Numerous scholars and legal experts have made assessments of the conduct of Israel in the Gaza genocide. In late 2023, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that "A growing number of academics, legal scholars and governments are accusing the Israeli government of carrying out a genocide".[1] Human rights lawyer Susan Akram said, "The opposition is political, as there is consensus amongst the international human rights legal community, many other legal and political experts, including many Holocaust scholars, that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza".[2]
While Israel and its supporters, including the US, deny the accusation, "a growing list of genocide scholars and international law experts" use genocide to describe Israeli actions.[3] A December 2024 Amnesty International report "adds an influential voice to a growing list of players that have accused Israel of committing genocide".[4][5] The law professor Adil Ahmad Haque said that the report describes serious violations of international humanitarian law and that Amnesty "correctly applies existing law" based on "its extensive factual findings".[6] Following the Amnesty report, Human Rights Watch accused Israel of "genocidal acts" in Gaza, but it did not say definitively whether genocidal intent existed.[7]
Former UK Supreme Court justice Jonathan Sumption said that a court would be likely to regard Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide due to Israel's explicit use of starvation as a weapon of war, the scale of human casualties and indiscriminate destruction in Gaza, and statements in support of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel Katz, Bezalel Smotrich, and Itamar Ben-Gvir.[a] He said: "The most plausible explanation of current Israeli policy is that its object is to induce Palestinians as an ethnic group to leave the Gaza Strip for other countries by bombing, shooting and starving them if they remain."[8]
Genocide studies, Holocaust studies, and history
Omer Bartov, a leading Israeli-American Holocaust and genocide scholar who has written extensively about Israel's actions in Gaza
On 31 August 2025, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), the world's biggest academic association of genocide scholars, passed a resolution saying that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.[9][10][11] IAGS president Melanie O'Brien called the resolution a "definitive statement from experts in the field of genocide studies that what is going on on the ground in Gaza is genocide". It is the ninth time since its 1994 founding that the IAGS has passed a resolution recognising an ongoing or historical genocide.[9][11]
In May 2025, NRC wrote that leading scholars in genocide studies are "surprisingly unanimous" that Israel is committing genocide.[12] But the debate has polarised the field of Holocaust studies. Some Holocaust scholars have defended Israeli violence and contended that the charge of genocide is based in antisemitism, in some cases comparing Hamas and Palestinians to Nazis—though many of these went silent as the war escalated. Others, primarily those who reject the uniqueness of the Holocaust and Jewish history, have argued that Israel's actions should be analysed as a case of genocide, along with other genocides in history.[13][pageneeded][14][pageneeded] In May 2025, Uğur Ümit Üngör said, "the gap between Holocaust historians and their colleagues who view genocides in a broader context is shrinking".[12]
Other academics also called Israel's attacks on infrastructure, food, and water genocidal.[15] Shmuel Lederman has called Israel's actions genocidal violence, but does not use the term "genocide", critiquing the simplification of intent in the term. He locates the situation in Gaza within a long and ongoing history of oppression, including mass surveillance, collective punishment, restrictions on travel and work, and settler-colonialism.[16]Amos Goldberg has said that Israel's actions in Gaza exhibit all the elements of genocide, citing explicit intent by high-ranking officials, widespread incitement, and pervasive dehumanisation of Palestinians in Israeli society.[17][18][19]Daniel Blatman[20][21] and Enzo Traverso[22] agreed with the genocide assessment. The Holocaust historian Tal Bruttmann has criticised Traverso's analysis and expertise.[23] Goldberg has accused mainstream Holocaust studies of abandoning universal human rights and becoming an "enabling factor" of the genocide.[24]
In 2023, Omer Bartov expressed concern that Israeli leaders had genocidal intent.[25] In response to Bartov, five Holocaust scholars, while acknowledging Israeli officials' "despicable statements that cannot be ignored",[26] said that only a few officials made such statements and justified them by pointing to Hamas's crimes.[27] The scholars argued that the dehumanising language was "not evidence of genocidal intent".[27] Bartov later said that as of May 2024 it was "no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions", while noting that very few in Israel (apart from Palestinians) held this view.[28] In July 2025, he confirmed his genocide assessment even though it was "a painful conclusion to reach".[29]
