Genocide scholars, human rights groups, and ethical legal experts agree that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Some reached that conclusion before the end of 2023. Others reached it in 2024. And some took until 2025 to use the word genocide.
Below is a comprehensive list of those figures and organisations, including Israeli genocide scholars and human rights groups, Palestinian human rights groups, international human rights and humanitarian organisations, international genocide scholars, Global South governments, UN experts, and legal scholars from around the world.
Section 1 – Israeli genocide scholars
1) Omer Bartov
Israeli genocide scholar Omer Bartov, from Brown University, warned a month into Israel’s 2023 assault on Gaza that the apartheid state was probably committing war crimes, and that this could turn into a genocide. In August 2024, he lamented “the utter inability of Israeli society today to feel any empathy for the population of Gaza”, adding that, by May 2024, “it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions”. In July 2025, he said:
My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.
He is not anti-Zionist or anti-Israel, but regretted the long-term development of a culture of dehumanising Palestinians. This has done so much damage, he said, especially amid the “accelerated, on-steroids transformation” into a state openly committing genocide since 2023.
2) Raz Segal
In October 2023, Israeli genocide researcher Raz Segal called Gaza “A Textbook Case of Genocide”, saying Israeli politicians had “loudly proclaimed” their genocidal intent with “dehumanizing language” that “leaders in the West reinforced”. He stressed that:
Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed
He faced a backlash for speaking out. But he insisted that opposing genocide was a necessary struggle against all forms of discrimination, including antisemitism. And he added that it was a “struggle for the significance of truth”.
In 2025, he argued that there was no longer anyone “whose work I respect who doesn’t consider it genocide”.
3) Shmuel Lederman
In May 2025, Israeli scholar Shmuel Lederman asserted that:
the cumulative effect of what Israel is doing in Gaza is genocidal in every sense
He had previously been reluctant to use the word genocide. But “the total siege that led to images and videos of skeleton-like children in the style of Somalia/Yemen/Holocaust” made it impossible to avoid doing so. He added:
I think the second half of 2024 is the point at which a consensus formed among genocide scholars (as well as the human rights organization community) that this is a genocide. Those who perhaps still had doubts—I estimate they dissipated following Israel’s actions since the breaking of the ceasefire [in March 2025]
4) Amos Goldberg
Israeli Holocaust Studies professor Amos Goldberg has insisted that:
For nearly 30 years I have researched and taught the Holocaust, genocide and state violence.
And I want to tell whoever is willing to listen that what’s happening now in Gaza is a genocide….
if you read Raphael Lemkin – the Jewish-Polish legal scholar who coined the term ‘genocide’ and was the major driving force behind the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention – what is happening in Gaza now is exactly what he had in mind when he spoke about genocide.
5) Lee Mordechai
Israeli history professor Lee Mordechai spent months researching, analysing, and documenting the genocidal assault on Gaza. Having “problems with the fact that academia hasn’t spoken out”, he felt a duty “to do scholarship and to try to improve society”. He concluded that:
The enormous amount of evidence I have seen… has been enough for me to believe that Israel is currently committing genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza
He also lamented that:
Israeli discourse has de-humanized Palestinians to such an extent that the vast majority of Israeli Jews supports the aforementioned measures [in Gaza]… Speaking about Palestinians in genocidal language is legitimate in Israeli discourse
This “pervasive dehumanization”, he said, is “the key to all of this”:
Palestinians are widely seen as less than human, based on discourse, behavior and opinions supporting the use of more force in Gaza. Therefore, violent actions against Palestinians are condoned and are often encouraged publicly, especially by key individuals such as the Minister for National Security [Itamar Ben-Gvir], who is particularly popular among younger audiences and soldiers.
