Roadmap to this page
This page is organized into 3 main sections:
Understanding Gaza: a brief background on the history and context of Gaza and Israel's occupation of the Gaza Strip
Understanding Genocide: a short overview of the definition of genocide and some common misconceptions
Understanding Why This is Genocide: a brief summary of the evidence found in much greater detail throughout this website
This third section is the longest, and is subdivided into 3 topics:
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Prominent organizations and scholars of human rights, genocide, and international law confirm this is genocide.
2. Israeli leaders openly proclaim their genocidal intent.
3. Israel’s genocidal actions include:
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mass killing and targeting of civilians
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making Gaza uninhabitable, and
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inflicting mass torture, trauma, and terror.
Conclusion: It is important to call this what it is - genocide - and to understand what Israel is doing in Gaza can't be sanitized as “self-defence” or dismissed as simple another terrible “war.”
Understanding Gaza
Gaza is a tiny strip of land - 25 miles long and just 7 miles wide at its widest point.
Prior to October 2023, the population of Gaza consisted of approximately 2.3 million people, almost half of whom are children.
~80% are refugees and their descendants from towns and villages in what is now Israel. They were expelled or forced to flee in 1948 when Zionist militias ethnically cleansed over 750,000 Palestinians during the establishment of the State of Israel. This is what Palestinians call the “Nakba,” or catastrophe, and what Israel mythologizes as its “war of independence.” These Palestinian refugees in Gaza live a short drive or walking distance from the homeland from which they were expelled, and the lands of which they were dispossessed.
Israel has militarily occupied Gaza since 1967, and blockaded and sealed it off from the world since 2006, essentially confining its people to what has been called the largest open-air prison.
Journalist Owen Jones describes what it means to be a Palestinian refugee in Gaza
Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, describes the transformation of Gaza from a cosmopolitan town with a rich, diverse culture into the Gaza Strip, the largest refugee camp in the world.
The Violence of the Blockade: the Slow, Deliberate Strangulation of Gaza
Prior to October 7, 2023, Israel maintained a grueling 17-year long blockade on the Gaza Strip, strangling Gaza’s economy and even counting the calories entering the enclave. It deliberately maintained Gaza on the brink of humanitarian collapse, and periodically subjected its defenseless civilian population to the high-tech killing sprees of one of the strongest militaries in the world – what Israel chillingly called “mowing the lawn.”
“The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet,
but not to make them die of hunger.”
~ Dov Weisglass, adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, summarizing Israel’s policy in Gaza
In 2021, the World Bank reported that Gaza had undergone a multi-decade process of de-development and deindustrialization, resulting in a 45% unemployment rate and a 60% poverty rate, with 80% of the population dependent on some form of international assistance to survive, in significant part because of the hermetic sealing of the access of Gaza to the outside world.
Living Under Israeli Blockade
The Great March of Return: Non-Violent Resistance in Gaza
Palestinians have a long history of nonviolent resistance. In Gaza, this culminated in the 2018-2019 Great March of Return, a large-scale peaceful protest along the separation fence between Gaza and Israel, in which thousands of Palestinians participated every Friday for over 18 months. Palestinians protested crushing isolation, the inhumane conditions imposed by Israel, and the ongoing denial of their right to return to the homes from which they and their families were expelled during Israel’s creation in 1948.
214 Palestinians - including 46 children - were killed
36,100 Palestinians - including nearly 8,800 children - were injured,
many while standing hundreds of meters away from the snipers, unarmed.
A UN Commission found that the maiming was not accidental: Israeli soldiers intentionally shot children, health workers, journalists, and even disabled demonstrators. One Israeli soldier admitted that he shot “42 knees in one day,” as part of a competition to see who could shoot the most.
Why does this matter? Because Israel uses armed resistance by Palestinian groups to dehumanize the Palestinian people and justify its overwhelmingly violent reprisals – as it has done most recently in Gaza after October 7. However, Palestinians have repeatedly tried nonviolence in an effort to achieve their rights, only to be met with crushing violence by Israel. Israel erases this context to justify its genocide, while ignoring the source of violence - the denial of Palestinian freedom and self-determination.
Israeli historian Ilan Pappe on erasing the context of Palestinian oppression and dispossession in order to justify genocidal violence.
Egyptian comedian and commentator Bassem Youssef on imagining what it is like to grow up Palestinian in Gaza.
Understanding Genocide
Definition of Genocide
Under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, acts of genocide include:
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Killing
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Causing serious bodily or mental harm, and
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Inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s destruction.
Common Misperceptions About Genocide
“It's Just War”
Genocides - like the Holocaust - often occur during war. Indeed, genocide and war go hand-in-hand. Of course, not every war is a genocide. But as this website will show, what is happening in Gaza is unique. It is not simply another war, however terrible war can be. There has never been a war in history where 80% of the country has been decimated, 100% of the population displaced and 70% of deaths women and children.
