Intent
Intent
Israeli leaders have made and continue to make clear statements of their intent to commit genocide against Palestinians.
This sentiment has been adopted and amplified by individual soldiers, journalists and public figures across Israeli society.
These statements attempt to justify the destruction of all Palestinians as a group of people.
Acts of genocide include killing or harming members of a group, inflicting conditions of life that will bring about its destruction, and more.
Israel has starved the people of Gaza, destroyed life-sustaining infrastructure, and forcibly displaced and killed residents at a shocking rate, leading dozens of experts to conclude that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
The following examples of incitement, from a database of more than 400 statements, show Israel's intent to commit genocide in Gaza.
Civilian Harm
In the first year of Israel's bombing campaign, more than 900 Palestinian families, from great-grandparents to infants, were killed in their entirety. Another 4,836 families were survived by one or two members.
Airwars documented hundreds of attacks on family homes and residential towers in the first few weeks alone.
There are thousands of stories like these.
Families are also targeted by Israeli ground forces, who set up free-fire zones in areas where civilians are sheltering.
“There was total freedom of action... It’s permissible to shoot everyone, a young girl, an old woman.”
Israeli Soldier
Palestinians who survived faced the destruction of their homes and families, injury, disease, and starvation.
Dehumanizing statements like this have been translated into civilian harm so irrefutably shocking that some of the world’s largest humanitarian organizations declared: “We have seen nothing like the siege of Gaza.”
“My most fervent dream is simply to stay alive.”
Ahmad, 14
Starvation
At least 343 aid workers killed between Oct 7, 2023 and Dec 3, 2024.
UN OCHA
Nine months after Gallant’s promise to cease the flow of life-saving essentials, UN experts declared a state of famine across all of Gaza.
During this campaign of starvation, Israeli occupation forces (IOF) burned food stocks, destroyed agricultural land, bombed flour mills, greenhouses, bakeries, and fisheries, allowed Israeli settlers to destroy aid bound for Gaza, and carried out targeted attacks on both aid seekers and aid workers.
“There was a sense of hope and even joy that we would get flour to take back to our families.”
Abdel Jalil Al-Fayoumi, 22
“My 13-year-old cousin, Nidal, was shot dead while attempting to get a bag of flour from a truck.”
Salameh Rafiq Obeid, 22
The flour massacre represents a pattern of incidents of Israeli forces targeting desperate aid seekers in Gaza.
On April 1, 2024, a series of Israeli strikes targeted a World Central Kitchen aid convoy, killing 7 aid workers.
The attack forced the largest aid organizations to suspend their operations in Gaza at a point when 1.1 million people — or half the population of Gaza — were experiencing catastrophic levels of hunger and at least 28 children had died of starvation.
The Israeli military has repeatedly attacked aid convoys and facilities, even when aid agencies shared their locations with the Israeli military.
Children under five, pregnant or breastfeeding women, the elderly, and people with disabilities are at the highest risk from Israel’s campaign of starvation.
Israeli officials said they would weaponize food and they did, causing serious bodily and mental harm to Palestinians in Gaza and inflicting on them conditions of life intended to bring about their destruction as a group.
Infrastructure
Three months after Israeli officials, legislators, and public figures called to “flatten,” “erase,” “burn,” and “destroy” Gaza, Israeli forces had carried out one of the most destructive bombing campaigns in history, according to military historians.
And it was just beginning.
Israeli forces didn’t spare a single life-sustaining sector in Gaza. Its housing, education, health, transportation, telecommunication, cultural, agricultural, and environmental systems all lie in rubble.
On October 27, 2023 Israel imposed a total blackout on Gaza, cutting all telecommunication and internet services.
Over the next 34 hours, Israeli forces carried out a series of deadly massacres, killing more than 1,000 Palestinians and leaving large swaths of Gaza in ruins.
“Don't know how to describe the damage... It's flattened, totally flattened to the ground. Nothing is the same, nothing is standing.”