Section 2 – Israeli human rights organisations
1) B’Tselem
In July 2025, Israeli human rights group B’tselem published a report with the title “Our Genocide”. It explained that:
An examination of Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated, deliberate action to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. In other words: Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip
And this didn’t happen in a vacuum, it stressed:
Genocide always occurs within a context: there are conditions that enable it, triggering events, and a guiding ideology. The current onslaught on the Palestinian people, including in the Gaza Strip, must be understood in the context of more than seventy years in which Israel has imposed a violent and discriminatory regime on the Palestinians, taking its most extreme form against those living in the Gaza Strip. Since the State of Israel was established, the apartheid and occupation regime has institutionalized and systematically employed mechanisms of violent control, demographic engineering, discrimination, and fragmentation of the Palestinian collective. These foundations laid by the regime are what made it possible to launch a genocidal attack on the Palestinians immediately after the Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023.
The group also warned that the genocide “may expand to other areas where Palestinians live under Israeli rule”. And it called for the international community to use:
every means available under international law to stop Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people
2) Physicians for Human Rights-Israel
To accompany B’Tselem’s report in July 2025, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHRI) documented “the deliberate and systematic destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system” in a “legal-medical analysis”. Executive director Dr. Guy Shalev said:
As people who believe in the sanctity of life, we are obligated to speak the truth: this is genocide, and we must fight it.
Section 3 – International human rights and humanitarian groups
Early on in the genocide, Palestinian human rights groups Al-Haq, PCHR, and Al Mezan submitted a request for the International Criminal Court to “consider the inclusion of crimes against humanity, notably apartheid, and the crime of genocide, in the ongoing investigation into the situation in the State of Palestine”. Other human rights and humanitarian groups took longer to openly talk about genocide but, after long investigations and analysis of abundant evidence, they did.
1) Amnesty International
Amnesty International is “the world’s largest grassroots human rights organisation”. And in a December 2024 report, it concluded that Israel “has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip”. It insisted that:
Governments must stop pretending they are powerless to end this genocide, which was enabled by decades of impunity for Israel’s violations of international law.
The failure of the world to hold the apartheid state to account, Amnesty said, had allowed Israel to unleash:
hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity.
2) Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch followed Amnesty’s call within days, saying:
Israeli authorities have intentionally deprived Palestinian civilians in Gaza of adequate access to water since October 2023, most likely resulting in thousands of deaths and thus committing the crime against humanity of extermination and acts of genocide
In April 2025, Human Rights Watch joined Amnesty and Oxfam in a legal intervention at the UK High Court, arguing that the UK government was failing in its duty to prevent genocide. The court later ruled that it didn’t have the authority to intervene, despite emphasising the UK’s responsibility to act. Amnesty’s Sacha Deshmukh insisted in response that:
The UK has a legal obligation to help prevent and punish genocide and yet it continues to authorise the export of weapons to Israel despite the clear risks that these weapons will be used to commit genocide.
3) Oxfam
In January 2025, Oxfam noted that, a year after International Court of Justice (ICJ) measures “demanding that Israel take immediate action to guarantee the protection of the rights of Palestinians in Gaza from acts of genocide”, there had been “no meaningful actions to address Gaza’s dire humanitarian conditions”, causing “the crisis to spiral further in blatant violation of the provisional measures”. The group called for an end to “cycles of neglect and impunity”.
In July 2025, Oxfam’s Bushra Khalidi went further, saying:
Israel’s genocide has thrown Gaza into the final chaotic stages of a full-blown human catastrophe… World leaders have been variously divided, complicit, uncaring, and collectively ineffectual in stopping Israel’s campaign of erasure… Ending Israel’s genocide of Gaza is a test not only of our world order but of our collective humanity.
4) Doctors Without Borders
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has insisted that:
An unprecedented humanitarian crisis is unfolding in Gaza. MSF is clear: We are witnessing Israel commit genocide… This is not a term we use lightly. Our decision to describe what’s happening in Gaza as a ‘genocide’ is based on nearly two years of extensive, firsthand information from our teams, who are witnessing massive levels of death and destruction by Israeli forces, a campaign of ethnic cleansing and the almost total dismantling of the health care system… Over the past 21 months, Israeli authorities have been responsible for mass killings, indiscriminate attacks, forced displacement, repeated failure to protect civilians, the deliberate destruction of homes and vital infrastructure, and the weaponisation of hunger in what amounts to collective punishment.
