UN Report Confirms Genocide in Gaza, But the World Still Shrugs, Even As Israel Erases Gaza City

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Four days ago, ripples of concern briefly surfaced in the global media, as a UN Commission of Inquiry — the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel — issued a devastating 72-page report establishing, definitively, that the State of Israel is engaged in a genocide of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, and has been throughout the whole of the last 23 months.

The Commission of Inquiry — chaired by Navi Pillay, who, over the last 30 years has served as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal dealing with the Rwanda genocide, and at the International Criminal Court, and who was also, from 2008 to 2014, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights — was established in May 2021 by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate violations of international humanitarian law in the territories illegally occupied by Israel since 1967, and its latest report follows on from other devastating reports over the last year.

One of these was in October last year, focusing on Israel’s exterminatory “war” on Gaza’s hospitals, and its extraordinarily brutal treatment of Palestinians in its prisons, which I wrote about in detail in two articles at the time — UN Report Confirms Israel Guilty of War Crimes and “Extermination” in Attacks on Gaza’s Hospitals and UN Report Condemns Unparalleled Violence, Including Torture, Rape and Murder, in Israel’s Unaccountable Prisons for Palestinians.

Another report, in March this year, focused on Israel’s “systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since October 2023”, as I discussed in my article, UN Report Finds Israel Guilty of Genocide and Extermination Against Women and Girls in Gaza, Through “Systematic Destruction” of Reproductive Healthcare.

As the Commission explained in its introduction to its latest report, in its previous reports it had already “found that the Israeli security forces have committed crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, including extermination, torture, rape, sexual violence and other inhumane acts, inhuman treatment, forcible transfer, persecution based on gender and starvation as a method of warfare.”

In addition, the Commission also established, in these earlier reports, that the Israeli authorities have committed two of the five actions that constitute genocide in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention), the groundbreaking Convention introduced in 1948 in response to the atrocities of the Second World War, having “destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group, including by imposing measures intended to prevent births”, and having “deliberately inflicted conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians as a group.”

The damning new report by the UN Commission of Inquiry

In this latest report, as an accompanying press release explained, subsequent developments have led the Commission to conclude that “Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces committed four of the five genocidal acts defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, namely killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the Palestinians in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births.”

See below for the video, via YouTube, of the press conference in Geneva at which the report was launched.

In the press release, Navi Pillay said, “The Commission finds that Israel is responsible for the commission of genocide in Gaza. It is clear that there is an intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza through acts that meet the criteria set forth in the Genocide Convention. The responsibility for these atrocity crimes lies with Israeli authorities at the highest echelons who have orchestrated a genocidal campaign for almost two years now with the specific intent to destroy the Palestinian group in Gaza. The Commission also finds that Israel has failed to prevent and punish the commission of genocide, through failure to investigate genocidal acts and to prosecute alleged perpetrators.”

The Commission added that, in establishing Israel’s genocide, it “examined the Israeli military operations in Gaza, including killing and seriously harming unprecedented numbers of Palestinians; imposing a total siege, including blocking humanitarian aid leading to starvation; systematically destroying the healthcare and education systems in Gaza; committing systematic acts of sexual and gender based violence; directly targeting children; carrying out systematic and widespread attacks on religious and cultural sites; and disregarding the orders of the International Court of Justice.”

While some of the report draws on earlier reports, the atrocities of the last year — and in particular, since March, when Israel shamefully broke the six-week ceasefire deal with Hamas and imposed a monstrous siege on all supplies, accompanied by the resumption of savage bombing and ethnic cleansing — has provided the Commission with a startling amount of new evidence to bolster its conclusions.

The ICJ, one of the six organs of the UN, which also include the Security Council, the General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council, was the first major international body to warn that a claim of genocide was “plausible” in January 2024, in response to a case brought by South Africa, when it issued provisional measures, ordering Israel to “take all measures within its power” to stop acts of genocide, to “prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide” made by senior Israeli officials, and to “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip”, which, it recognized, were being deliberately restricted by Israel itself. In subsequent provisional measures, in March and May 2024, the Court reiterated its calls for deliberate blockades on humanitarian aid to be lifted.