Genocide Requires Total Annihilation
Such a definition would render the term genocide almost meaningless. A standard so high could not even be applied to the Nazi Holocaust. Instead, as renowned genocide scholar Daniel Blatman explains, genocide is any action that leads to the destruction of a collective's ability to exist, not necessarily its total annihilation.
This is critical because the Genocide Convention was designed to create “warning signs,” not autopsies. The goal is prevention. Thus, genocide is defined by the perpetrator's intent and actions - not as millions dead or a specific percentage of people killed.
“It's Ethnic Cleansing, Not Genocide.”
While ethnic cleansing and genocide are distinct crimes, historically ethnic cleansing is often the first phase of a genocide. During the early phase of the Holocaust, for example, the goal was the expulsion of Jews, not necessarily their mass murder. In the case of Gaza, Israel initially sought to push the entire population of Gaza into the Sinai Peninsula. When Egypt rejected this, Netanyahu instructed one of his aides to explore ways to “thin out” Gaza’s population. Israel's efforts at ethnic cleansing have continued ever since.
Why This is Genocide
Israel is Committing Genocide in Gaza
Israel’s decimation of Gaza is clearly intended to annihilate Palestinian life in Gaza. Israeli leaders openly declare their desire and intent to destroy Gaza, and their view that no one in Gaza is innocent, or even human. On the ground, Israeli forces have not only killed countless thousands and seriously injured well over 130,000 people, they have terrorized, traumatized, and starved the entire population. They have utterly destroyed Gaza - its homes, agricultural fields, greenhouses, bakeries, mosques, schools, cultural and governmental institutions, water and sanitation infrastructure, roads, hospitals, every trace of what sustains life. In making Gaza uninhabitable, they have deliberately inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.
There are 3 key elements to understanding why this is a genocide [click below to jump to a specific section]:
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2.
3.
1. Every Prominent Organization and Scholar Confirms:
“This is Genocide”
International human rights and humanitarian organizations agree:
This is Genocide.
Amnesty International says this is genocide.
Human Rights Watch says this is genocide.
B'tselem says this is genocide.
Physicians for Human Rights in Israel says this is genocide.
A UN Human Rights Special Committee says this is genocide.
The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention says this is genocide.
Doctors Without Borders says this is genocide.
The Center for Constitutional Rights says this is genocide.
The University Network for Human Rights says this is genocide.
Amnesty International issued a 300-page report (summarized here) concluding that Israel is committing the crime of genocide. In the words of its Secretary General: “What’s happening in Gaza is a litany of violations of international law … not seen since World War II.” It specifically investigated claims that Israel was targeting Hamas, and found “these claims are not credible” in light of the unprecedented levels of destruction and the denial of aid to the entire civilian population.
Multiple independent UN reports and Special Rapporteurs conclude that Israel is committing genocide and extermination in Gaza. In November 2024, a UN Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices found that Israel's warfare methods are “consistent with genocide, including use of starvation as a weapon of war,” using sexual violence against women and girls, and showing a blatant disregard for distinguishing between civilians and combatants - creating an “apocalyptic situation” of “unchecked barbarity.” In June 2025, the Independent International Committee of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory found that Israel was committing the crime of extermination, including by killing civilians sheltering in schools. Former UN Humanitarian Chief Martin Griffiths said, “This is unequivocal. Of course it is genocide.”
A short video summary of the findings of the UN Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices
A short explainer, including video testimony, of the report of the UN Special Committee
An excerpt of the UN Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices
The Lemkin Institute, named after the polish Jewish intellectual Raphael Lemkin, who defined “genocide” after witnessing the atrocities of the Nazi Holocaust, issued this statement against Western countries’ complicity in the Gaza genocide: “The Lemkin Institute condemns Israel, Europe, Canada, and the USA for perpetrating genocide in Gaza. It is a moral wrong that should haunt these countries for eternity.” It called the bombing of Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, “a genocidal act ... against a trapped civilian population,” conducted by “an army that has proved to be motivated by genocidal zeal.”
The Center for Constitutional Rights and the University Network for Human Rights, a consortium of human rights centers at colleges across the world, also say what Israel is inflicting upon Gaza constitutes genocide.
The International Court of Justice - the UN's world court - ruled in January 2024, only 4 months into Israel's war on Gaza that Palestinians were at “real and imminent risk” of genocide, and ordered Israel to prevent and punish public incitement to genocide and to facilitate the entry of humanitarian assistance. As this website details, Israel has done precisely the opposite, ratcheting up the genocidal fervor at home while deepening its stranglehold and starvation of Gaza.
In July 2025, two prominent Israeli human rights organizations - B'tselem and Physicians for Human Rights in Israel - both accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. B'tselem stated in no uncertain terms that "Over the last 22 months, Israel has been deliberately and systematically destroying Palestinian society in Gaza. Government policymakers and military commanders have repeatedly declared their objective is to annihilate the people of Gaza, and the horrific result can be seen on the ground. This is Genocide." It continued: "The assault on the Gaza Strip is not just another violent confrontation or moral failure. It is the systematic implementation of a policy of killing civilians en masse, destroying basic living conditions, forcibly displacing residents, dismantling civil institutions, erasing collective identity, and totally dehumanizing the Palestinian people of Gaza. When these practices are carried out together, openly and over many months, the conclusion is clear. This is genocide and it is happening now. We must end it."