And it asserted:
There have been multiple and well-documented dehumanising statements by Israeli officials calling for the annihilation of the population, or their transfer out of the Strip. The only reasonable inference is that the intention is to erase the Palestinian people from Gaza. This is why we believe that a genocide is taking place… In the face of such atrocities, sanctioned and enabled by Israel’s allies, especially the United States and the United Kingdom, we believe it is our moral obligation to speak out with clarity.
5) Medico International
German organisation Medico International also insisted, after a year of Israel ignoring the measures the ICJ demanded to prevent genocide, that the apartheid state had “dramatically worsened an already intolerable situation”. And it said:
The conclusion is clear, and medico shares this analysis, that Israeli actions constitute genocide. Even though ICJ proceedings are still ongoing, the voluminous in-depth investigations by international human rights organizations and the documentation by local organizations, including long-standing partners of medico international, are too abundant to ignore. Therefore, medico will embrace usage of the term “genocide” to describe actions of the Israeli state in Gaza since October 2023.
6) The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention
Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin proposed condemning the crime of genocide back in 1944. And eight decades later, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention asserted in 2024 that:
One might even say that Lemkin’s definition fits the situation in Palestine for the past 76 years.
In June 2025, as the US vetoed yet another UN call for an Israel ceasefire in Gaza, the institute went further, insisting that:
There can be no doubt now that the #UnitedStates is a perpetrator of genocide in Palestine.
It explained:
The country was founded on genocide and institutionalized a genocidal form of slavery… The enduring mainstream institutions of the state and society remain comfortable with the genocide of non-white people.
Today, many critics see the Israeli state as an outpost for US imperialism and its global plunder. This fits into the pattern of consistent US support for Israeli war crimes.
7) Others
In September 2024, UK humanitarian organisations including Save the Children, Christian Aid, and CAFOD said:
In January, the International Court of Justice warned there is a risk that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and has ordered that Israel cease actions that might be part of a genocide.
Considering “the clear and compelling evidence that the Israeli military is violating IHL” (International Humanitarian Law), they asserted, “it is insufficient that the Government has failed to end ALL arms transfers to Israel”.
Section 4 – International genocide scholars
In December 2023, dozens of academics warned of “the danger of genocide” in Gaza and called on the world to act. They said:
We know that genocide is a process, and we recognize that the stage is thus set for violence more severe than the Nakba and not spatially limited to Gaza.
The Nakba was the process of “permanent displacement of more than half of the Palestinian population” during the violent creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Over five million refugees from this ethnic cleansing event live across the Middle East. Around 70% of Gaza’s population are descendants of Nakba refugees.
According to a Dutch media report in May 2025:
leading genocide researchers are surprisingly unanimous: the Netanyahu government, they say, is in that process [of genocide]—according to the majority, even in its final stages.
International Association of Genocide Scholars president Melanie O’Brien came to the conclusion that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza as a result of Israel’s “deliberate withholding of food, water, shelter, and sanitation”. For all the people the report interviewed, it was “the whole picture” – the sum of many different war crimes – that led them to see the actions in Gaza as genocide. One of these, Martin Shaw, wrote separately that politicians and media outlets have avoided the term ‘genocide’ for a reason:
Tame media will ban the very word from the airwaves so as not to offend politicians. Political leaders themselves will avoid talking about genocide, to protect themselves not only from demands to stop it, but also from scrutiny of their complicity – Israel has been helped by RAF surveillance, British-made weapons and parts for its bombers, and diplomatic support, all of which the Starmer Government has continued.
Canadian scholar of international law William Schabas, meanwhile, has stressed that “there’s nothing comparable” to Israel’s genocide in Gaza “in recent history”. He insisted:
Of all the cases that have come before the International Court of Justice dealing with the Genocide Convention (there are now 19 of them), South Africa’s case is the strongest.
A. Dirk Moses, editor of the Journal of Genocide Research, has said the mass murder of civilians in Gaza is:
not unintentional, and it’s not even collateral, it’s calculated… And when you marry that with the public statements of Israeli leaders, then it’s impossible to ignore that there’s a fusion of military and genocidal logics.