However, as Navi Pillay explained, Israel “flagrantly disregarded the orders for provisional measures from the International Court of Justice”, as well as subsequent “warnings from Member States, UN offices, human rights organisations and civil society groups” regarding its actions, as it “continued the strategy of destruction of the Palestinians in Gaza.”

She added that the Commission found that the Israeli authorities “had no intention to change their course of actions”, and, on the contrary, “have persisted and continued with their genocidal campaign in Gaza for almost two years now.”

“Israel”, she proceeded to explain, “must immediately end the genocide in Gaza and comply fully with the orders for provisional measures of the International Court of Justice.”

Attributing the acts of Israel’s political and military leaders to the State of Israel, the Commission concluded that “the State of Israel bears responsibility for the failure to prevent genocide, the commission of genocide and the failure to punish the perpetrators of genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

The Commission also made a point of singling out three individuals for particular culpability — the Israeli President Isaac Herzog (who, shamefully, was warmly welcomed in London by the Prime Minister Keir Starmer just six days before the report’s publication), Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant, who, as they described it, “have incited the commission of genocide”, also noting that “Israeli authorities have failed to take action against them to punish this incitement.”

Notoriously, both Netanyahu and Gallant are already fugitives from justice, having had arrest warrants issued against them by the International Criminal Court in November last year, for the war crimes of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population and of starvation as a method of warfare, and for the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.

The inclusion of Isaac Herzog also makes sense, as the ICJ and numerous other institutional critics of Israel’s actions have, previously, made specific mention of Herzog’s horrendous claim, made on October 13, 2023, that “it’s an entire nation out there that is responsible [for the October 7 attacks]. It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians who were not aware and not involved. It is absolutely not true.”

The Commission also admitted that it “has not fully assessed statements by other Israeli political and military leaders” but “considers that they too should be assessed to determine whether they constitute incitement to commit genocide.”

In conclusion, as the press release explained, the Commission stated, “Israel must end its policy of starvation, lift the siege and facilitate and ensure the unimpeded access of humanitarian aid at scale and unhindered access of all United Nations staff, including UNRWA and OHCHR international staff, and all recognized international humanitarian agencies delivering and coordinating aid.”

The Commission also called on Israel “to immediately end the activities of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”, an Israeli and US-backed organisation established to distribute aid in Gaza, which began its deadly operations in May 2025.

Cynically designed to prevent the UN and other established NGOs from operating in Gaza, the GHF is rightly regarded as a “Hunger Games”-style death trap by Palestinians, with at least 1,373 Palestinians killed while seeking food between May and July, “859 in the vicinity of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites and 514 along the routes of food convoys”, as the Commission explained, also citing UNWRA’s Commissioner-General, Philippe Lazzarini, who stated in June that the GHF “is an abomination that humiliates and degrades desperate people. It is a death-trap, costing more lives than it saves. Food is weaponized, and Palestinians are dehumanized, without consequence.”

Turning to the obligations of other countries, the Commission “recommended that Member States cease the transfer of arms and other equipment that may be used for the commission of genocidal acts to Israel; ensure individuals and corporations in their territories and within their jurisdiction are not involved in aiding and assisting the commission of genocide or incitement to commit genocide; and take action on accountability through investigations and legal proceedings against individuals or corporations that are involved in the genocide directly or indirectly.”

As Navi Pillay said in conclusion, “The international community cannot stay silent on the genocidal campaign launched by Israel against the Palestinian people in Gaza. When clear signs and evidence of genocide emerge, the absence of action to stop it amounts to complicity. Every day of inaction costs lives and erodes the credibility of the international community. All States are under a legal obligation to use all means that are reasonably available to them to stop the genocide in Gaza.”

