A query of intent: Is what’s occurring in Gaza genocide?

As world leaders collect in New York this week for the U.N. Normal Meeting, a rising variety of consultants are calling on diplomats to deal with what they describe as genocide and famine in Gaza.

Israel strongly rejects accusations that it’s responsible of genocide in its almost two-year marketing campaign in Gaza following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, assault that killed almost 1,200 folks, with one other 250 taken hostage, in line with Israeli officers.

The Israeli army marketing campaign that adopted has killed greater than 64,000 folks, together with greater than 18,000 kids, in line with Gaza well being authorities. Nearly all of Gaza’s estimated 2 million residents have been pressured to flee their houses, typically a number of instances. Many Palestinians, in addition to rights teams and a few distinguished People, have mentioned Israel is chargeable for genocide within the enclave.

In the US, the phrase has began to enter the general public discourse. Polls present Democrats and independents are more and more more likely to describe Israel’s actions as genocide, whilst Republican views have remained regular.

To know what the time period means and the way it has develop into such a battleground, NPR spoke with historians, authorized students, army analysts and other people residing by means of the struggle. The students say it is tough to carry states legally chargeable for any crimes. And a few pointed to a thornier subject: the burden of proving that Israel’s struggle in Gaza is motivated by “genocidal intent.”

What does genocide imply?

The time period “genocide” was launched in 1944 by Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to explain the extermination of European Jews throughout the Holocaust. Lemkin’s early publicity to the historical past of Ottoman assaults on Armenians and the pogroms in Poland was instrumental in shaping his perception that teams wanted safety beneath worldwide regulation.

In 1948, 4 years later, the United Nations adopted the Conference on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, typically known as the Genocide Conference, defining genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Inflicting critical bodily or psychological hurt to members of the group;

(c) Intentionally inflicting on the group situations of life calculated to result in its bodily destruction in complete or partially;

(d) Imposing measures meant to forestall births inside the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring kids of the group to a different group.”

Each Israel and the U.S. have ratified the conference — Israel in 1950 and the U.S. in 1988.

How are international locations tried for genocide in courts?

The Worldwide Court docket of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, Netherlands, handles disputes between international locations, together with beneath the Genocide Conference. A separate court docket, the Worldwide Prison Court docket, entered into pressure in 2002 to prosecute people for genocide, struggle crimes and crimes towards humanity. Nevertheless it has no jurisdiction over international locations that have not joined, amongst them the U.S., Israel, Myanmar and China. Outdoors the courts, the U.N. Safety Council can authorize the safety of civilians, however that energy is commonly paralyzed by the veto powers of the council’s 5 everlasting members.

In Rwanda, the Worldwide Prison Tribunal for Rwanda dominated that the 1994 mass killings of the Tutsi minority constituted genocide, and it convicted a number of political and army leaders for organizing and inciting it. Within the struggle following the breakup of the previous Yugoslavia, the ICJ discovered that genocide occurred in 1995 in Srebrenica, the place round 8,000 Bosnian Muslims have been killed by a Serbian-aligned pressure. However the court docket didn’t maintain Serbia immediately chargeable for committing genocide, just for failing to forestall it.

The U.S. has additionally formally acknowledged genocides towards Armenians and Darfuris. Then-President Barack Obama labeled ISIS’s actions genocide, and President Trump used the time period to explain the scenario dealing with white South Africans.

Gambia introduced a still-ongoing case towards Myanmar to the ICJ in 2019, accusing it of genocide over a army marketing campaign that pressured greater than 700,000 Rohingya to flee. The U.Okay. and different states argued in that case that intent might be inferred from the mass displacement and hurt to kids. Myanmar claims it was focusing on terrorists, however the court docket rejected its bid to throw out the case and is now weighing it on the deserves.

Why is “intent” in genocide circumstances exhausting to show?

Genocide is taken into account the toughest crime to show in court docket.

The “intent” requirement makes it distinct, mentioned Shannon Fyfe, a authorized scholar at Washington and Lee College.

