UN panel finds Israeli genocide in Gaza

What happened

Israel’s assault on Gaza meets the legal definition of genocide, a team of independent experts commissioned by the United Nations Human Rights Council said yesterday. The panel’s 72-page report was released as Israeli forces launched a major ground assault on Gaza City, forcing thousands of Palestinians to flee south. 

Who said what

The three-member commission’s “deeply documented” and “painstaking legal analysis” found that Israeli leaders had committed “four of the five ‘genocidal acts’” prohibited under the U.N. Genocide Convention, The Associated Press said. “Genocide accusations are especially sensitive in Israel,” where “memories of the Holocaust” — the Nazi genocide against the Jews that prompted the 1948 convention — “are important in the country’s national identity.”

Israel’s government vehemently rejected the genocide accusation, calling the report “fake” and “libelous.” The panel “does not speak for the U.N.,” The Washington Post said, but its finding “echoes assessments by a growing group of governments and Israeli and international human rights organizations,” including the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

What next?

The international community’s “obligation to prevent genocide wherever it occurs” is “not optional,” commission chair Navi Pillay, a former judge on the Rwanda genocide tribunals, said at The New York Times. It “requires action,” including “halting the transfer of weapons” used in genocidal acts and “using all available diplomatic and legal means to stop the killing.” Pillay’s panel has no power to act, the AP said, but its findings “could be used by prosecutors at the International Criminal Court or the U.N.’s International Court of Justice,” which is currently “hearing a genocide case filed by South Africa against Israel.”

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