸ Destroy the hospitals and civil registry offices, kill the people documenting the attacks, exclude international press, and then demand independent verification: that is not neutral uncertainty. It is obstruction.

The available independent evidence points upward, not downward. A population-representative household survey published in The Lancet Global Health estimated about 75,200 violent deaths by 5 January 2025, when the Ministry's count for the same period was 49,090.⁹ The exact total will remain unknowable for years. The genocide case does not depend on selecting a perfect number from the ruins.

Nor should the article be organized around Israeli claims about the percentage of dead who were “combatants.” Palestinians do not lose the right to resist occupation, and Israel cannot turn every man or armed Palestinian into proof that its campaign was lawful. Civilians remain protected from attack; resistance fighters are not a licence to starve and displace an entire people. Whatever fraction Israel assigns to fighters cannot explain what it did to Gaza's children, homes, hospitals, schools, water and food supply.

Children were shot, families were erased

The killing was not confined to explosive weapons striking crowded neighbourhoods. A June 2026 UN Commission of Inquiry report drew on medical records, CT scans, photographs, video and forensic-pathology review to document children killed by single, carefully aimed sniper and quadcopter shots. It records an 18-month-old girl shot in the chest while her mother held her and a 13-year-old girl shot in the chest near a food-distribution site. The Commission concluded that Israeli forces deliberately targeted Palestinian children.¹⁰

Amnesty International investigated three strikes in April 2024 that killed 44 civilians, including 32 children. In one, children were playing table football; in another, families were asleep. Amnesty found no military objectives at the sites it examined.¹¹ These were three families among thousands broken apart by a campaign that repeatedly turned homes and tents into graves.

On 23 March 2025, Israeli forces fired on clearly marked ambulances and rescue vehicles in Rafah. Eight Palestine Red Crescent workers and seven Civil Defence staff were killed; their bodies and crushed vehicles were buried in sand. Video recovered from one victim's phone contradicted the IDF's initial claim that the vehicles approached without lights or emergency signals.¹²

Homes, hospitals and schools were destroyed

Satellite imagery from 16 June 2026 showed 201,290 affected structures—about 82 per cent of Gaza's structures. UNOSAT classified 134,422 as destroyed and estimated 328,627 damaged housing units.¹³ This is not a scatter of accidental damage around a few defensible targets. It is the physical remaking of an entire territory.

The destruction included controlled demolitions and burning after Israeli forces had taken control of sites. The UN Commission of Inquiry documented strikes on schools sheltering displaced families, soldiers filming themselves celebrating the destruction of schools and universities, and the systematic demolition of educational facilities. It concluded that Israel had effectively destroyed Gaza's education system.¹⁴

By 2026, UNESCO reported that 97.5 per cent of Gaza's schools had been damaged or destroyed and more than 637,000 children were out of school.¹⁵ OCHA later recorded more than 300,000 children in summer programmes and temporary learning spaces.¹⁶ Tarpaulins, improvised classrooms and short emergency programmes are evidence that Palestinians are fighting to preserve education amid destruction. They are not a functioning school system.

The health system has not recovered either. In May 2026, WHO said no hospital in Gaza was fully functional and none was functioning in North Gaza.¹⁷ WHO's July facility monitoring and OCHA's reporting found that only 44 per cent of the health-service points mapped before October 2023 were functioning at any level; North Gaza had no maternity-hospital service.¹⁸¹⁹ OCHA's 28 August update still described depleted medicines, delayed medical movements and a system operating under severe access restrictions.²⁰ A partially operating clinic without ordinary staff, supplies, specialist care or safe access is not a restored hospital network.

By late August, OCHA said two-thirds of Gaza was inaccessible or under severe restrictions and 1.98 million people needed shelter and basic-item assistance.²⁰ Israel did not merely attack people where they lived. It repeatedly ordered them to move, destroyed the places they could live, and compressed them into a shrinking fragment of their own land.

Starvation was policy

On 9 October 2023, defence minister Yoav Gallant announced a “complete siege”: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel.” No aid entered Gaza from 7 to 20 October.²¹ The deprivation was announced at the start, imposed through Israeli control of the crossings, and repeated whenever Israel chose to close them.