“Proving intent tends to be the most difficult part of any criminal case,” she mentioned. “The ICJ says genocidal intent must be the only reasonable inference from the available evidence.”

The Genocide Conference’s drafters added “as such” to require that acts be carried out due to who the group is, not simply to realize one other purpose — one thing judges wrestle to evaluate.

Gaza: Early warnings, early rejections

Simply days after Israel started its bombing marketing campaign in Gaza, Raz Segal, an Israeli-American scholar of Jewish historical past and Holocaust and genocide research, wrote that it represented a “textbook case of genocide.”

Particularly, Segal pointed to what he seen as a deliberate intent to destroy, citing then-Protection Minister Yoav Gallant’s order to impose a siege on the enclave.

Shortly after he publicly accused Israel of genocide in Gaza, the College of Minnesota rescinded its supply for him to steer the varsity’s Heart for Holocaust and Genocide Research.

“People ask me, ‘Wasn’t it too soon on Oct. 13?’ No. The convention is activated by the risk of genocide, not just its occurrence. That’s the whole point of prevention. That’s the meaning of ‘Never Again,'” Segal instructed NPR, referencing a standard saying calling for the Holocaust to by no means be repeated.

He added that denying Israel was committing any struggle crimes, together with genocide, allowed for Israel’s actions to be justified.

“As if the Hamas-led massacres that day were not terrible enough, Israel and its allies, primarily the United States, including President Biden, immediately started circulating this atrocity propaganda,” he mentioned. “The lies and fabrications — like the false claim about beheaded babies — continuously shifted the focus not to Israeli violence but to the alleged barbarity of the Palestinians, to the point where they were seen as a danger that no international law should apply to.”

When did a Palestinian “genocide” develop into a authorized declare? A timeline

In November 2023, the Biden administration was named in a federal lawsuit filed by the Heart for Constitutional Rights and the regulation agency Van Der Hout LLP on behalf of Palestinian people and the human rights organizations Al-Haq and Protection for Youngsters Worldwide-Palestine, together with eight different plaintiffs.

The swimsuit alleged that the “unfolding genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza has so far been made possible because of the unconditional support” of President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Protection Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Laila Elhaddad, a Palestinian American creator from Gaza and one of many plaintiffs, went to court docket on Jan. 26, 2024, and later instructed NPR that she knew it was an extended shot, however she felt “uniquely obligated, as an American whose taxes were partly financing the killing of my family members,” to take authorized motion.

She added, “We as Palestinians understood from the start the intent to genocide. Israeli leaders spelled out exactly what they planned to do and then carried it out. We never expected it to go this far. But with no one to stop Netanyahu and no red lines in place, it was no surprise that he felt emboldened to destroy everything.”

On Jan. 31, 2024, U.S. District Choose Jeffrey White wrote that he discovered indications that “the ongoing military siege in Gaza is intended to eradicate a whole people and therefore plausibly falls within the international prohibition against genocide.” Nonetheless, White dismissed the case in 2024, saying the court docket couldn’t intervene in U.S. international coverage selections.

For Elhaddad, the ruling was each validating and bitter.

“It was cathartic,” she mentioned, to testify about what her household had endured. However exterior the courtroom, she felt silenced. “Even using the word ‘genocide’ in opinion pieces was a no from editors I worked with.”

The listening to of Elhaddad’s case, together with these of the opposite plaintiffs, started simply hours after the Worldwide Court docket of Justice in The Hague dominated that it’s believable that Israel has violated the phrases of the Genocide Conference within the struggle in Gaza, in a case introduced ahead by South Africa. The proceedings stay ongoing and have drawn assist from greater than 25 international locations.

In its case towards Israel, South Africa devotes 9 pages to claims of genocidal incitement. The submitting says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu twice referred to the biblical story of Amalek, saying: “Remember what Amalek has done to you, says our holy Bible. We remember.” He talked about Amalek once more in a letter to Israeli troopers and officers.

Within the Hebrew Bible, Amalek is a determine who tried to destroy the Jewish folks. The reference has traditionally been utilized by the Israeli far proper to justify killing Palestinians.