While the Commission of Inquiry’s findings are by no means the first authoritative assessment that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, they are particularly significant because, as Steve Crawshaw, a former UK director at Human Rights Watch, explained in an article for the Guardian, “a UN commission of inquiry brings a particular stamp of authority”, even as the report joins others by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the respected Israeli groups B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights–Israel, who, as Crenshaw also explained, “have all published authoritative and detailed reports concluding that Israel is committing genocide”, with UN experts and genocide scholars also reaching the same conclusion.

The UN and thwarted accountability

Israel, meanwhile, continues to treat all criticism as antisemitism, proof of involvement with Hamas, and a “blood libel.” Its ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Daniel Meron, called the report “scandalous” and “fake”, saying it had been authored by “Hamas proxies”, and told journalists, “Israel categorically rejects the libellous rant published today by this commission of inquiry.” As Steve Crawshaw noted of Navi Pillay, “When I first met her, she was a respected UN high commissioner for human rights – not exactly a ‘Hamas proxy’”, as Daniel Meron absurdly claimed.

Chris Sidoti, another of the Commission’s members, refreshingly told the truth about Israel’s dismal propaganda at the press conference launching the report, answering a question about Israel’s counter-claims by stating, “Honestly, the Israeli responses are becoming so boring. They say the same thing every time, but they’re producing the responses by ChatGPT these days. They spend so much money in the foreign ministry on propaganda, you’d think that they would actually come up with something original. I would want them to engage with the evidence, but they never engage with the evidence. They put the report into ChatGPT, and then they put out the standard response, so no one takes it seriously.”

Shamefully, however, western leaders and the western media still almost entirely refuse to challenge Israel, either through a ban on arms sales, the imposition of sanctions or the suspension of diplomatic relations, behaving as though they can wish away their complicity, and as though accountability — for their involvement in what is undoubtedly the most horrific western-backed atrocity of the 21st century — can somehow be avoided.

Ironically, their efforts are working in the sense that they end up contributing to the impotence of the UN, which, since its founding, has struggled to enforce its key mandate — to “maintain international peace and security”, according to its founding Charter, which entered into force on October 24, 1945, after being ratified by 51 countries — in the face of a deliberately built-in lack of any enforcement mechanism.

I have always respected the founding notions of the UN, and particularly its intention to “maintain international peace and security” after the Second World War, the deadliest conflict of the 20th century, in which up to 85 million people — at least 3% of the world’s entire population — died in the six years of the war’s relentless atrocities.

In particular, I admire its commitment to human rights, primarily via the Human Rights Council, which was originally established in 1946 as the Commission on Human Rights “to weave the international legal fabric that protects our fundamental rights and freedoms.”

This has given us the Special Procedures, independent human rights experts who work, unpaid, as Special Rapporteurs and in Working Groups “with mandates to report and advise on human rights from a thematic or country-specific perspective”, and the International Commissions of Inquiry and Commissions on Human Rights, which, as their UN page explains, “are increasingly being used to respond to situations of serious violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law, whether protracted or resulting from sudden events, and to promote accountability and counter impunity.”

However, while the Human Rights Council fundamentally functions as the conscience of the world, the lack of any enforcement mechanisms, which also afflicts the International Court of Justice, has plagued the UN from the beginning.

Its impotence has also been reinforced by the power granted to themselves by the UN’s five founding members — the US, the UK, France, Russia and China, the so-called victors of the Second World War — who gave themselves permanent seats on the UN Security Council, which is charged with ensuring international peace and security, and also, crucially, gave themselves a permanent veto on any resolutions with which they disagree.

While this has ensured that the many monstrous crimes committed by all five countries since the UN’s founding have not been fundamentally challenged, it is on Israel that the UN’s structural weaknesses have been most prominently displayed, as a dark shadow of impunity haunting the UN throughout almost the whole of its existence.

The UN’s failures regarding Israel began even before the blood-soaked founding of the State of Israel in May 1948, when 15,000 Palestinians were killed, numerous towns and villages were erased, and 750,000 Palestinians (85% of the total Palestinian population) were exiled from their historic homeland.

