Just one week after October 7, 2023, more than 800 scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies, and genocide studies signed a public statement “to sound the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” On November 2, 2023, a group of United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteurs said that they remained “convinced that the Palestinian people [were] at grave risk of genocide.”
In the almost two years since these statements of concern, a growing consensus among experts and human rights organizations holds that genocide in Gaza is not a risk but a reality. They argue that Israel’s aerial bombing campaign and siege tactics have been accompanied by explicitly genocidal statements from Israeli politicians, including the prime minister and defense minister. Public opinion is shifting as well: August 2025 polling shows that 47 percent of adults in the US now recognize Israel’s action in Gaza as genocide, up from 39 percent in April 2024.
Despite growing recognition that Israel’s current campaign meets the legal definition of genocide, there is also an emerging agreement that the Palestinian people have in fact been suffering a protracted genocide for decades. Legal and academic definitions of genocide, after all, recognize that it is not a one-off event, but a much longer process of human rights violations. Although the conversation about genocide in Palestine has accelerated since the start of current assault on the Gaza Strip, it is by no means new. Unfortunately, history suggests that the growing consensus on genocide recognition will mean little for Palestinians if it is not accompanied by meaningful political action.
The Crime of Crimes
Genocide occurred for many centuries before it was given a name. Rome’s destruction and siege of Carthage during the Third Punic War (146-149 BCE) was among the first known genocides, though it was not until the atrocities of World War II that the crime of genocide was defined. The term itself was coined by Jewish-Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1942 and first published in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe by combining the Greek word genos (meaning a group or people with a common descent) with the Latin -cide (killing). Lemkin analyzed hundreds of pages of Nazi documents to reconstruct the various “techniques of genocide” that they employed: annexation and settlement; social and cultural destruction; economic destruction; and physical harm. Lemkin observed how mass killing was the last technique used by the Nazis, who preceded it with earlier techniques such as causing hunger and spreading disease among the Jews whom they forced into squalid, crowded ghettos. Lemkin’s analysis drove him to lead the charge to have genocide recognized as a crime under international law.
The UN General Assembly first recognized the crime of genocide in 1946, and it was prohibited by parties to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948. The Genocide Convention defines the crime as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” including killing or causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. Importantly, the Convention outlaws not only these specific acts of genocide, but also the crimes of incitement to commit genocide, attempt to commit genocide, and complicity in genocide.
Although genocide has been described as “the crime of crimes” because it is tantamount to an attack on humanity itself, this ultimate crime has been difficult to prosecute in practice. Some argue that the definitions of protected groups are too narrow and that the need to provide evidence of ‘intent’ sets the bar high for legal action. Although the International Court of Justice (ICJ) was established in 1945, it did not find a state to be in breach of the Genocide Convention until 2007, in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro for crimes during the Bosnian War, including the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica. The unwillingness of states to pursue or support investigations at the ICJ, and their willingness to retaliate against parties who do so, suggests these systems are simply political tools, not mechanisms of justice.
Lemkin’s concept of genocide as a process, not as a singular event, sheds light on the situation in occupied Palestine, where over the past 77 years many have argued that Israel has engaged in various forms of “structural genocide” or “incremental genocide.” Given that Palestinians have used the word for events as far back as the Nakba of 1948, it is unsurprising that Palestinian organizations, unlike their international counterparts, did not make formal announcements describing Israel’s post-October 7 campaign as genocide. Where others saw new evidence of a war crime, they saw continuity.
Growing Recognition of Genocide in Palestine
Human rights organizations have been relatively outspoken in recognizing the current situation in Gaza as genocide. Just days after the October 7 attacks, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention called for “Western leaders to pull back from the endorsement they have given Israel to effectively commit genocide against Palestinians.” In June 2024, the University Network for Human Rights issued a report concluding that “Israel’s actions in and regarding Gaza since October 7, 2023, violate the Genocide Convention.” In December 2024, Amnesty International concluded that “Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.” The same month, Human Rights Watch said that “Israeli authorities [were] responsible for the crime against humanity of extermination and for acts of genocide” and highlighted that Israel was “intentionally depriving Palestinian civilians [in Gaza] of adequate access to water.”
Two influential Israeli NGOs recognized the genocide in Gaza in July 2025. In a report titled “Our Genocide,” human rights organization B’Tselem detailed the unlivable conditions, attacks on educational and cultural institutions, arrests, and mass killings in Gaza; they warned that the genocide “may expand to other areas where Palestinians live under Israeli rule.” A report by Physicians for Human Rights-Israel described “the deliberate, cumulative dismantling of Gaza’s health system, and with it, its people’s ability to survive” as an act of genocide.
Several Israeli scholars have reached the same conclusion. As early as October 13, 2023, Raz Segal, a scholar of Holocaust and genocide studies, called the assault on Gaza “a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes”. Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies who had previously served in the Israeli Defense Forces, first acknowledged war crimes and crimes against humanity in November 2023 before reaching the “inescapable conclusion” in July 2025 that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.