Amnesty Worldwide was the primary main worldwide group to accuse Israel of finishing up genocide in Gaza. Amnesty Worldwide Israel, which publicly disputed the genocide allegation in uncommon dissent from the worldwide rights group, was later suspended for breaking with that conclusion. Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, Medical doctors With out Borders and Physicians for Human Rights–Israel have additionally accused Israel of committing genocide. Individually, a U.N. fee concluded that Israel has dedicated 4 of the 5 genocidal acts outlined within the Genocide Conference. Whereas such findings carry no enforcement energy, they might affect the Worldwide Court docket of Justice and the Worldwide Prison Court docket.

Arguments towards calling it a genocide

Israel’s protection towards the genocide case introduced by South Africa rests on two claims: that it lacks genocidal intent and that its actions goal authentic army goals. It additionally argues that the case displays bias, citing a scarcity of belief within the U.N. and different worldwide our bodies.

Israel instructed the court docket it’s combating a authentic struggle of self-defense towards Hamas. The Israeli authorized crew mentioned South Africa’s accusations that Israel has intent to destroy the Palestinian folks in Gaza are based mostly on feedback by Israeli officers which have been taken out of context and are based mostly solely on “random assertions” so as to present genocidal intent.

In an interview with NPR’s Morning Version, Amos Yadlin, the previous head of Israeli army intelligence, known as the cost of genocide “nonsense,” saying that the purpose is to destroy Hamas, not Palestinians.

Eran Shamir-Borer, director of the Israel Democracy Institute’s Heart for Safety and Democracy and former head of the Israel Protection Forces’ worldwide regulation division, defended the legality of Israel’s marketing campaign in an e mail to NPR:

“Available evidence regarding Israel’s policies and conduct in the war in Gaza – whether it relies on statements by Israeli officials or on Israel’s conduct on the ground – does not suggest that such standards are even close to being met,” he mentioned, including that “jumping straight to the genocide claim not only empties the sacred term of its meaning; it also undermines other categories of potential violations of the law.”

John Spencer, a retired U.S. Military officer who has suggested the Israeli army, instructed Morning Version that Israel shouldn’t be engaged in genocide and cited “the mountain of evidence of what Israel is doing to preserve infrastructure, civilian life, to provide services.”

At instances throughout the struggle, Israel has fully blocked assist from coming into Gaza, citing causes comparable to pressuring Hamas to give up and accusing the group of seizing humanitarian provides. Beneath stress from the US, Israel has allowed some assist into the territory, however humanitarian organizations say the situations imposed by Israel severely restrict the quantity that may attain civilians.

Israeli officers haven’t offered public proof to assist their declare that Hamas systematically steals assist. In contrast to in earlier Gaza conflicts, worldwide journalists aren’t permitted entry to Gaza until they’re embedded with the Israeli army.

The U.S. authorities, beneath Biden and now beneath Trump, has firmly supported Israel’s army actions, going nicely past diplomatic statements and even imposing sanctions on Worldwide Prison Court docket judges and prosecutors, U.N. official Francesca Albanese and nongovernmental human rights organizations like Al-Haq.

Because the outbreak of the struggle in 2023, the U.S. authorities has bought at the very least $30 billion in weapons to Israel, delivered greater than 90,000 tons of weapons and offered the Israeli authorities with $12.5 billion in funds to buy weapons.

Authorized definitions and political justifications

As students grapple with whether or not the struggle in Gaza is genocide, they return to the query of intent.

Fyfe, the Washington and Lee College authorized scholar, mentioned, “Genocide can occur within or outside of war. But it is never permissible, even if the war itself is. So war is not a defense. If the legal elements are met, they are met, regardless of other circumstances.”

On intent, she mentioned, “If a military leader intends to gain land and removing a group is the only way to do it, that’s not necessarily genocide. But if the only reasonable inference from a siege or campaign is that the group itself is being destroyed as such, then that is genocidal intent.”

In Gaza, she mentioned, that distinction has blurred.

