Israeli-Palestinian human rights group B’Tselem has declared Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide in its latest report, titled Our Genocide.
The report, released on Monday, carries strong condemnation of Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed at least 59,733 people and wounded 144,477.
“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 action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip,” the report reads.
“In other words: Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
An estimated 1,139 people died during the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, and some 200 were taken captive.
‘Our Genocide’
The report delves into Israeli violations against Palestinians, going back to the 1948 foundation of the Israeli state, which “had a clear objective from the outset: to cement the supremacy of the Jewish group across the entire territory under Israeli control”.
As such, the state of Israel exhibits “settler-colonial patterns, including widespread settlement involving displacement and dispossession, demographic engineering, ethnic cleansing and the imposition of military rule on Palestinians”, the report continues.
And while it looks back at Israel’s efforts to “uphold Jewish supremacy, relying on a false pretense of the rule of law while, in reality, the rights of the Palestinian subjects are left unprotected”, the report notes that this was accelerated after October 7.
The “broad, coordinated onslaught against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip” that the report points to has “enjoyed support, legitimization, and normalization from the majority of Jewish-Israelis, as well as from the Israeli legal system”.
The report also speaks about the intensified efforts since October 2024 to displace Palestinians in Gaza.
“Israel’s actions in northern Gaza were described by many experts … as an attempt to carry out ethnic cleansing. In practice, by November 2024, some 100,000 people who had lived in northern Gaza had been displaced from their homes,” the document reads.
The report goes beyond Gaza to say that Israel has intensified its violent operations in the occupied West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem since October 7, “on a scale not seen since Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967”.
B’Tselem first used the word “apartheid” in 2021 to describe the two-tier reality for Israelis and Palestinians in historic Palestine.
Genocide in words and actions
B’tselem’s report follows an op-ed in the New York Times by Holocaust scholar Amos Goldberg, where he described Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, as well as growing demonstrations by protesters in Israel calling for an end to the war.
However, opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza is still widely controversial in Israeli society. Only around 16 percent of Jewish Israelis believe peaceful coexistence with Palestinians is possible, according to a June poll by the Pew Research Center.
Meanwhile, 64 percent of Jewish Israelis believe Israel should temporarily occupy the Gaza Strip, according to a survey by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA).
Critics of stereotypical Israeli views include Israeli political commentator Ori Goldberg, a former university professor and national security consultant, who called these views “vile” on the social media platform X.
I was overcome yesterday. The vileness pouring out of Israeli society shut my mouth for 24 hours. It was an immediate reaction, not anger or sadness. I couldn’t speak. I broke out in hives for the first time since I was diagnosed. I think I tried to reject reality. I’m back.…
— Ori Goldberg (@ori_goldberg) July 27, 2025
“I can only conclude that the pressures from within Israeli society are truly as great as Ori Goldberg recently noted,” Elia Ayoub, a writer, researcher, and the founder of the podcast The Fire These Times, told Al Jazeera.
“Israeli society has normalised a genocide for nearly two years, and this speaks to a deep moral rot at the core of their political culture,” he continued.
Meanwhile, Israeli government officials have continued their violent calls against the people of Gaza.
“The government is rushing to erase Gaza, and thank God we are erasing this evil. All of Gaza will be Jewish,” Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said on Israeli radio last week.
Welcomed news, even if late
B’Tselem’s report runs 79 pages and documents interviews with numerous Palestinians in Gaza who have lived through the last 22 months of attacks.
That one of Israel’s most prominent human rights organisations described Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide is bound to draw criticism of the group in Israeli society. Many Israeli critics of their own country’s actions in Gaza have faced brutal denunciations from their compatriots.
That makes B’Tselem using the weight of the word “genocide” all the more powerful, even if some believe it could have been done sooner.
“I welcome this news even though it comes very late into the genocide,” Ayoub said.
In December 2023, South Africa brought a case that Israel was committing genocide against Gaza to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Several other countries, including Brazil, Spain, Turkiye and the Republic of Ireland, have joined South Africa in its ICJ case.