Human rights academic Alonso Gurmendi took an in-depth look at the scholarly debate about genocide in Gaza in July 2025. And he said:
most, if not all, scholars writing outside the framework of ideological Zionism have now concluded that Israel is in fact committing genocide
Section 5 – Legal experts
1) South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice
In December 2023, South Africa took Israel to court to try and stop its genocidal crimes in Gaza. It filed a case with the UN’s highest court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The case quickly gained the backing of other nations.
In January 2024, the ICJ ruled that:
at least some of the rights claimed by South Africa and for which it is seeking protection are plausible. This is the case with respect to the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide and related prohibited acts identified in Article III, and the right of South Africa to seek Israel’s compliance with the latter’s obligations under the Convention.
In short, it found there were grounds to investigate further and called for action to prevent the possibility of genocide. A final ICJ judgment on whether genocide has occurred in Gaza, however, may not come until at least 2027.
South Africa has also been a key organiser of the Hague Group. This is a bloc of majority Global South states that has launched concrete efforts to “halt the genocide in Gaza”.
2) UN legal expert Francesca Albanese
Francesca Albanese is an international lawyer specialising in human rights, and is the UN’s special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. In March 2024, she found that there were “reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating that Israel has committed genocide has been met”. Then, in October 2024, she put the genocide in the context of Israel’s “decades-long process of territorial expansion and ethnic cleansing aimed at liquidating the Palestinian presence in Palestine”, insisting that genocide was “integral and instrumental to the aim of full Israeli colonization of Palestinian land while removing as many Palestinians as possible”. She criticised states for their inaction:
A genocide and a man-made humanitarian catastrophe are unfolding in front of us and in Gaza. I regret to see so many member states are avoiding acknowledging the suffering of the Palestinian people and instead look away
In a June 2025 report, meanwhile, she called out corporate complicity in the genocide, saying the “engine of racial capitalism” had enabled and propped up Israel’s transformation into an “economy of genocide”. She stressed:
The corporate sector, including its executives, must be held to account, as a necessary step towards ending the genocide and disassembling the global system of racialized capitalism that underpins it.
She has also argued that Britain and other states have violated their obligations under international law to prevent genocide, insisting that there should be an investigation into the complicity of UK prime minister Keir Starmer and others. Despite being a human rights lawyer himself, Starmer has long engaged in genocide denialism regarding Gaza.
Together with academics Luigi Daniele and Nicola Perugini, Albanese co-wrote a book with the title Israel Rewrites the Laws of War to Legitimize Genocide in Gaza. The authors looked at “Israel’s use of international humanitarian law (IHL) to justify actions in Gaza that amount to genocide”. The apartheid state, they stressed, has employed “distorted legal discourse to present these actions as compliant with IHL, despite their genocidal nature”. It’s a “legal-political strategy to mask atrocities” which “may enable future genocides globally, under the guise of lawful warfare”.
3) Hundreds of scholars and practitioners
In October 2023, a public statement of “over 800 scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies and genocide studies” said:
we are compelled to sound the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip
It added that genocide had already been on the radar for years:
The pre-existing conditions in the Gaza Strip had already prompted discussions of genocide prior to the current escalation – such as by the National Lawyers Guild in 2014, the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in 2014, and the Center for Constitutional Rights in 2016. Scholars have warned over the years that the siege of Gaza may amount to a “prelude to genocide” or a “slow-motion genocide”. The prevalence of racist and dehumanising language and hate speech in social media was also noted in a warning issued in July 2014 by the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and Special Adviser on the Responsibility to Protect, in response to Israel’s conduct against the protected Palestinian population
“All states should immediately act”, they said, to ensure “the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide”. However, they noted that:
the Security Council is compromised by the United States and the United Kingdom (both permanent veto-holding members) sending military forces to the eastern Mediterranean in support of Israel
4) University Network for Human Rights
In May 2024, the University Network for Human Rights concluded, after “a thorough legal analysis”, that:
Israel has committed genocidal acts of killing, causing serious harm to, and inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, a protected group that forms a substantial part of the Palestinian people.