Scholars of genocide and international law agree:
This is genocide.
Renowned scholars of genocide and international law, including prominent Israeli scholars of the Holocaust, agree that this is genocide.
A Dutch investigation found that “Leading genocide scholars are unanimous that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.” The paper interviewed seven renowned genocide and Holocaust researchers from six countries - including Israel - all of whom described the Israeli campaign in Gaza as genocide, and said their peers in the field share this assessment. “Can I name someone whose work I respect who does not think it is genocide? No, there is no counterargument that takes into account all the evidence,” Israeli researcher Raz Segal said.
Holocaust historian Barry Trachtenberg testified that there is a consensus among genocide historians that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide. Similarly, Israeli scholar Shmuel Lederman said that identifying Gaza as a genocide is the “consensus” view among genocide researchers.
Prominent Israeli genocide scholars are also unequivocal.
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Amos Goldberg, a Holocaust historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wrote an opinion piece titled “Yes, this is genocide.” He said the “deliberate crushing of Palestinian existence in Gaza” is “undoubtedly genocide.” He then published a video in which he said: “My name is Amos Goldberg. I am an Israeli professor of Holocaust Studies. For nearly 30 years I have researched and taught the Holocaust, genocide and state violence. And I want to tell whoever is willing to listen that what’s happening now in Gaza is a genocide.”
Raz Segal, an Israeli historian and associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies, explicitly called Israel's actions in Gaza “a textbook case of genocide,” and warned in The Guardian of weaponizing the memory of the Holocaust to justify genocide in Gaza.
Numerous other top genocide scholars - like International Association of Genocide Scholars President Melanie O’Brien, Journal of Genocide Research Senior Editor Dirk Moses, and “What is Genocide” author Martin Shaw say a genocide is taking place in Gaza. Historian Lee Mordechai has created a website documenting the enormous amount of evidence demonstrating that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide.
Martin Shaw, author of "What is genocide?" explaining why Israel's "war" in Gaza is a genocide.
Other prominent Israelis - while not using the word “genocide” - have said nearly as much.
Israeli opposition leader Yair Golan has accused the government of killing “children as a hobby.”
2. “This is Genocide”:
Israeli Leaders, Media, and Society Say It Openly and Proudly
Introduction
An endless stream of statements by Israeli leaders across the political spectrum demonstrate clear genocidal intent. Indeed, Israeli leaders openly and repeatedly declare their desire to exterminate Palestinians in Gaza. As South Africa said to the International Court of Justice in its case accusing Israel of genocide: “The evidence of genocidal intent is not only chilling, it is also overwhelming and incontrovertible.”
This section:
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Highlights examples from the highest levels of Israeli leadership,
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Provides examples from the top to bottom of the Israeli military, and
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Shows how these views have been embraced by mainstream Israeli media and society.
Israeli Leaders
There are a flood of statements by Israeli government officials openly proclaiming their genocidal intent - from the immediate aftermath of October 7 to the present day. One database captures over 500 such statements as of January 4, 2024. Below we highlight a few:
“No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly.”
“Gaza will never go back to what it was. We will eliminate everything.”
~ Yoav Gallant, Defense Minister
“Remember what Amalek has done to you.”
~ Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, alluding to the biblical call to “attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep.”
“It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true.”
~ President Isaac Herzog, Center-Left Labor Party
“The children of Gaza have brought this upon themselves.”
~ Meirav Ben-Ari, Israel Knesset member of the centrist Yesh Atid party
Video compilations of Israeli statements that illustrate genocidal intent.
“Now we all have one common goal - erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth.”
“There are no uninvolved people … we must go in there and kill, kill, kill.”
“Every child born now is already a terrorist when he is born.”
“Every child is the enemy … Not a single Gazan child should remain there.”
~ Deputy Knesset speaker Nissim Vaturi
“The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”
~ IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagari
“We are fighting Nazis.”
~ Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett
“The work must be completed … Total destruction.”
~ Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich
“Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”
~ Giora Eiland, former head of the Israeli National Security Council. According to a scholar of genocide writing in The New York Times, “Apparently, no army representative or politician denounced this statement.”
The Palestinians “can go to Ireland or deserts, the monsters in Gaza should find a solution by themselves.” “Blow up and flatten everything. Simply a delight for the eyes. … Total destruction.”
~ Amichay Eliyahu, the Minister of Heritage
“Whoever returns here, if they return here after, will find scorched earth. No houses, no agriculture, no nothing. They have no future.”
~ Col. Yogev Bar-Shesht, deputy head of the Civil Administration, in an interview from inside Gaza
“Eliminate the Muslim Nazis in Gaza. We have to pick up the pace … cover all these hundreds of ants, while they were still alive. They are not human beings and not human animals, they are subhuman and that is how they should be treated.”