“There are statements from Israeli officials that suggest intent to destroy, but it’s not always clear if they mean Hamas or Gazans,” she mentioned. “But I do not think it is reasonable to claim that the siege is a military objective, given that Hamas is already crippled.”

“So it may be that the only reasonable inference that can be made about the siege is that it reflects genocidal intent. Objective behavior can, and may here, stand in for objective statements.”

“Each Israeli strike may be a war crime, but serially they’ve destroyed more than 70% of Gaza’s buildings and killed tens of thousands, mainly civilians,” mentioned A. Dirk Moses, Spitzer professor of worldwide relations at Metropolis School of New York and editor of the Journal of Genocide Analysis. “In no way can this outcome be seen as collateral.”

He additionally mentioned that it’s typically forgotten that the Genocide Conference contains the destruction of a gaggle “in whole or in part.” “In Srebrenica, ‘only’ 8,000 men and boys were killed, but they were deemed a substantial part of the Bosnian population. That was enough for a genocide ruling.”

Sonia Boulos, a professor of worldwide human rights regulation at Nebrija College in Spain, argued that Israel’s justification — that Hamas makes use of civilians as human shields — has functioned to disclaim Palestinians civilian standing altogether.

“Even if one were to accept the premise that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, that fact does not alter the genocidal nature of rhetoric that dehumanizes Palestinians as ‘human animals,’ calls for the complete destruction of Gaza or invokes biblical references to Amalek,” she mentioned.

“Such utterances are not only genocidal in nature — they help explain the apocalyptic reality currently unfolding in Gaza,” Boulos mentioned.

What led two students to vary their minds about Gaza?

Some students who initially rejected or prevented the time period “genocide” have since shifted their stance, citing mass civilian killings, widespread destruction and restrictions on humanitarian assist as key causes for his or her change.

Omer Bartov, an Israeli-born genocide scholar and army veteran, was amongst those that reconsidered his place. “There were people who expected that there would be genocide right away. There are people who think that Israel has always been involved in genocide. And I did not think that,” he mentioned in a Morning Version interview. However he added that he discovered proof and got here to his conclusion in Could 2024. “I asked myself: What is actually the goal of what the [Israel Defense Forces] is doing? Is it what it said — to destroy Hamas and to release the hostages? Or is it something else?”

In Could 2024, almost 1 million Palestinians have been displaced from the southern metropolis of Rafah and northern Gaza after Israeli forces issued evacuation orders. By August of that yr, Rafah, as soon as residence to about 275,000 folks, had been decreased to a desolate panorama of rubble. Lots of those that fled south to areas deemed “safe” from the heavy bombardment within the north discovered little to no safety there.

Dov Waxman, a British-American professor of Israel research on the College of California, Los Angeles, has additionally revised his stance after as soon as publicly disputing Raz Segal’s early declare that Israel was engaged in genocide. As of this writing, he’s the one U.S.-based scholar within the discipline of Israel research — an instructional self-discipline targeted on the historical past, politics and tradition of latest Israel — to have achieved so publicly.

“I struggled to accept the possibility that Jews, the victims of genocide, could become perpetrators of genocide,” Waxman mentioned.

“As the months passed and the death and destruction mounted, I understood why experts were calling it genocide, but I still wasn’t convinced,” Waxman mentioned, including that his turning level got here in March 2025, when Israel broke a ceasefire, minimize off humanitarian assist and resumed its offensive.

“Deliberately making it impossible for Palestinians to live as a group in Gaza crosses the legal threshold for genocide,” Waxman mentioned.

Israeli officers have thought of plans for pushing Palestinians out of Gaza for the reason that early days of the struggle, and a proposal by Trump to construct a “Riviera” in Gaza has added momentum.

How the struggle in Gaza is altering the discourse about genocide 

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., mentioned on Sept. 17 that Israel’s actions in Gaza represent a genocide, marking the primary time the longtime senator has used the time period to explain the struggle. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., have additionally known as it genocide.