It added:
Israel’s genocidal acts in Gaza have been motivated by the requisite genocidal intent
Law professor Susan Akram, who participated in the analysis, said:
there is consensus amongst the international human rights legal community, many other legal and political experts, including many Holocaust scholars, that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
She and other human rights lawyers wrote a year later that:
The significance of Israel’s apartheid has been overshadowed by its genocidal assault on Gaza. But the two are inextricably linked. The same racial hatred fuels apartheid as much as it does genocide.
5) The Center for Constitutional Rights
In October 2023, the Center for Constitutional Rights warned of “Israel’s unfolding crime of genocide”, saying:
there is clear evidence that Israel is attempting to commit, if not actively committing, genocide in the occupied Palestinian territory, and specifically against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.
It added that the USA was likely playing a “role in furthering genocide”.
A year later, it added that:
Decades of U.S. and Israeli impunity for war crimes and crimes against humanity have made this genocide not only possible, but inevitable.
6) Nimer Sultany
Nimer Sultany, human rights lawyer and editor-in-chief of the Palestine Yearbook of International Law, wrote in May 2024 that:
the military logic of defeating an enemy in war has been crossed into the genocidal logic of elimination. This logic of elimination is evident in many expressions of genocidal intent by Israeli officials and soldiers that South Africa’s December 2023 application to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) enumerates.
Too much legal analysis, he said:
seemed to reserve judgment concerning genocide until after the actual and eventual decimation of Gaza
He added:
When South Africa submitted its application to the ICJ it undermined the pro-Israeli western discourse about the “war” and reignited debates about “genocide.”
He also stressed that:
The invocation of genocide invites the ongoing debate concerning the shortcomings and limitations of the legal definition.
For him:
South Africa’s application to the ICJ is an example of an anticolonial mobilization of the law. An African state that suffered from the yoke of colonialism and apartheid, invoked the crime of genocide against a western-supported colonial apartheid.
7) Maryam Jamshidi
Legal scholar Maryam Jamshidi wrote in August 2024 that:
the extermination of a protected group’s civilian leadership can serve as proof of genocidal intent where it is also accompanied by the elimination of its military personnel, which—much like the destruction of law enforcement—leaves the group “defenceless.”
She added:
Instead of undercutting South Africa’s genocide case, Israel’s desired elimination of Hamas provides more proof that its actions satisfy the Convention’s definition of genocide.
She explained:
Missing from many accounts of Israel’s genocidal intent, however, is direct engagement with one of Israel’s main counter-arguments to genocide—its aim of obliterating Hamas—and how this also demonstrates an intent to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza as a group.
And she insisting on the importance of “grappling with these realities head on”.
8) Lawyers in France
Lawyers working on behalf of non-governmental organisation Pour la Justice au Proche-Orient sought to take action against French politicians in July 2025. They said that:
Far from taking concrete measures to prevent the ongoing genocide against the Palestinians, the members of the French executive cited in this communication have continued to support the criminal actions of the government of Israel by providing military, political, economic, diplomatic and propaganda support to that state, including by providing the means to commit the crimes in question.
9) Legal scholars in Germany
Stefanie Bock and Kai Ambos are law professors in Germany. And they insisted in June 2025 that:
as Israel’s warfare continues and becomes increasingly brutal, the evidence for genocide is mounting.
The evidence for this, they stressed, has “become more compelling in recent days and weeks”. And they added:
on the whole, the dynamics of the conflict now speak more in favour of genocide than against it.
Speaking about this assessment, Itamar Mann – an academic at the University of Haifa – asserted that we have already reached a stage where the “only reasonable inference is genocide”, i.e. “that Israel is committing genocide”.
10) Israeli legal scholars
Speaking specifically about the Israeli government’s “plan to concentrate the population of Gaza in a so-called “humanitarian city” to be established on the ruins of Rafah”, a group of Israeli “scholars and lecturers at Israeli law faculties specializing in international law and the laws of armed conflict” warned “against the clear and explicit illegality” of such an idea in July 2025. They stressed that:
If implemented, the plan would constitute a series of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and under certain conditions, could amount to the crime of genocide.
Featured image via the Canary
