The word genocide is no longer whispered in activist circles, no longer confined to the margins of human rights reports. It now sits on the record of the United Nations itself.
The UN Commission of Inquiry, led by former High Commissioner Navi Pillay, has done what many governments lacked the courage to admit: Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
“The Commission finds that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza,” Pillay declared, “through killings, the causing of serious bodily and mental harm, and the infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians as a group.”
This is not hyperbole. It is not rhetoric. It is the careful judgment of international jurists who sifted through testimony, satellite imagery, and the blood-soaked statistics of a war that has turned a strip of land into a graveyard.
The commission’s findings are unbearable to read.
It documents how entire families were buried under their own homes, struck at night while they slept. How aid convoys were bombed, even when their routes were pre-coordinated with the Israeli military. One section recounts the attack on a UN school sheltering displaced families, killing scores of children whose only crime was seeking refuge.
“Israel has carried out attacks against civilians and civilian objects, including shelters, hospitals, schools and convoys, in circumstances that demonstrate a pattern of disregard for civilian life,” the report concludes.
Hospitals — protected under international law — were not spared. The commission recorded how Al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest, was besieged, stormed, and left without electricity or medicine, condemning premature babies to die in their incubators. Maternity wards and reproductive health clinics were targeted, a pattern the commission linked to the genocidal element of “imposing measures intended to prevent births.”
“The denial of humanitarian aid, attacks on reproductive health services, and deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure demonstrate an intent to destroy Palestinian life in Gaza,” the commission wrote.
And looming over it all is the rhetoric of Israeli leaders. The inquiry cited senior officials who called Palestinians “human animals” and demanded Gaza be “erased.”
“Statements made by senior Israeli officials, including those dehumanizing Palestinians and calling for their annihilation, provide clear evidence of genocidal intent,” the report stated.
The evidence is chillingly clear. Killing members of the group. Inflicting conditions calculated to bring about its destruction. Preventing births by destroying reproductive health services. Incitement to genocide. Every element the world swore “Never Again” to allow has been checked off, one by one.
Israel rejects the report, calling it biased. Its allies mumble excuses about “complexities.” But genocide is not complex. It is the systematic attempt to erase a people, and that is what the UN’s own investigators now say is unfolding in Gaza.
The commission did not mince words about what must happen next:
“Immediate measures are required to end ongoing violations, ensure unimpeded humanitarian access, and bring those responsible to account. States must refrain from transferring arms where there is a clear risk they will be used to commit .”
And yet, the silence from many capitals is deafening. The same governments that rushed to condemn Russia in Ukraine, that thundered about ethnic cleansing in Sudan, now weigh their words carefully, terrified of offending an ally. They hide behind process while children in Gaza hide from drones.
History will not be kind to the bystanders. The UN has spoken with a clarity that cannot be ignored: Gaza is a genocide in motion. The only question left is whether the world will stand by, once again, as another people is erased — or whether, at long last, it will choose to act.
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