In March 2025, Israel again stopped food, medicine, fuel and other supplies. By 4 May, the Humanitarian Country Team reported that nothing had entered for nine weeks. It rejected Israel's proposed replacement for the UN-led distribution system: aid channelled through Israeli military-controlled hubs while the population was pushed toward them.²² The Famine Review Committee later found that no food entered from 2 March to 19 May and that subsequent inflows were grossly inadequate. In August 2025, the IPC confirmed famine in Gaza Governorate.²³

When the October 2025 ceasefire allowed more supplies in, famine conditions receded, although hundreds of thousands remained in emergency or catastrophic food insecurity.²⁴ That change is not evidence against starvation. It shows the mechanism: when Israel blocked food, famine followed; when access increased, conditions improved.

Claims that Hamas stole the aid shifted responsibility away from the state controlling entry. The more revealing record is that Israel backed armed Palestinian groups outside Hamas. Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged “activating” clans, and an Israeli official identified the Popular Forces led by Yasser Abu Shabab. OCHA said armed gangs operating under Israeli forces' watch near Kerem Shalom had systematically attacked and looted aid convoys.²⁵ Palestinians were starved by blocked access and then sent toward a militarized distribution system where seeking flour could itself become deadly.

The intent was said aloud

Genocidal intent is not hidden in a secret order. It appears in what Israeli leaders announced and in the campaign they carried out.

On 9 October 2023, Gallant paired the complete siege with this declaration:

“We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”²¹

President Isaac Herzog rejected the separation between civilians and Hamas:

“It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It's absolutely not true.”²⁶

In May 2025, finance minister and security-cabinet member Bezalel Smotrich described the intended result of the expanded campaign:

“Gaza will be entirely destroyed.” Civilians would be concentrated in the south and “start to leave in great numbers to third countries.”²⁷

Aharon Haliva, the head of Israeli military intelligence on 7 October, was recorded saying:

“For every person on October 7, 50 Palestinians must die. It doesn't matter if they are children.”²⁸

These statements were not isolated from public opinion. In February 2024, the Israel Democracy Institute found that 68 per cent of Jewish Israeli respondents opposed allowing food and medicine into Gaza even through international bodies not linked to Hamas or UNRWA.²⁹ A March 2025 survey of 1,005 Jewish Israelis found 82 per cent supported forcibly expelling Gaza's residents; 47 per cent agreed with a question proposing that the army kill all inhabitants of a conquered enemy city in the manner of biblical Jericho.³⁰

Polls do not make every Israeli personally responsible. They show that siege, expulsion and mass killing were not unspeakable fringe ideas. Ministers said them, the military implemented the material conditions they described, and large majorities or pluralities endorsed them.

It is genocide

Genocide means committing prohibited acts with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Those acts include killing, serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group's physical destruction.³¹

Israel has done all three in Gaza. It has killed and maimed Palestinians at enormous scale. It has destroyed homes, hospitals, schools, universities, sanitation, water systems and farmland. It has displaced almost the entire population and denied it food, medicine, fuel and safe shelter. Its leaders described Palestinians collectively as responsible, announced siege, promised total destruction and spoke of mass expulsion. The policy and the language point in the same direction.

The UN Commission of Inquiry concluded in September 2025 that Israeli authorities had committed four of the five genocidal acts in the Convention and that genocidal intent was established.²⁶ Amnesty International reached the same conclusion in December 2024.³² In July 2025, the Israeli organizations B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel concluded that their own state was committing genocide, grounding their reports in the destruction of Palestinian society and Gaza's health system.³³

We conclude that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. That conclusion does not rest on a single death total, one politician's statement or the legality of one air strike. It rests on the convergence of conduct and intent: mass killing, deliberate deprivation, destruction of the means of life, forced displacement and a declared project of destruction and removal.

The IDF now says it remains because Palestinian armed groups may rebuild. That is not an answer to the evidence. It is the latest justification offered for continuing a campaign whose purpose is visible in what Israel has made of Gaza and in what its leaders said they wanted to make of it.