~ Arieh King, Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem
Overtly genocidal statements from the Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, urging the IDF to annihilate Gaza and every Palestinian there.
Israel's Finance Minister, a far-right settler, said it would be “justified and moral” to starve the 2 million Palestinians in Gaza. He subsequently suggested it would be possible to create a situation in which in two years Gaza's population would be half its current size. More recently, in May 2025, Smotrich declared: “We are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction [which has] no precedent globally. And the world isn’t stopping us.” He said Israel will “conquer, cleanse, remain.” Smotrich is joined in his genocidal zeal by Itamar Ben-Gvir, an illegal settler and the Minister of National Security, a convicted terrorist, who leads the Jewish Power party (the Jewish supremacist equivalent of “white power”).
But Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are not extreme in Israeli society when it comes to their views of Palestinians. Israel Katz, the Defense Minister, openly threatened the “residents of Gaza” that unless they somehow could “return the hostages and expel Hamas…the alternative is total destruction and devastation.” In so doing, he openly announced the intention to annihilate the civilian population of Gaza, and put the burden on that suffering, starving, and terrorized population to somehow defeat armed combatants and do what one of the most powerful militaries in the world has not succeeded in accomplishing.
The Knesset, Israel's parliament, openly debated whether starving children in Gaza would be a bad thing. Knesset Member Moshe Saada boasted: “I will starve Gazans! Yes absolutely. It is our duty to expel Gazans.”
Israeli Military
This genocidal fervor has spread throughout the Israeli military, which turns these calls for genocide into action. In numerous videos, Israeli commanders encourage troops to “kill everyone.”
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Before the ambush of 15 Palestinian medics, a blatant war crime, a commander from the Golani Brigade told his troops, “Everyone you meet is an enemy. You recognize a person, open fire, eliminate them, and move on.”
Israeli soldiers embraced and repeated this genocidal language.
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In a TV interview, an Israeli soldier says, “There are no innocents in Gaza,” says his brigade's mission was to kill anyone who came near their area, and responds that the war would end when “no one remains there.”
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“You went into Gaza for revenge, as much as possible. Women, children, anyone in sight,” said an Israeli, proudly and nostalgically as he eulogized his brother, an Israeli soldier.
Click above to explore more examples of genocidal rhetoric, proudly posted on social media, by Israeli soldiers and collected by Zeteo.
Israeli soldiers turned these calls for genocide into action. Several news outlets published investigations, particularly of social media videos uploaded by Israeli soldiers themselves.
Al Jazeera Database of Israeli Soldier Social Media Posts Documenting Potential War Crimes
A compilation of social media videos uploaded by Israeli soldiers, proudly showcasing their war crimes.
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Zeteo investigation and documentary - Independent news outlet Zeteo published an investigation of Israeli soldiers' social media posts rejoicing in the humiliation and suffering of Palestinians. It also produced a 40-minute documentary on the radicalization of Israeli society and its support for genocide, showcasing viral social media posts from soldiers in Gaza.
These videos show Israeli soldiers destroying homes and schools, looting family possessions, abusing Palestinians, and mocking, cheering, dancing, and rejoicing in the wholesale destruction of Gaza and the suffering of its people. Examples include:
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Laughing while boasting “I've stopped counting how many neighborhoods I've erased.”
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Vandalizing local shops and school classrooms, mocking the death and destruction of children's bedrooms, family homes, and schools.
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Bulldozing civilian areas and calling for the building of Israeli settlements.
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Smiling while showing off the wreckage of destroyed family homes.
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Dancing and toasting while buildings are blown up.
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Dedicating the bulldozing of a building to Eyal Golan, an Israeli singer who has called for the complete destruction of Gaza.
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Looting the family homes of Palestinians who have lost everything.
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Sharing a photograph of three armored bulldozers and a destroyed landscape, captioned: “This is after a lot of work — the whole place was covered in greenery and houses until we got there.”
From The New York Times visual investigation of Israeli soldiers social media
Israeli Media and Society
Israeli society has increasingly embraced this genocidal rhetoric, overwhelmingly supporting the government and military in carrying out a genocide in Gaza. As genocide scholar Raz Segal has observed, “Israeli politics, society and media are awash with annihilatory language against Palestinians in Gaza.”
In poll after poll, majorities of Jewish Israelis say they don't believe there are any innocent people in Gaza, and support the total annihilation of Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of its people. A June 2025 Hebrew University of Jerusalem poll found that 64% believe there are no innocents in Gaza. The same month, a poll by Penn State University found that 82% of Jewish Israelis support the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza, 47% agree that when conquering an enemy city the Israeli army should “kill all its inhabitants,” and 65% believe there is a modern day Amalek (a biblical enemy God ordered wiped out, and that Netanyahu invoked on the eve of Israel's invasion of Gaza). 56% support the expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Israeli soldiers have also spoken to Israeli newspapers and NGOs, revealing how the military operates from within, and illustrating the intentional, systematic, and calculated killing of Palestinian civilians across Gaza.