As the end of the British Mandate for Palestine loomed in 1947, ending the UK’s 24-year management of the country, which it had been allocated by the League of Nations, the precursor to the UN, after the First World War and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the nascent UN proposed a disastrous Partition Plan that heavily favoured the Jewish population of Palestine, whose numbers had swelled massively in the preceding decades, as a result of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 — arguably the most disastrous declaration in human history — which recklessly promised a homeland in Palestine for European Jews, largely disregarding its long occupation by the Palestinians in favour of ludicrous claims by a new Jewish nationalist movement, Zionism, that Jews worldwide had a historic claim to the Palestinians’ land dating back millennia.

After the ill-conceived Partition Plan collapsed, and Jewish terrorists violently — even genocidally — established the State of Israel, the UN attempted to impose its first demands on the new state via Resolution 194, passed on December 11, 1948, which sought to end the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbours, which had, inevitably, engulfed the region after the Jewish settlers’ brutal, nation-founding aggression.

Crucially, Resolution 194 enshrined a right of return for the dispossessed Palestinians, stating that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.”

Israel has never honoured the stipulations of Resolution 194, and in the long decades since, largely supported by the US and its veto, both countries have, essentially, persistently behaved as though they, and they alone, are superior to the UN and impervious to any resolution undertaken by the majority of the other Member States. Perfectly demonstrating this contempt, just yesterday, the US, for the sixth time since the genocide in Gaza began 23 months ago, vetoed a draft resolution at the Security Council calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza and the release of hostages.

With all accountability blocked, the only practical course of action would be for UN Member States, via the General Assembly, to implement the Uniting for Peace resolution, first passed in 1950 at a time of paralysis within the Security Council during the Korean War, which stipulates that, “if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with a view to making appropriate recommendations to Members for collective measures, including in the case of a breach of the peace or act of aggression the use of armed force when necessary, to maintain or restore international peace and security.”

Just two weeks ago, on September 5, apparently unnoticed by most of the world’s leaders and by the mainstream media, a group of 45 UN human rights experts, comprising Special Rapporteurs, independent experts and Working Group members, called on the UN General Assembly to invoke the Uniting for Peace resolution in order to respond to the escalating famine and genocidal conditions in Gaza.

In their joint statement, as the law professor Kushtrim Istrefi explained in an article for OpinioJuris, “the experts urged the Assembly to (i) recommend a peace operation, (ii) demand that all crossings into Gaza be opened under UN supervision, (iii) suspend humanitarian mechanisms that had proved dangerous or ineffective, (iv) call upon Mediterranean states to deploy humanitarian naval missions, (v) authorize UN-led humanitarian convoys to supervise all crossings, and (vi) demand a permanent ceasefire alongside the release of detainees and hostages.”

Still a howling void where there should be action

Despite these calls, and despite the brief flurry of interest in the new UN report, all the signs are that Israel and the US have succeeded in their long and malignant efforts to disembowel the UN, and to return the world to a horrific state in which military power trumps all other concerns, and, if a western-backed Member State of the UN wants to engage in a genocide, then no one should have any ability to try to stop them.

The situation is particularly dispiriting right now, because, for the last month, the State of Israel, ever more unhinged and genocidally belligerent, has been engaged in the planned erasure of Gaza City, the last great population centre of the Gaza Strip, where around half of the estimated two million survivors of the genocide to date were still living until Israel issued mass evacuation orders and began systematically destroying entire neighbourhoods, home after home, apartment block after apartment block, with barely any pretence anymore of military necessity.

While Netanyahu continues to cling onto power, despite significant internal opposition — from the families of the surviving hostages, in particular — and as he continues to seek to manipulate public opinion worldwide, three other significant individuals, all former terrorists — the defense minister Israel Katz, who replaced Yoav Gallant in November 2024, and the two far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who should all, quite clearly, also have been subjected to ICC arrest warrants — have largely given up even pretending that their actions are justifiable.

