(Image via BBC)
Staff Editor: Gwen Pichette
Email: gpichette@umassd.edu
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory has released a report confirming that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians.
The Commission is headed by Navi Pillay, a former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, former International Criminal Court judge, and former judge and president of the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
Published by the Human Rights Council (HRO), the extensive report is titled “Legal Analysis of the conduct of Israel in Gaza pursuant to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”
This nearly 72-page report evaluates in painstaking detail “all alleged violations of international humanitarian law and all alleged violations and abuses of international human rights law” from dates October 7th, 2023 to July 31st of 2025.
The Commission states in the report that all other countries have an obligation to prevent genocide and to take action when genocidal acts have been committed. They define genocide as an “international crime” under which acts have been committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
For a genocide to have been committed, one of the five following acts must have occurred:
- Killing members of the group in question,
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,
- Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the groups’ physical destruction,
- Imposing measures that are intended to prevent births within the group, and
- Forcibly displacing children of the group to another group.
The report concludes that four of the five genocidal acts have been committed under the 1948 Genocide Convention.
The acts also had to have been committed “not negligently,” meaning not accidentally or as a result of collateral from war operations.
Thus, the Committee finds that Israel has committed the intentional murder of Palestinians, establishing that genocide was purposefully inflicted “as a way to contribute to the overarching purpose of destroying the group, in whole or in part.”
From October 7, 2023 to July 31, 2025, 60,199 Palestinians were killed—18,430 of the victims being children and 9,735 being women.
One alarming finding from the report highlighted that the life expectancy of both sexes combined in Gaza decreased a whopping 35 years during just the first 12 months of war, from 75.5 years before October 2023, to 40.5 years.
This extreme decrease in life expectancy does not account for the deaths that would naturally occur from lack of access to healthcare resources.
Additionally, the report evaluated Israel’s air strike missions, which the Commission found were intentionally targeting civilians.
Israel used “heavy unguided munitions with a wide margin of error in densely populated residential areas” to fulfill their strategy. An Israeli spokesperson stated that it was to focus upon “what causes maximum damage.”
As a result of these missions, entire neighborhoods, residential apartments, and city blocks were decimated with civilians inside.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), between October 7, 2023 and July 30, 2024, Israel completed 498 attacks on healthcare facilities in the Gaza Strip, killing a total of 747 people, including children and pregnant women who were attempting to seek shelter and aid. As of April 15th of 2025, The Ministry of Health in Gaza, found that 1,400 healthcare workers were killed.
The Commission’s report also revealed that there were countless instances in which civilians were killed during ceasefire periods, while trying to surrender, evacuate, and when seeking food.
While Israeli security forces knew of Palestinians presence along evacuation routes and in safe areas, they still chose to engage forces. Per the report, they “shot at and killed civilians, some of whom (including children) were holding makeshift white flags. Some children, including toddlers, were shot in the head by snipers.”
At least 1,373 Palestinians were killed while seeking food—859 being in the vicinity of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), an U.S.-backed organization that was initially established to distribute aid to Gaza. 514 were killed along routes of food convoys, and American contractors were found to be responsible for some of these deaths.
The Commission also evaluates Israel’s claims that their actions were a necessary form of self-defense in response to the October 7th attacks. Israel claims that the neutralization of Hamas was necessary for their safety and that their actions were also an attempt to get the hostages released that were taken on October 7th.
Yet, the Commission noted that these events “did not occur in isolation” and were “preceded by decades of unlawful occupation and unlawful settlement, with racial segregation or apartheid, under an ideology requiring the removal of the Palestinian population from their lands and their replacement.” The Commission notes that Israel’s actions indicated that they were focused on “vengeance and collective punishment” of Palestinians.
The Commission also found extensive evidence of sexual and gender-based violence towards Palestinians.
The sexual violence was not just used to humiliate individual victims but “also to publicly humiliate the Palestinians as a group,” which is based on Israeli soldiers’ social media posts showcasing themselves in the act.
Ultimately, the report concludes that Israeli President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant are guilty of inciting genocide and that Israeli officials did not punish them accordingly.
The Commission urges Israel to facilitate investigations into the officials involved in the genocide, to lift the blockade of humanitarian aid, and to implement a permanent a ceasefire.
The public’s responses to the nearly 72-page report are wide-ranging. While some argue that an official acknowledgement of genocide has been a long time coming, others outright deny the validity of the report.
A spokesperson for Israel’s foreign ministry unequivocally rejected the report, deeming it as “distorted and false,” instead alleging that “Hamas is the party that attempted genocide in Israel – murdering 1,200 people, raping women, burning families alive, and openly declaring its goal of killing every Jew.”
Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and president of Human Rights Voices, Anne Bayefsky, shared a similar sentiment, asserting that the report “downplays the mass murder, rape, torture, and trauma of Israelis by suggesting that not enough Jews were harmed to pose an ‘existential threat’ to Israel.”
While the report is independent and does not officially speak for the United Nations, it is considered to be the strongest UN finding to date. It is the latest form of pressure put on by the UN to recognize Israel’s acts as genocide. Read the full Commission’s report here.