Martin Shaw argues that states avoid the term genocide to dodge their responsibility to end it; moreover, he argues, Israel avoids the term out of "a misplaced belief that Jews, having been prime historical victims of genocide, cannot also be its perpetrators."[30][31] In January 2024, Shaw noted that while the application of the framework of genocide to Palestine had, in the words of one commentator, "habitually evoked fanatical pushback", the nature of Israel's assault on Gaza "represented a strategic choice" rather than an inadvertent consequence, and thus calling it genocide was both warranted and inescapable.[32][33][34] The genocide scholar Uğur Ümit Üngör calls Israeli actions "unmistakably counter-genocidal in terms of the quantity, quality, and dynamic of mass violence".[35]
Professor Victoria Sanford and scholars Barry Trachtenberg and John Cox detailed the similarities between statements Israeli government officials and ministers made and those made during the genocides in Guatemala, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, northern Iraq, and Myanmar.[36][37]Didier Fassin compared Israel's actions in Gaza to the Herero and Nama genocide.[38] The Holocaust historian Tal Bruttmann[fr],[23] the sociologist Luc Boltanski, and others have criticised Fassin's arguments, calling his analogy to German colonialism inappropriate.[39] In response to these critiques and others, Fassin highlighted three rhetorical formations that he says have repeatedly occurred: presenting 7 October 2023 as the beginning of events, ignoring any history before that;[40] hyperbolic claims;[41] and distortion.[42]
In January 2024, the scholar Mark Levene detailed how Israel's actions are ethnic cleansing at the very least, in line with the Israeli intelligence ministry's policy paper for a forcible and permanent transfer of all Gazans, supported by Netanyahu's government.[43] Levene also argued that Israel's actions and its politicians' statements show that it is engaging in genocide.[44] The historian Donald Bloxham wrote that he is uninterested in the debate as "it makes no moral difference", "though much of what has transpired is eminently consistent with genocide".[45] Segal said Jewish supremacism plays a role in the Gaza genocide and Israel's settler colonialism.[46]
The historian Ilan Pappé said, "What we see now are massacres which are part of the genocidal impulse, namely to kill people in order to downsize the number of people living in Gaza."[47] Historian Yoav Di-Capua charted a history of increasing genocidal ideology among Hardal, identifying Smotrich and Ben-Gvir as politicians who seek the adoption of this ideology as national policy and are using the Gaza war to implement their plan.[48] The Israeli historian Benny Morris contended that Israel was not committing genocide,[49] but said that genocide against Palestinians was possible in the future unless certain steps were taken.[49]
In June 2025, Melanie O'Brien, a professor and president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, said that, according to international law, Israel is committing genocide. She added, "even if self-defence is invoked, that does not justify genocide. There is no legal defence for genocide under international law."[50]
Other scholars
Answers to the question "How would you define Israel's military campaign in Gaza?" among Middle East scholars in a January–February 2025 survey[51]
Genocide (46.0%)
Major war crimes akin to genocide (36.0%)
Major war crimes but not akin to genocide (9.00%)
Unjustified actions but not major war crimes (4.00%)
Justified actions under the right to self-defense (4.00%)
I don't know (2.00%)
In March 2024, the Middle East Studies Association condemned the "accelerating scale of genocidal violence being inflicted on the Palestinian population of Gaza", saying that Israel's conduct constituted cultural genocide.[52] A May–June 2024 Brookings Institution survey asked 758 Middle East scholars to define Israel's current military actions in Gaza; the most frequent response was "major war crimes akin to genocide"; next was "genocide". The two responses together made up a strong majority.[53][54] In January–February 2025, a follow-up survey indicated a growing consensus that Israel's military campaign in Gaza was genocide.[51]
Norman Finkelstein argued that Netanyahu's description of the Palestinians as "Amalek" was a call for genocide;[55] he accused Israel of engaging in "genocidal war".[56] On 13 November 2023, the German social theoristJürgen Habermas and three colleagues at Goethe University Frankfurt published a statement in which they said that attributing genocidal intent to Israel's actions in Gaza was a misjudgement,[57] triggering public debate in Germany.[58]