Just two days ago, Katz, in a typically hysterical post on X, claimed that, “With the start of the ground manoeuvre [in Gaza City] and the handover of command to field commanders, 25 terror towers have been destroyed”, describing the actions as being “aimed at removing any sniper threats to our forces”, and claiming, without providing any evidence whatsoever, that “terrorists were killed”, while also boasting that “ infrastructure was demolished.”

As he also stated, “If Hamas does not release the hostages and abandon its weapons, Gaza will be devastated and turn into a memorial for the killers and rapists of Hamas.”

Also two days ago, Bezalel Smotrich, the Finance Minister, who is a key driver of efforts to completely depopulate the Gaza Strip for Israeli colonization through extermination disguised with false suggestions that the remaining population can be removed through “voluntarily migration” to other countries, even though no other countries are willing to accept Palestinian refugees as a result of mass ethnic cleansing, spoke openly and gleefully at a real estate conference in Israel about how the “demolition phase” of destruction in Gaza was now over, paving the way for the “real estate bonanza” of building new Israeli settlements, for which a plan, he said, was “on President Trump’s desk”, following up on Trump’s hideous suggestion, back in February, that Gaza should be redeveloped as “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Meanwhile, on the day the UN report was issued, Ben-Gvir, the Minister of National Security, told an Israel Police conference, as Middle East Eye described it, that “he wants to build a neighbourhood for officers ‘on the beach’ in Gaza, describing it as a ‘perfect place.’”

“We will build a magnificent police neighbourhood there, with tall buildings and modern design. With God’s help, we will win,” he said, adding, “Settlement leads to security. The time has come for Jewish settlement, to encourage immigration, and to pass the death penalty law for terrorists. It’s right, it’s appropriate, it’s moral, it’s true.”

As Israel presses ahead with its long-publicized plan to move the surviving Palestinians to a concentration camp in the south, and to flatten every square inch of Gaza, which it has been doing systematically for the last six months, even resorting to hiring bulldozer drivers from abroad to do so, the world’s continuing inaction in the face of these horrors is more intolerable than ever before.

Widespread famine, declared a month ago, still stalks Gaza, as every aspect of Israel’s genocidal intent to deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the Palestinians in whole or in part continues relentlessly.

Vital medical supplies and medical equipment are still unavailable, and the surviving population is suffering from intolerable living conditions throughout the entire territory, including the deliberate destruction of water supplies and sewage treatment facilities, with no infrastructure to support the hundreds of thousands living in tents, and with opportunistic profiteers charging prohibitive amounts of money for transport and tents, leaving many dispossessed families living in the open in the streets with no shelter whatsoever.

As Israel also continues to indiscriminately kill civilians at every opportunity, the world needs to wake up and defend what remains of the critically endangered notion that any actions that support a country committing a genocide are absolutely intolerable. Sadly, the efforts put in place to prevent genocide seem to have failed, however much there are legal reasons to explain institutional delays, but the requirement to punish those responsible must not be abandoned, and nor, morally, is there any justification for any kind of complacency that justifies sitting back and allowing the death toll to continue rising inexorably without any meaningful efforts to bring this unforgivable slaughter to an end.

As one of the great chroniclers of the genocide, Dr. Ezzideen, wrote on X on September 14:

Look at what Israel is doing. Do you dare call this war? War is fought between armies. War has rules. Here there are no rules. Here there is only the machine, crushing bone, tearing flesh, leaving nothing behind but the smell of burnt hair and the wailing of women. Here they are not killing Hamas, they are killing Gaza itself. Every building is marked for death, every street for erasure. The sky itself seems to agree, it rains fire until the city is ash.

Do you see what they are doing? They are trying to kill memory. When the last man leaves Gaza, there will be nothing to bury him under, no house, no mosque, no church, no school, no market. Only sand and silence. And perhaps one day the world will say: “There was nothing here. No one lived here.”

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

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