Cultural figures comparable to YouTuber Ms. Rachel, comic Theo Von — who has interviewed Trump and constructed a MAGA-friendly following — and Joe Rogan, the world’s hottest podcaster, have additionally used the time period.

David Simon, director of the Genocide Research Program at Yale College, says the phrase’s use itself has surged within the public discourse. He hyperlinks the rise to a broader consciousness sparked first by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and once more by photographs of Gaza’s famine and destruction.

“Some of this may be driven by the images and reporting on the famine, which paint a much more vivid picture of the threat to human life than does mere statistics. But also, people considering the element of ‘intent to destroy’ that is part of the U.N. definition of genocide seem to find it more consistently now, in the context of a man-made famine, than they did with respect to the previous elements of conflict, which at least from a distance read more as ‘war.'”

In an August 2025 Economist/YouGov ballot, 69% of Democrats and 44% of independents mentioned that Israel was committing genocide towards Palestinian civilians. In a January 2024 survey from the identical pollsters, solely 45% of Democrats and 29% of independents mentioned Israel was committing genocide. The share of Republicans who thought that genocide was being dedicated towards Palestinians was unchanged at 17%.

In Israel, solely a minority of the inhabitants shares that view.

A survey performed in March 2025 and the topic of an essay in Haaretz newspaper discovered that 82% of Jewish Israelis polled backed the expulsion of Gazans and that almost half, 47%, mentioned they supported killing all Palestinians in “enemy cities captured by the Israeli army.”

Martin Shaw, a historic sociologist and the creator of What Is Genocide? and The New Age of Genocide: Mental and Political Challenges After Gaza, says that the general public discourse reveals how “some people still think that only events like the Holocaust count as genocide, which no expert would argue. Gaza is different from the Holocaust, but it is still a deliberate attempt to destroy a people, which is the meaning of genocide.”

Shaw, who wrote early within the struggle that Hamas’ killings of Israeli civilians constituted “genocidal massacres” and who now believes Gaza is experiencing a genocide, mentioned there’s a new dynamic in how the general public understanding of the phrase is being formed. Israel, he mentioned, believed that by banning worldwide journalists from coming into Gaza, “it could prevent the world from seeing its atrocities.”

“It has tried to kill local Palestinian journalists,” he mentioned, “but so many ordinary people in Gaza have filmed what Israel is doing that the world has seen it nevertheless.”

Israel denies intentionally focusing on journalists. Worldwide information companies have criticized previous Israeli investigations into its army, stating in a current joint letter following Israeli strikes that killed 5 journalists in Gaza that such investigations “rarely result in clarity and action.”

The Committee to Defend Journalists says the struggle in Gaza is the deadliest battle for journalists because it began gathering information in 1992.

Simon, of Yale College, observes that media blackouts aren’t new. However within the case of Gaza, “having social media serve as the source of information has made it much harder to agree on the basic understanding of what’s actually been going on, and [has] added more to the algorithmic amplification that contributed to the acute polarization over the past two years.”

Past debates

For a lot of Palestinians, the general public debates over the phrase aren’t simply an summary idea.

Elhaddad instructed NPR that for the reason that 2023 lawsuit towards the Biden administration — at which period at the very least 86 of her relations had been killed — Israeli airstrikes, drones and shootings on the Gaza Humanitarian Basis’s meals distribution websites have raised the dying toll on her mom’s facet to 200. She shared a spreadsheet detailing the deaths, together with notes when she was capable of get them.

“It felt like the ground was moving beneath my feet, as if everything that made my parents’ home familiar was being systematically erased,” mentioned Elhaddad.

Now that extra distinguished figures of various political persuasions have slowly begun to name Israel’s actions in Gaza a “genocide,” Elhaddad mentioned, she has felt recognition of her personal story.

“The tragedy is that it took over 60,000 Palestinian bodies and a full-blown starvation to reach this conclusion,” she mentioned.

This story was edited by Tony Cavin, Nishant Dahiya, James Hider. For extra protection, in addition to for differing views and evaluation of the battle, please go to NPR’s particular sequence Center East battle.