This is detailed in the page on Israeli Confessions. Here we highlight just a few examples:
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Multiple Israeli news outlets and organizations - including Ha'aretz, +972 Magazine, and Breaking the Silence - collected testimony by soldiers of how the army established “kill zones” in which soldiers shoot to kill anyone who crosses an arbitrary, invisible line – including unarmed men, women, children, and the elderly. Often they were civilians simply looking for food or trying to get home. It then labeled them all “terrorists.”
Earlier this year, two additional polls confirmed these sentiments. In February 2025, 82% of Jewish Israelis said they supported Trump's “relocation” plan, which called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza. Only 3% thought it was immoral. In May, 67% of Jewish Israelis said Gaza’s suffering should play little or no role in policy decisions.
Israeli media reflects and amplifies this genocidal fever. A Zeteo report examined how Israel’s Channel 14 became a mouthpiece for genocidal incitement—celebrating starving children, airing calls to “wipe Gaza off the face of the earth,” and platforming guests who propose war crimes, including using crop dusters to blanket Gaza in gas and set it on fire. Israeli TV commentators regularly cheerlead and encourage the genocide, saying things like:
“Every baby in Gaza is an enemy”
“Yes, it is possible to achieve total victory…There’s a finite amount of people in Gaza.”
These genocidal sentiments have spread throughout Israeli society. Far from being confined to the fringes of far-right settlers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, or even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, they include Israelis of all stripes - young Israeli women, doctors, children, soccer fans, and the Supreme Court.
Little wonder then that Israeli soldiers posted thousands of photos and videos on social media documenting their own war crimes and rejoicing in the suffering of Palestinians—they saw nothing wrong in it. Journalists and celebrities celebrated the burning of Rafah and displaced families in tents as a Jewish bonfire holiday, posting images of the Palestinian city ablaze captioned “Happy Holidays.” Young women unashamedly tell TV cameras “We need to kill them. Every one of them” and “You need to destroy their offspring to prevent them from creating more offspring.”
Hosts of the Two Nice Jewish Boys podcast, a popular Israeli English-language podcast, stated in August 2024: “If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow, I would press it in a second,” adding that he believes most Israelis would do the same. They added, “Seriously, this is how Israelis feel...people enjoy knowing that [Gazans] are suffering.”
Israeli society is so accepting of these views that when Israelis travel abroad, many share them openly and proudly. Fans of Israeli soccer team Maccabi Tel Aviv fans chanted “Death to Arabs” and “Let the IDF [Israeli army] fuck the Arabs” in the streets of Amsterdam. When they arrived at Ben Gurion airport on their return from Amsterdam, they sang: “Why is school out in Gaza? Because there are no children left there.” This is not especially surprising from a society where Israeli nationalists conduct an annual march through Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem shouting “Death to Arabs!”
These views are sanctioned by the broader society - implicitly and explicitly. Israel’s Supreme Court has denied all requests to protect Palestinian civilians in Gaza and given its seal of approval to the withholding of medical treatment, starvation, disappearing people, and denying media access. Most recently, on May 18, 2025, four human rights organizations asked the court once again to order the government to allow food to enter Gaza without limitations, as it increasingly became clear Gaza was on the verge of mass starvation. Since then, Ha'aretz reports, the prosecution has filed 10 requests to postpone even submitting a response. There are virtually no protests inside Israel against the barbaric treatment of Palestinians, leading Professor John Mearsheimer to remark: “It’s not just Israeli leaders backing this genocide — the public’s silence is deafening...This is the Nazification of Israel. Like Germans under Hitler.”
3. Israel's Acts of Genocide: An Overview
Introduction
This section summarizes the kinds of genocidal actions Israel is committing in Gaza. It aims to provide an overall picture of what is taking place. For more detail on any one of these topics, navigate to the dedicated pages at the top of the site.
Israel’s genocidal actions include:
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Mass killing and targeting civilians
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Making Gaza uninhabitable for those who survive and destroying the fabric of Palestinian society (including by intentionally starving the entire civilian population, destroying nearly all sources of food and clean water, systematically attacking nearly every single hospital while killing, disappearing, and torturing health care workers, and attacking 92% of houses, 95% of schools, hundreds of mosques, and so on. There simply is nothing left to sustain life in Gaza.
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Inflicting mass torture, trauma, and terror.
Israel is not merely “waging a war” or “acting in self-defense.” There has never been a war in history where over 80% of the country has been destroyed, 100% of the people displaced, and nearly 70% of deaths women and children. There is nothing about intentionally starving newborn babies that constitutes self-defense.
This is genocide. Israel is annihilating Gaza and its people, their society, culture, and way of life - their very existence. For 22 months, Israel has been raining terror down on Gaza. In the words of Amos Goldberg, a Holocaust and genocide scholar at the Hebrew University:
“What is happening in Gaza is genocide because the level and pace of indiscriminate killing, destruction, mass expulsions, displacement, famine, executions, the wiping out of cultural and religious institutions, the crushing of elites (including the killing of journalists), and the sweeping dehumanisation of the Palestinians — create an overall picture of genocide, of a deliberate conscious crushing of Palestinian existence in Gaza.”