Anas Baba, Palestinian Journalist
Israel's destruction of civilian infrastructure is part of a campaign to dismantle the conditions of life in Gaza.
Nowhere is this clearer than in its persistent attacks on health facilities, which sustain not only present life, but also future life.
Shortly after Barak’s statement, Israeli forces surrounded Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa, and held it under siege.
Israel has repeatedly killed, maimed, and arrested health workers in 568 separate attacks on sites of care.
By June 1, 2024, 84% of health facilities in Gaza were damaged or destroyed. Less than half of all hospitals were partially functional, preventing Palestinians from accessing care amid bombardment, starvation, and disease.
Israel's campaign of mass destruction embodies the crime of genocide.
By striking at the very foundations of Palestinian society, it undermines their existence on the land and their ability to return home in the future.
“We lost the life of one baby today. Yesterday we lost two.”
Dr. Marwan Abu Sada, Al-Shifa Hospital
“[Al-Shifa hospital] is now an empty shell with human graves.”
Director-General, World Health Organization
Displacement
Two months after the Israeli military issued the first of dozens of mass displacement orders to residents of Gaza, 85% of the population had been driven from their homes, many being forced to move repeatedly.
Those who were unable or unwilling to leave north Gaza, or who tried to return to their homes, were labeled “accomplices in a terrorist organization” by the Israeli military and subjected to denial of aid, execution-style killings, and mass arbitrary arrests.
“Nowhere is safe in Gaza, not even our schools.”
Tamara Alrifai, UNRWA
Salah Al-Din road, one of two routes from north to south Gaza, became known to Palestinians as a “death corridor”.
“You can follow the orders so that you aren’t exposed to danger, but the danger will still reach you wherever you are.”
Raji Al-Ajrami
Mohammad Al-Absi made it south with the surviving members of his family. They settled in a warehouse in Rafah before moving to a tent camp closer to a United Nations base.
“All the children started screaming... The sound was terrifying.”
Umm Mohamed Al-Attar
“I felt helpless watching my family dying and not able to help them.”
Mohammad Al-Absi
Mohammad and his brother are the only surviving members of their family.
“Have you ever felt like a toy, being played with left and right, east and west, pushed from one place to another – south to Khan Younis, out of Rafah, back to Khan Younis, then to Nuseirat, only to be driven out again?”
Maram Humaid
Israelis continue to demand that Palestinians be sent into permanent exile, continuing the Nakba.
In October 2023, Mohammad Al-Absi fled with his family from their home in Jabalia refugee camp.
Israeli leaders sought to justify their genocidal intent through colonial tropes, racialized language, and the use of dehumanizing terms to describe Palestinians as a whole.
“Language used... appears to reproduce rhetoric and tropes associated with genocide and incitement to genocide.”
Public Statement, 15 Oct 2023
The warning of genocide scholars was borne out in the months of bombing, invasion, starvation, and mass displacement unleashed by Israel.
On January 26, 2024, the International Court of Justice ordered “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide.
Israeli leaders ignored the demand and belittled the court.
Israel continues to obstruct aid, commit war crimes, and use starvation as a weapon of war.
In November 2024, a United Nations investigation found Israel's war in Gaza was “consistent with the characteristics of genocide.”
As Israel's genocide rages on, it has become increasingly difficult to count the dead.
Gaza's Ministry of Health reported 44,502 fatalities as of December 3, 2024, but experts project the direct and indirect death toll will be many times higher.
Israel has shown the intent, capacity, and determination to permanently extinguish the conditions of life in Gaza.
They will not stop without a broad campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions.
Yet the US, UK, Germany, and other states continue to provide Israel with military, political and diplomatic protection. By doing so, they are complicit in Israel's genocide — defying international law, ignoring their own treaty obligations, and undermining their basic humanity.
It's not too late to stop the genocide.
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