Is Israel Carrying Out a Genocide in Gaza? Reading the Convention Text, the Findings Issued and the Counts Each Party Publishes

Four of the five acts enumerated in Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention were found to have been committed by Israeli authorities and security forces in the September 2025 report of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry, an investigative finding rather than a judgment of a court. No court has entered a merits judgment in the case brought against Israel under the Convention, and the only merits judgment ever entered under that treaty came in 2007, fourteen years after the case was filed. The Convention requires two things together: one or more of five enumerated acts, and the intent to destroy a protected group as such, which is where the dispute concentrates. Israel’s published position is that its campaign is directed at Hamas, and its ministries and military publish their own counts of hostages, investigations and aid in support of it.

Key Findings

• Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted 9 December 1948, sets two elements: one or more of five enumerated acts, and intent to destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such, in whole or in part (treaty text).
• The International Association of Genocide Scholars adopted a resolution over 31 August to 1 September 2025 holding that Israel’s conduct in Gaza meets the legal definition of genocide, supported by 86% of voting members (Reuters, 2025). It is a membership resolution of a professional association.
• Israel’s Military Advocate General’s Corps reported 74 criminal investigations opened as at 3 August 2024 into alleged misconduct in Gaza, drawn from more than 1,000 incidents referred for factual assessment, on a stated threshold under which civilian death or injury in most cases does not by itself indicate reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct (the party’s own count).
• COGAT, a unit of Israel’s Ministry of Defense, recorded 1,778,363 metric tons of food entering Gaza between 10 October 2025 and 7 June 2026, counted from self-declarations by humanitarian organizations and private providers rather than weighed at the crossings (the party’s own count).
• Among UK Facebook comments coded as antisemitic by Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022, peer-reviewed), 4.2% used a Nazi analogy and 5.2% an apartheid analogy in reaction to the May 2021 escalation.

Which bodies have formally determined genocide in Gaza?

The United Nations Human Rights Council’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded in its report of 16 September 2025 that Israeli authorities and security forces had committed four of the five acts enumerated in Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention, and that there were reasonable grounds to find genocidal intent. The instrument is a finding by an investigative body established by the Council, not a judgment of a court.

The four acts the Commission identified are the first four in the Article II list: 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. The fifth enumerated act, forcibly transferring children of the group to another group, was not among them.

The standard the Commission applied is its own: reasonable grounds, the evidentiary threshold ordinarily used by United Nations commissions of inquiry and fact-finding missions to characterise conduct. It is not the standard a court applies in deciding responsibility, and the Commission has no power to enter a binding determination against a state. Its report goes to the Council that created it.

Two other United Nations mandates have published in the same direction. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights issued the Commission’s conclusion in a press release dated 16 September 2025, and the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 published a report in October 2025 describing the conduct in Gaza as a collective crime. Each is a mandate holder’s or a commission’s own determination on its own reading of the Convention, dated and named here as such.

Against these sits the state of the judicial record. As of publication no international court has issued a merits judgment on whether genocide has been committed in Gaza, and no domestic court has entered such a judgment either. What courts have produced so far are procedural orders, which the next sections take up alongside the treaty text those orders apply.

Is it true that leading genocide scholars have said yes?

It is often said that the world’s leading genocide scholars have concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. On the record, a professional association of that field voted and said so: the International Association of Genocide Scholars adopted a resolution over 31 August to 1 September 2025 holding that Israel’s conduct meets the legal definition, and the resolution was supported by 86% of voting members (Reuters, 2025).

What the 86% describes is a share of the members who cast a vote in that ballot. The association has not published the number of members eligible to vote or the number who voted, so the figure is a share of participants rather than a measured share of the discipline. The resolution is a membership determination of a scholarly association, which is a different instrument from a court judgment and a different instrument again from a measurement.

