The human rights group released a report on Thursday saying such actions cannot be justified by Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which ignited the war, or the presence of militants in civilian areas.
Amnesty said the US and other allies of Israel could be complicit in the genocide and called on them to halt arms shipments.
“Our damning revelations must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now,” Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, said in the report.
Israel, which was founded in the wake of the Holocaust, has firmly rejected the accusations of genocide as an anti-Semitic “blood libel”.
She is contesting such accusations at the International Court of Justice, and she also rejected the International Criminal Court’s accusations that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister committed war crimes in Gaza.
“The deplorable and bigoted organization Amnesty International has once again produced a fabricated report that is completely false and based on lies,” Israel’s foreign ministry said.
Israel accused Hamas, which has vowed to destroy Israel, of carrying out the genocidal massacre in the attack that sparked the war, and said it was defending itself in accordance with international law.
Amnesty International Israel, the organization’s local branch that was not included in the report, also disputed the genocide allegations, in a rare public outpouring of internal dissent within the human rights group.
Amnesty says Palestinians face ‘slow, calculated death’
Amnesty’s report adds an influential voice to the growing list of players who have accused Israel of committing genocide — which would put it in the company of some of the deadliest conflicts of the past 80 years, including Cambodia, Sudan and Rwanda.
The accusations come mainly from human rights groups and allies of the Palestinians. But last month, Pope Francis called for an investigation to determine whether Israel’s actions amounted to genocide, and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has signaled a willingness to establish diplomatic relations with Israel, accused him of committing genocide.
Israel says it is at war with Hamas, not the people of Gaza. And key allies, including the US and Germany, have also rejected accusations of genocide. But Amnesty has accused Israel of violating the 1951 Genocide Convention with acts it says are intended to bring about the physical destruction of the Palestinian population in Gaza by subjecting them to a “slow, calculated death”.
Amnesty said it analyzed the overall pattern of Israeli behavior in Gaza between October 7, 2023 and early July. It noted that there is no threshold for the number of victims in proving the international crime of genocide, which the United Nations has defined as acts intended to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
To determine intent, Amnesty said it reviewed more than 100 statements by Israeli government and military officials and others since the start of the war that “dehumanized the Palestinians, called for or justified acts of genocide or other crimes against them.”
Israeli officials have previously said such statements were taken out of context or referred to their stated goal of destroying Hamas, not Palestinian civilians.
Amnesty International Israel said the report did not prove genocidal intent beyond a reasonable doubt. The local chapter said that despite this there are suspicions that Israel has committed “widespread violations of international law” that “may amount to crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing”.
UK-based Amnesty International did not immediately respond to a request for comment on its Israeli chapter’s dissent.
Israel says it is working hard to protect civilians and respect international law – including ordering civilians to evacuate areas ahead of airstrikes and ground offensives. It is also said to have facilitated the delivery of large quantities of food and humanitarian supplies – a claim disputed by the UN and humanitarian organizations working in Gaza.
Pictures capture the exact moment an Israeli missile hits a building in Beirut
On Sunday, a former senior Israeli general and defense minister accused the government of ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, where the army closed the towns of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya and the Jabaliya refugee camp and allowed almost no humanitarian aid to enter.
Amnesty said it had found that Israel had “deliberately imposed living conditions on Palestinians in Gaza with the intention of eventually leading to their destruction”. These actions included the destruction of homes, farms, hospitals and water bodies; mass evacuation orders; and the limitation of humanitarian aid and other essential services.
It also analyzed 15 airstrikes from the start of the war to April that killed at least 334 civilians, including 141 children, and wounded hundreds of others. They say they found no evidence that any of the attacks were aimed at military targets.
One of the attacks was said to have destroyed the home of the Abdelal family in the southern city of Rafah on April 20, killing three generations of Palestinians, including 16 children, as they slept. An Associated Press investigation identified at least 60 families in which at least 25 members were killed.
Amnesty previously angered Israel by joining other major human rights groups in accusing it of the international crime of apartheid, saying it has systematically denied basic rights to Palestinians in the territories under its control for decades. Israel has also rejected the accusations.
Israel blames Hamas for the civilian deaths, and the UN for the lack of aid
Israel says it only targets militants and blames Hamas for civilian deaths because the militants are fighting in densely populated, residential areas and have built tunnels and other militant infrastructure near homes, schools and mosques.
He blames the lack of humanitarian aid on United Nations agencies, accusing them of not delivering the hundreds of aid trucks that were allowed to enter.
The UN says it is often too dangerous to receive and deliver aid. It blames Israel as the occupying power for the breakdown of law and order — which has allowed armed groups to steal aid convoys — while also accusing it of severely restricting movement within the territory.
The war began when Hamas-led militants invaded southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking about 250 hostages, including children and the elderly. About 100 prisoners are still in Gaza, at least a third of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed more than 44,500 people, according to Gaza health officials, whose numbers do not distinguish between civilians and fighters, although they say more than half of the dead are women and children.
The offensive is among the deadliest and most destructive since World War II, and has destroyed vast areas of the besieged coastal region. It displaced about 90 percent of the population of 2.3 million, often multiple times. Hundreds of thousands of people were crammed into squalid tent camps with little food, water or toilets.
Aid groups say the population is at risk of disease and malnutrition, especially as winter approaches. Experts have warned of famine in northern Gaza, which Israel has almost completely halted since it launched a major military operation there in early October. Hamas militants have repeatedly regrouped there and in other areas, and the group has faced no major internal challenge to its rule.
Amnesty says the US needs to put pressure on the war to end
The US, which has provided key military aid to Israel and shielded it from international criticism, has repeatedly appealed to Israel to provide more aid, with limited results.
The Biden administration said in May that Israel’s use of US weapons in Gaza at times probably violated international humanitarian law, but that the evidence was incomplete.
Callamard called on the US, Germany and other countries that supply Israel with weapons to pressure Netanyahu to end the war.