Israel committing ‘genocide’ in Gaza, UN commission of inquiry says

The deeply documented findings by the three-member team are the latest accusations of genocide against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government.

A team of independent experts commissioned by the United Nations’ Human Rights Council has concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, issuing a report Tuesday that calls on the international community to end the genocide and take steps to punish those responsible for it.

The deeply documented findings by the three-member team are the latest accusations of genocide against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government as Israel carries on with its conflict in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of people. Israel rejected what it called a “distorted and false” report.

The Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel, which was created four years ago, has repeatedly documented alleged human rights abuses and violations in Gaza since the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel led by Hamas, and other Palestinian areas.

While neither the commission nor the 47-member-country council that it works for within the U.N. system can take action against a country, the findings could be used by prosecutors at the International Criminal Court or the U.N.’s International Court of Justice.

The report also amounts to a final message from the team headed by former U.N. rights chief Navi Pillay, who served as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda that sentenced 62 people over the 1994 genocide of more than half a million Rwandans. All three of the commission’s members announced in July that they would resign, citing personal reasons and a need for change.

The team was commissioned by the Human Rights Council, the U.N.’s top human rights body, but it does not speak for the United Nations.

Israel has refused to cooperate with the commission and has accused it and the HRC of anti-Israel bias. Earlier this year, the Trump administration, a key Israeli ally, pulled the United States out of the council.

After a painstaking legal analysis, examining both actions and intent, the commission said Israel had committed four of the five “genocidal acts” defined under an international convention adopted in 1948 known colloquially as the “Genocide Convention,” three years after the end of World War II and the Holocaust.