Mass Killing & Targeting of Civilians
Israel is killing Palestinians in Gaza on an industrial scale - using the most lethal and advanced technology against a defenseless civilian population. As of August 2025, Israel has massacred over 58,000 people – and likely well over 300,000 people if one includes the deaths of people buried under the rubble and those who have or will die from indirect, preventable causes, like starvation, disease, and lack of medical care and humanitarian aid. Entire family lines have been eradicated.
~70% of those killed are women and children. The age group most killed in Israel's targeting of residential buildings is 5-9 year olds. There were 200 times the rate of child deaths in the first five weeks in Gaza as during the Iraq war. Israel has killed over 18,500 children in what UNICEF has called its “ruthless killing of children,” over 19,000 children have been orphaned, all have been traumatized. Israel's relentless bombing so shreds Palestinian bodies that parents write their names on their childrens’ limbs so they can be identified if killed.
Over 132,000 suffer from life-changing injuries including amputations and severe burns. Gaza now has the highest concentration of child amputees in the world.
Israel has dropped countless 2000 lb bombs to cataclysmic effect in one of the most densely populated places on earth and unleashed over 70,000 tons of bombs - more than 4 nuclear weapons worth - on this tiny enclave.
Israel's onslaught is not simply indiscriminate. Throughout the genocide, Israel has deliberately targeted civilians. Dozens of American doctors have testified to the deliberate targeting of children with sniper shots to the head and chest. Israeli soldiers have repeatedly killed people waiving white flags while fleeing on the very routes designated for evacuation, attacked designated “safe zones” with bombs, turning them into deadly infernos, created “kill zones” where soldiers target anything that moves, and run over people with tanks and bulldozers. Numerous videos show Israeli drones targeting unarmed people who are clearly civilians, and then striking again when people try to rescue the survivors. Palestinians testify to summary executions of unarmed civilians in their homes, including the elderly.
In short, Israel has conducted a campaign of mass extermination and terror, shredding children with industrial, shrapnel-packed bombs, and burning families alive as they shelter in tents near hospitals or in UN schools.
For detailed evidence, visit the Mass Killings and Targeting Civilians pages.
For nearly two years, Israel has systematically deprived over 2 million people of food, water, and medical aid. As of August 2025, at least 94 children have starved to death. Over 300,000 children under five are at risk of acute malnutrition, which carries lifelong health consequences. Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, the World Food Program, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Bt'selem, and a chorus of other organizations say Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war in violation of international humanitarian law. Not only is this a war crime, it is an integral part of Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
Israel has deliberately engineered a humanitarian crisis that the International Red Cross has called “beyond catastrophic,” and a level of urban starvation not seen since World War II. It does this first and foremost by blocking the entry of humanitarian aid, while systematically destroying food and water sources inside Gaza — razing agricultural fields, orchards, and greenhouses, bombing bakeries, and destroying water and sanitation infrastructure, such as water wells, pipes, and water treatment plants. Children are forced to drink from dirty puddles of water or salty seawater. Israel's ban on food aid extends even to baby formula. As of late June 2025, 580 premature babies were at risk of death from starvation due to Israel's blockade on baby formula.
Israel also relentlessly attacks people delivering aid and massacres people seeking aid. It has killed an unprecedented number of humanitarian aid workers, more than 470, bombed food distribution centers, and targeted community kitchens and their chefs. Since it launched its new “aid” scheme in June 2025 to replace the effective and respected UN-led system, Israeli forces have massacred starving civilians desperately seeking food on a daily basis. Simply put, Israel starves people and then kills them as they line up for food. It uses the lure of small bits of food to herd people into penned-in concentration camps in one tiny corner of the already small and densely crowded enclave, facilitating the ethnic cleansing that is their ultimate goal.
Examples of the catastrophic levels of starvation Israel has unleashed on the entire population of Gaza, including children.
The Israeli-backed “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” which kills Palestinians every day under the guise of providing aid.
For more specifics and examples, visit the Intentional Starvation page.
At the same time as Israel has wrought such extraordinary suffering - precisely at the moment when Palestinian civilians who are injured or starving most need medical care - Israel has systematically destroyed Gaza’s entire healthcare system, bombing and besieging nearly every single hospital. The few hospitals that can still operate are barely functional, doctors are forced to operate without anesthetic, and basic medications and equipment - like insulin and incubators - are simply unavailable. Just imagine: amputations and c-sections without anesthetic. Israel blocks medical aid, leading countless civilians to die from preventable or treatable diseases. It even blocks fuel to hospitals, while bombing generators and solar panels.
On top of this, Israel has forcibly evacuated medical staff from hospitals, leaving newborn babies in incubators to rot and die.