Three organizational determinations sit alongside it, each named and dated here as that organization’s own conclusion on its own reading of the Convention. Amnesty International published “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman” on 5 December 2024, concluding that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. B’Tselem published “Our Genocide” in July 2025, and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel published its own determination in the same month, the first such conclusions issued by Israeli organizations. Each of these bodies operates with a stated advocacy mission, and each conclusion is a legal characterisation reached in-house, not an adjudicated finding and not a measured quantity. Amnesty’s published documents on both genocide and apartheid are set out at greater length in a separate reading of that record.

So the premise, read strictly, holds: an association of genocide scholars voted, and by a large majority of those voting it said yes. What the vote establishes is the position of that association’s participating membership as of September 2025. The Convention’s two elements, which govern what a court would have to find, are set out in the text itself.

What must be proven under the 1948 Genocide Convention?

Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948, sets two elements that must hold together: one or more of five enumerated acts, and the intent to destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such, in whole or in part.

The article’s operative words are these: genocide means any of the listed acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” The five acts follow: 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; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The second element is what separates the Convention from the law of armed conflict, where unlawful killing, disproportionate attack and the starvation of civilians are prohibited without any requirement to prove a destructive purpose toward a group. A finding that acts occurred is therefore not, on the text, a finding of genocide, and the separate body of war crimes claims and the legal record around them runs on the different standard.

Article III lists the punishable forms: genocide itself, conspiracy to commit genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, attempt, and complicity. Incitement is punishable whether or not the act follows, which is why statements by officials feature in the material the Commission of Inquiry assembled.

The Convention sets no numeric threshold. The words “in whole or in part” carry the scale question, and the text supplies no minimum count of deaths above which the crime is made out or below which it is not.

What has the World Court ordered, and what has it decided?

The International Court of Justice has issued three provisional measures orders in the case brought against Israel under the Genocide Convention, dated 26 January 2024, 28 March 2024 and 24 May 2024, and no judgment on the merits. Provisional measures are interim orders to preserve rights while a case proceeds, and the Court states in them that it is not deciding whether the alleged acts occurred.

The standard at that stage is plausibility of the rights asserted, not proof of a violation. An order indicating measures records that the Court considers at least some claimed rights plausible and that there is a risk of irreparable prejudice before judgment. It does not record a finding that genocide has been committed, and the Court’s own orders say so in terms.

How far the interim stage sits from the merits is visible in the one completed precedent. The Court’s single merits judgment under the Genocide Convention, in the case brought by Bosnia and Herzegovina against Serbia and Montenegro, was delivered on 26 February 2007, fourteen years after the application was filed in 1993. Provisional measures in that case were indicated in 1993, and the judgment that resolved the responsibility question came a decade and a half later.

The International Criminal Court operates on a separate track and against individuals rather than states, and its published warrants in the situation concerning Palestine do not carry a genocide charge. Neither institution has produced the thing the question implicitly asks for, which is a determination by a competent court after argument and evidence.

That gap is not neutral to the dispute. On the treaty text set out above, the acts element and the intent element must both be established, and the intent element is the one on which the parties disagree in public. A commission of inquiry has stated that there are reasonable grounds to find it; the state accused of it has published a competing account of its aims and of the machinery it says applies its own standards. Those published texts are the subject of the next two sections.

How does Israel answer the intent requirement?

Israel’s answer runs through its stated aims and its self-reported enforcement. The Israel Defense Forces Military Advocate General’s Corps reported 74 criminal investigations opened as at 3 August 2024 into alleged misconduct in the Gaza war, out of more than 1,000 incidents referred to the General Staff’s Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism. Every figure here is the party’s own count of its own processes, published by a party to the events.

The breakdown the Corps published is 44 investigations concerning the death of detainees held by the IDF, 13 alleged pillaging or stealing, 8 alleged detainee mistreatment, 6 alleged illegal use of force, and 3 alleged destruction of civilian property without military necessity.

