Chair of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, South Africa's judge Navi Pillay, speaks during a press conference in Geneva. AFP
The commission found that "genocide is occurring in Gaza and is continuing to occur," commission chief Navi Pillay told AFP.
"The responsibility lies with the State of Israel."
The commission, tasked with investigating the rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territories, published its latest report nearly two years after the start of the Israeli war on Gaza in October 2023.
Israel has killed nearly 65,000 people and wounded more than 160,000 others, mostly women and children, and destroyed most infrastructure in the strip since the start of the war.
In August, the United Nations declared that famine in Gaza, the first ever in the Middle East, amid a total Israeli blockade on the entry of humanitarian aid to 2.3 million Palestinians into the strip.
More than 450 Palestinians have died of starvation and acute malnutrition due to the Israeli blockade in the past six months.
The COI concluded that Israeli authorities and forces had, since October 2023, committed "four of the five genocidal acts" listed in the 1948 Genocide Convention.
These are "killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group".
'Intent to destroy'
The investigators said explicit statements by Israeli civilian and military authorities, along with the pattern of Israeli force conduct, "indicated that the genocidal acts were committed with intent to destroy ... Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as a group".
The report concluded that Israeli President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant have "incited the commission of genocide and that Israeli authorities have failed to take action against them to punish this incitement".
"The responsibility for these atrocity crimes lies with Israeli authorities at the highest echelons," stated Pillay, 83, a former South African judge who once headed the international tribunal for Rwanda and also served as UN human rights chief.
The commission is not a legal body, but its reports can wield diplomatic pressure and serve to gather evidence for later use by courts.
Pillay told AFP the commission was cooperating with the International Criminal Court prosecutor.
"We've shared thousands of pieces of information with them," she said.
'Complicity'
"The international community cannot stay silent on the genocidal campaign launched by Israel against the Palestinian people in Gaza," insisted Pillay, presenting her final report.
"The absence of action to stop it amounts to complicity," she warned.
The UN itself has not labelled the situation in Gaza a genocide, although the body's aid chief urged world leaders in May to "act decisively to prevent genocide", while its rights chief last week denounced Israeli "genocidal rhetoric".
In January last year, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to prevent acts of "genocide" in Gaza.
Four months later, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for suspected war crimes and crimes against humanity.
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