It has blown up cancer hospitals, dialysis clinics, maternity wards and IVF clinics – depriving people of necessary medical care now and for years to come. It is clear: it intends to destroy Gaza so that Palestinians will either die or be forced to leave.
Skin diseases and other illnesses run rampant and polio—previously eradicated—has reemerged, paralyzing small children.
Israel has also targeted over 200 red crescent ambulances. It has killed over 1,500 medical workers, while disappearing, detaining, and torturing others.
For more specifics and examples, visit the Destroying Hospitals page.
Israel has completely destroyed housing in Gaza - one look at the images tells you everything.
92% of residential buildings are severely damaged or destroyed and over 90% of the population of Gaza displaced. People are exposed to heat, cold, and flooding, all the while being bombed in the tents, schools, and hospitals in which they seek shelter. This is no accident: On October 11, 2023, an IDF official stated, “Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents. There will be no buildings.” Israeli soldiers have admitted they burned and destroyed buildings “for no reason.” In May 2025, Netanyahu reportedly said at a meeting: “We are destroying more and more homes – they have nowhere to return to. The only expected result will be a desire for Gazans to emigrate outside the Strip.”
In addition to housing, Israel has destroyed the fabric of Palestinian society by deliberately targeting civilian institutions of all kinds, such as universities, libraries, archives, religious and cultural sites, historical sites, farms, schools, cemeteries, museums and markets. Israel has attacked 95% of schools, destroying 2300 school buildings and every single university. It has destroyed over 800 mosques and over 200 cultural and historic sites.
Israel has also systematically destroyed the infrastructure that sustains life - destroying 82% of the road network, 88% of commercial facilities, and attacking electricity networks and water and sanitation infrastructure.
It has also openly targeted civilian governance institutions and individuals - from the police who guard aid trucks to the people who repair water lines - a blatant violation of international law. At the same time, Israel has admitted to arming criminal gangs who loot humanitarian aid, threaten any semblance of safety and order, and sow societal collapse. The goal it seems is plunge the Gaza Strip into complete chaos, further ravaging Palestinian communities.
For more specifics and examples, visit the Obliterating Civilian Life page.
Throughout this genocidal war, Israel has detained Palestinian civilians en masse - subjecting them to systematic abuse, starvation, torture, sexual assault, and even death in what Israeli human rights NGO B'tselem calls “a network of torture camps.” These prisons are overseen by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir—a convicted terror supporter who brags about starving inmates as “deterrence.” These practices violate every principle enshrined for decades in the Geneva Conventions. The goal is obvious: to terrorize and traumatize, to break the Palestinian spirit and their will to continue living on their land.
The images are harrowing - reminiscent of the Nazi Holocaust. Israel is implementing a mass detention scheme with no semblance of due process or verification. Detained without charge, Palestinians are effectively hostages. People are numbered and stripped, severely beaten, interrogated, detained in horrific conditions, sexually assaulted, and tortured. Many have been released, simply dropped at the border with no clothes on, only diapers. Over 70 Palestinians have died in Israeli custody since October 7, 2023. Israeli top brass reportedly call the Sde Teiman prison a “cemetery.” A growing number of Palestinians have had their limbs forcibly amputated, often without anesthesia, after zip ties cut off their circulation. At least one man died after being gang-raped, while others report being raped with a hot metal rod in the rectum. A UN independent commission concluded Israel is using “systematic sexual violence” against Palestinians.
These prisons are full of civilians - women, the elderly, disabled, children as young as 13, doctors, journalists, and academics. 50-year-old Palestinian surgeon and professor, Adnan al-Bursh, the head of orthopedic surgery at Al Shifa hospital, was taken hostage and tortured to death in an Israeli secret detention site. Not a single soldier has been investigated, arrested, or tried for his murder.
Even Israeli soldiers confirm the testimony of Palestinians. Israeli whistleblowers describe amputations due to constant handcuffing, medical procedures performed by people without expertise and without anesthesia, neglected wounds left to rot, beatings done out of revenge, beatings for speaking or moving, and so on. “They stripped them down of anything that resembles human beings,” said one soldier.
For more specifics and examples, visit the Torture page.
CONCLUSION
Israel's wholesale destruction of Gaza and its people - through mass killings, deliberate targeting of civilians including children, and making Gaza uninhabitable - is undoubtedly a genocide. Israeli leaders, politicians, media, and society openly declare their genocidal intent, fueled by a profound dehumanization of Palestinians, announcing to the world over and over again that “there are no innocents in Gaza.” They have said it all along to anyone who would listen: “Amalek,” “a second Nakba,” “Nothing will remain.”
In 22 months, Israel has attacked and destroyed 92% of homes, nearly every single hospital, 95% of schools, and over 80% of agricultural fields - as well as water wells, sewage systems, cattle and sheep herds, and orchards, bakeries, and greenhouses. It has destroyed places of worship, and cultural and historical sites. At the same time, it has systematically starved the entire civilian population, while regularly massacring people at so-called “aid” sites.