In December, in correspondence published in The Lancet, multiple specialists in international medicine and humanitarian aid reiterated warnings of the risk of genocide, while detailing how Israel's blocking of humanitarian support and aid were leading to unnecessary deaths and how the death rate would continue to worsen. They called on signatories to the Genocide Convention to enforce a ceasefire on Israel.[59] Multiple public declarations from journals and academic organisations have warned of a potential genocide and declared opposition to an ongoing genocide.[60][61][62]
In January 2024, the American political scientist and international relations scholar John Mearsheimer wrote that, while he had believed during the first two months of the war that Israel was "guilty of serious war crimes", once the 2023 Gaza war ceasefire ended, it "became clear" to him "that Israeli leaders were in fact seeking to physically destroy a substantial portion of Gaza's Palestinian population".[63] In July 2025, 1,300 professionals and academics in public health, health care, and the social sciences signed a letter acknowledging the Gaza genocide.[64] According to professor Ernesto Verdeja, even by "the most inflexible interpretation of genocide, Gaza qualifies as genocidal".[65]
Legal assessments
Gaza war deaths by month
Craig Mokhiber, a retired UN human rights lawyer, wrote, "Never, in the modern era, have we seen such a clear-cut, article-by-article violation of the United Nations Genocide Convention, so broad a consensus in the identification of the crime".[66] According to Nimer Sultany and Mia Swart, a growing consensus among legal and international law scholars is emerging that Israel's actions constitute genocide.[67][68]
In November 2023, the scholar David Crane argued that Netanyahu had not expressly stated an intent to destroy Palestinians, and that it could therefore not be considered a genocide.[69] In December 2023, Luis Moreno Ocampo, former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, told Al Jazeera that the siege of Gaza was a form of genocide due to Israel's imposing conditions that would lead to the deaths of Palestinians.[70] In January 2024, a number of prominent Israelis, represented by the human-rights lawyer Michael Sfard, sent Israel's attorney general and state prosecutor an open letter detailing examples of "the discourse of annihilation, expulsion and revenge".[71] The signatories said that the Israeli judiciary was ignoring incitement to genocide in Gaza.[71]
William Schabas, an expert in international criminal law,[72] said that South Africa's case was "arguably the strongest case of genocide ever brought before the" International Court of Justice,[73] citing the destruction of Gazan infrastructure and statements made by Israeli politicians that Gazans are "human animals" and that Israel would deny them electricity, water, and medical care.[74][75][76] In a May 2024 interview, the Human Rights Watch co-founder Aryeh Neier detailed how Israel's blocking of aid and the subsequent starvation of Gaza's population is indicative of genocide.[77] A June 2024 report by the University Network for Human Rights and Boston University School of Law found that "Israel has committed genocidal acts".[2]
In May 2024 the scholar Nimer Sultany supported Forensic Architecture's assessment that Israel had weaponised international humanitarian law into "humanitarian violence".[78] This was supported in July by Professor Neve Gordon and the anthropologist Nicola Perugini, who argued that Israel used "the law itself as a tool legitimizing genocide".[79] Luigi Daniele, a lecturer at Nottingham Law School, noted a link between the IDF's justification for its conduct in Gaza and the Rapid Support Forces rationale in the Sudanese civil war, saying it "reveals the emergence of a template to commit mass extermination and even genocide".[80]
In April 2024 the scholar Stefan Talmon told Süddeutsche Zeitung that Israel was not committing genocide in Gaza, but conceded that Israel had committed war crimes.[81] Professor Sabine Swoboda also argued that although Israel may have broken international law, it had not committed genocide because its intent was not genocidal.[82] In January 2024 the Israeli lawyer Eugene Kontorovich called the genocide allegations "absolutely absurd" and called for Israel to end its acceptance of the ICJ's jurisdiction in response to South Africa's case.[83] In an op-ed in August 2024 the lawyer Eli Rosenbaum wrote that Israel's actions in Gaza are not genocidal but seeking to "prevent genocide" by Hamas.[84]