Albeit a small number, several former Israeli politicians have joined the emerging consensus that the country is engaged in violations of international law. In December 2024, former Israeli minister of defense Moshe Yaalon admitted “war crimes are being committed” , while former prime minister Ehud Olmert conceded that Israel was “committing war crimes” in May 2025.
Denial of the genocide in Gaza, or even of the ability to discuss the risk, has itself been criticized by several prominent academics. Martin Shaw, one of the world’s foremost genocide scholars, has attacked the inclination of Western leaders and journalists “to avoid, at all costs, the ‘G-word’ in evaluating Israel’s actions,” while Dirk Moses, editor of the Journal of Genocide Research, asked his fellow scholars, “What’s the point of this field? Is it, in fact, enabling the mass killing of Palestinians in the name of self-defense and genocide prevention? If that’s the case, then the field is dead—not only incoherent, but complicit in mass killing.” Omer Bartov argued that denial of the genocide in Gaza “threaten[s] to undermine everything that Holocaust scholarship and commemoration have stood for in the past several decades.”
In early August 2025, as the famine in Gaza reached a new intensity, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Melanie O’Brien again underlined that genocide is a process, not an event. Discussing the evidence relevant to the terms of the Genocide Convention, O’Brien argued that “it is without a doubt that we are witnessing a genocide now in Gaza,” while noting that “the genocide process did not begin on 8 October 2023. It was prefaced by decades of human rights abuses against the Palestinian people; extensive violations of international law involving discrimination, persecution, apartheid and more.”
The list of other notable assessments goes on and on and on and on. While only a very small group of American politicians have joined the consensus, including Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), other politicians from around the world have done so, as have at least three dozen governments. The list continues to grow.
The ICJ Case Against Israel
While the case for genocide is being heard in the court of public opinion, the issue will be considered by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in a case for the crime of genocide lodged against Israel by South Africa in December 2023. There has been little progress in the case since the court’s interim judgement in January 2024, which included “provisional measures” that bound Israel to certain actions, including preventing genocide, preventing and punishing incitement to genocide, and enabling the provision of basic services and humanitarian assistance. In March 2024, the ICJ added further measures concerning humanitarian aid; in May 2024, it ordered Israel to stop the invasion of Rafah and to reopen the Rafah crossing to humanitarian aid deliveries. Israel has so far ignored all these provisional measures.
Israel’s rebuttal of the case has been postponed until January 2026; experts don’t expect a judgement from the court until 2027 or even 2028. With the Israeli Prime Minister and Knesset pushing for a full occupation of Gaza and seizure of Gaza City in August 2025, it is unclear what may be left of Gaza—and the people living there—by the time the court delivers its verdict.
What Does This Mean for Palestinians?
No ruling from the ICJ can bring back the more than 60,000 people who have been killed in Gaza or rebuild the 70 percent of structures that have been damaged or destroyed. A ruling will neither bring back the parents of tens of thousands of orphaned children nor restore limbs torn apart by bombs. It is not clear how the punitive and reparative measures that would come with such a judgment would be handled, nor how Israel and its allies, especially the United States, might respond to an affirmative ICJ judgement in light of Israel’s argument that the fact that the ICJ was even willing to consider the case demonstrated “antisemitic bias.”
Besides the specific crime of genocide, there are a host of other Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity that should be investigated and prosecuted but never have been. It took Palestinians and their allies decades of advocacy before major human rights organizations concluded that Israel was committing the crime of apartheid, for example, and no meaningful action has been taken then, either. Although recognizing the crime of genocide is important for many reasons, will it have tangible outcomes for Palestinians who are actively facing multiple, escalating existential crises?
Importantly, the purpose of acknowledging the crime of genocide was not simply to have a name for an event after it has already happened. States have a legal obligation to prevent genocide. As the Bosnia v. Serbia judgement noted, states must “employ all means reasonably available to them, so as to prevent genocide so far as possible,” especially those with “the capacity to influence effectively the action of persons likely to commit, or already committing, genocide.” So far, there has been no meaningful action by any third state to intervene either in the mass killing, maiming, deprivation, and displacement of Palestinians in Gaza, or in the escalating settler and military violence and land seizure in the West Bank. What can acceptance of such atrocities mean in the aftermath of the supposed lessons learned after World War Two? As Noura Erakat argued before the UN at the Commemoration of the 77th Anniversary of the Nakba, “If you normalize genocide, you will have nothing left.”
While Australia, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom have recently offered to recognize a Palestinian state, recognizing Palestinian statehood changes nothing on the ground today, where it is urgently needed. Even as global understanding of what is being done to the Palestinians—and why—continues to grow, Palestinians are continuing to lose their land, their livelihoods, and their lives. Palestinians do not need merely to be remembered fondly when the events of today are lamented in 50- or 100-years’ time. They need intervention—now.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.
Featured image credit: Shutterstock/Anas Mohammed