The consensus of genocide scholars and human rights organizations is clear: this is genocide. This is the deliberate crushing of Palestinian existence in Gaza, the wholesale destruction of a society, culture, and way of life. For those who survive, Israel has inflicted unimaginable levels of trauma and terror, a psychological horror that may never be overcome, as well as unbearable physical and emotional pain. The people of Gaza, as journalist Chris Hedges wrote in The Last Days of Gaza, are “Sick. Injured. Terrified. Humiliated. Abandoned. Destitute. Starving. Hopeless.”
Since the onset of its genocide, Israel has banned every international journalist from entering Gaza and systematically killed over 230 local Palestinian journalists. This alone speaks volumes. You don't kill journalists unless your enemy is truth.
And the truth is, as this site intends to document, that this is a genocide. For Israel, genocide is a key element of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, a project that has been at the heart of the Zionist movement and the creation of Israel from its inception. There was simply no other way to create an Jewish state in a land that was overwhelmingly inhabited by Arabs, except by conquering and expelling them, as Israel continues to do to this day.
This time, however, the magnitude and scale of death and destruction is unlike anything ever seen before. It is an avalanche of human suffering. It is a holocaust.
Such complete and total destruction cannot be sanitized as “self-defense.” Cutting off food and water to 2 million civilians - including 1 million children - is not self-defense. Turning Gaza into a “graveyard for children,” and bombing residential buildings where the most murdered age group is 5-9 year olds, is not self-defense. Starving babies and burning them alive in tents is not self-defense. Erasing entire neighborhoods with industrial bombs and bulldozers is not self-defense. Forcing medical staff to abandon newborns in incubators and then leaving them to rot and die is not self-defense. Forcing doctors to amputate children without anesthetic is not self-defense. Starving people then killing them as they line up for food is not self-defense. Killing a grandmother holding a child's hand and waiving a white flag on a designated evacuation route is not self-defense. Snipers targeting children with shots to the head and heart is not self-defense. Ethnically cleansing 2 million people and stealing their land is not self-defense. The efforts of Israel and its allies to whitewash such horrors as “self-defense” is a chilling, Orwellian mockery of language - it is weaponizing language to hide rather than illuminate reality. It is embracing Hitler's use of “the big lie.”
Sadly, such efforts aren't new. During the Palestinian uprising against Israeli military occupation in 1987, an Israeli soldier in Gaza confessed: “A soldier shot an Arab four times in the back and got away with a self-defense claim. Four bullets in the back from a distance of ten meters … cold-blooded murder. We did things like that every day.” Today, Israel's Minister of Finance has openly declared, “Our goal for 2025 is to destroy more than what the Palestinians have built,” to “conquer, cleanse, and remain,” and still pundits repeat the same nonsense lie that Israel has a right to defend itself.
For Israel, nothing justifies October 7, but October 7 justifies everything. Such a calculus is, of course, profoundly inhumane and startlingly racist: some lives have infinite value, others have none whatsoever.
Repeating phrases like “terrorism” and “self-defense” over and over is an effective way to numb the public to the cruelty Israel has carried out with the approval of its western patrons. And this is precisely the purpose of such incantations, to shield people from reality, and to shield Israel and its sponsors in the United States and Europe from accountability. As one commentator observed, Zionism is the only ideology where stealing land and bombing hospitals is called self-defense, but a child throwing a rock at a tank is terrorism.
It should go without saying that peace or security cannot be achieved by slaughtering, torturing, and dehumanizing an entire people. The truth is self-evident: such violence will only breed more violence. Oppression always breeds resistance. The goal, then, it becomes clear, is neither peace nor security - it is land. Land has always been the goal of the Zionist project - a land without Palestinians.
Some will say this is just war, and war is terrible. But this is not a war. Dropping the weight of 4 atomic bombs on 2.3 million civilians who have no tanks, aircraft, or warships, and who have been forcibly displaced, trapped, and starved by Israel is not “war.” Targeting civilians and combatants alike is not simply “collateral damage” – it is the purposeful destruction of an entire people. Destroying every source of life - from food and clean water, to education, agricultural fields, homes, and cultural and religious institutions - is not war. It is annihilation.
As Greek doctor Christos Georgalas reflected on his time in Gaza: “I can’t say I went to war. War is a very different thing. There was no war in Treblinka, there was no war in Auschwitz. War has two armies. Here you have a population that is mainly civilians and women and children, who have no way of escaping. And bombs are systematically raining down from the sky.”
Princeton University Professor Richard Falk called Israel's onslaught in Gaza the “most transparent genocide in human history.”
“Society is erased. … Words dry up in the throat,” Dr. Munir Al-Barash, Director General of the Palestinian Ministry of Health said.
The UN's Humanitarian Chief, Tom Fletcher, someone who has been to Congo, Sudan, and other war-torn countries, says he's “never” seen anything like Gaza. “It's a horror show.”
If Palestinians had inflicted upon Jews the horrors that the Israeli state has carried out every single day for over 600 days in Gaza, there is no question what the world would have called this.
There would be no hesitation to call it what it is: GENOCIDE.