In December 2023 Kai Ambos, a professor and judge at the Kosovo Special Tribunal, warned that statements by politicians, while potentially beneficial for proving intent, could not necessarily be applied in evaluating military decisions.[85] In January 2024, Christian Walter[de], a professor at LMU, argued that the extent of harm to both civilians and infrastructure were inconclusive, and that attempts to evacuate civilians were an indication against genocidal intent.[86] In June 2025, Ambos and scholar Stefanie Bock[de] wrote that it has become more difficult to deny genocidal intent.[87]
Professors Marco Sassoli and Oliver Diggelmann[de] argued in May 2024 that while some statements by politicians may be genocidal, the same did not apply to the actions of the Israeli military; Diggelmann believes a conviction for genocide is unlikely.[88] Professor Andreas Müller[de] said that the term "genocide" was being used as a criticism instead of according to its legal definition, adding, "there was no sufficient ground of genocide if one takes the legal term seriously".[89] Professor Daniel-Erasmus Khan[de] said in June that there was no clear evidence of a special intent among Israeli leadership.[90]
In a speech in October 2024, Professor Conor Gearty called Israel genocidal, pointing to the continued attacks on schools and hospitals and the lack of internal investigations by Israeli authorities into potential crimes.[91] In April 2025, the barrister Michael Mansfield said there was "no question" that genocide was occurring.[92]
Global implications
Some scholars, particularly those associated with Third World approaches to international law, have argued that the international community's failure to treat Israel's actions in Gaza as a genocide and respond accordingly has harmed the principles of the international order and international law, and exposed the deficiencies of international governance.[93][94][95][pageneeded] José Manuel Barreto argues that "the Palestinian genocide has unveiled the deep colonial structure of the international legal order" and identifies events in Gaza with the history of genocides in the colonised world, which he says the Westphalian system has historically failed to prevent.[94]
Journalist Colin Jones interviewed lawyers affiliated with the US military and concluded that they see Gaza as a test case for what military conduct might be acceptable in a hypothetical future war between the US and a peer power such as China.[96]Moustafa Bayoumi wrote, "Israel's acts of extermination and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, funded and enabled at every turn by a complicit west, [have] contributed the most to the demise of the global, rules-based order."[97]
Abdelwahab El-Affendi wrote, "increasing partisanship in Genocide Studies threatens the field itself, as well as the very act of genocide prevention."[34] Omer Bartov wrote that the reluctance of many scholars of the Holocaust and Holocaust commemoration institutions to identify events in Gaza as a genocide threatens universalist interpretations of Holocaust studies and Holocaust commemoration and may lead to a decline in the relevance of Holocaust education.[98][99]
Notes
↑ Sumption wrote: "The Israeli minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is a long-standing advocate of ethnic cleansing. The finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, is another. He announced at a public press conference on 6 May 2025, shortly after the decision to launch Operation Gideon's Chariots, that "Gaza will be entirely destroyed." He went on to explain that Palestinians would be herded into a Hamas-free zone, and from there would leave "in great numbers" to third countries. [...] A week after Smotrich's remarks, Netanyahu, giving evidence to a Knesset committee, reported that Israel was destroying more and more housing so that the population would have nowhere to return to and would have to leave Gaza. More recently, on 7 July, the defence minister, Israel Katz, briefed Israeli media that it was proposed to incarcerate Palestinians in a vast camp to be built on the ruins of Rafah, pending their departure for other countries."
↑ Karsenti, Bruno; Ehrenfreund, Jacques; Christ, Julia; Heurtin, Jean-Philippe; Boltanski, Luc; Trom, Danny (12 November 2023). "Un génocide à Gaza? Une réponse à Didier Fassin"[A genocide in Gaza? A response to Didier Fassin]. Analyse Opinion Critique (in French). Archived from the original on 13 November 2023. Retrieved 16 December 2024.
↑ Mokhiber, Craig (March 2025). "Law on trial: Gaza and the future of the international legal order". Dialectical Anthropology. 49 (1): 121–144. doi:10.1007/s10624-025-09764-0.
Swart, Mia (5 August 2025). "South Africa v Israel: South Africa's case at the International Court of Justice". The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs and Policy Studies: 1–3. doi:10.1080/00358533.2025.2542794.
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