The threshold that produces those counts is stated by the Corps itself: in armed conflict, “death or injury to a civilian or harm to civilian objects, while tragic and regrettable, in most cases do not by themselves indicate a reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct, as they can be explained as reasonable aftermath of lawful operational activity.” The investigation count is a function of that standard, and the two travel together. The counts are of investigations opened, not of findings, indictments or convictions.

On aims, the Permanent Mission of Israel to the Multilateral Organizations in France published a position statement last updated 17 September 2025 framing the operation around the hostages and Hamas, and reporting as of 14 September 2025 that 207 hostages had returned or been recovered, 148 alive and 59 deceased, with 48 remaining in captivity. On operational counts, the IDF Spokesperson stated at a briefing on 29 February 2024 that over 13,000 people the IDF describes as terrorists had been eliminated in Gaza since the start of the war. The classification of those counted is the IDF’s own characterisation, is contested, and is not independently verified.

What do Israel’s own aid figures record?

COGAT, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, recorded 1,778,363 metric tons of food entering Gaza between 10 October 2025 and 7 June 2026, a total it reports as nearly threefold the World Food Programme’s monthly requirement benchmark for the period. The tonnage rests on self-declaration by humanitarian organizations and private sector providers rather than weighing at the crossings, and COGAT is a unit of Israel’s Ministry of Defense.

These counts speak to the third act in the Article II list, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction, which was among the four the Commission of Inquiry identified. What each party publishes on the humanitarian picture, and on the tolls, is set out at length in a separate reading of the counts each body publishes.

COGAT also reports a decline of approximately 72% in the Gaza food consumer price index between September 2025 and May 2026, without identifying the source of the price data in the report. In the threefold ratio, only the numerator is COGAT’s own; the denominator is the World Food Programme benchmark.

None of these totals has been independently verified, each is published by a party to the events it describes, and the earlier figures are stated as floors rather than exact counts, so “over 1.9 million tons” cannot be restated as 1,900,000 tons. What they establish is what Israel records having facilitated, and the record is the party’s own.

Which Israeli and non-Israeli analysts reject the finding?

The Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs put a ceiling of at most 41,000 on the number of civilians in Gaza who died of war-related causes through October 2025, derived by subtracting estimated natural deaths and Israel’s count of fighters killed from the Gaza Ministry of Health total.

The Center states on the same page that neither the Ministry’s total nor Israel’s fighter count has been independently confirmed, so the figure is its own arithmetic on inputs supplied by parties to the conflict.

The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University publishes running situation reports on the war carrying cumulative Israeli casualty totals: 1,664 Israelis confirmed killed and 17,809 wounded as at 5 September 2024, of which 1,184 were killed on the single day of 7 October 2023. The reports credit no official body for the killed and wounded figures.

NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based organization with a stated advocacy mission, addresses the sourcing of non-governmental determinations. In its 2024 annual report it states that it identified 157 groups in the United States linked to an anti-Israel network with over 3,000 connections, and 111 groups in Canada with over 1,800 connections. Those are the organization’s own reported counts, and the report does not state the mapping’s method or inclusion criteria.

On the academic side, the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University publishes a research paper series under the title “The Genocide Libel,” which takes the genocide characterisation itself, and its history before the current war, as its subject of study. It is an academic institute’s paper series, not a legal determination and not a measurement.

Israel’s own answer to the intent question, quoted in the preceding section from its Foreign Ministry and its Military Advocate General’s Corps, is the state’s position, and these institutes argue in the same direction on their own reasoning. Each of the numbers above is either an institute’s own arithmetic or an institute’s own count, and none of them is an audited or independently verified total. Set against the Commission of Inquiry’s finding and the association resolutions, what the record holds is a disagreement between named bodies, dated, each publishing on its own method and to its own standard, with the adjudicating instrument absent.

What has been measured about the genocide framing in online discourse?

Among the UK Facebook comments coded as antisemitic by Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022, peer-reviewed), 4.2% used a Nazi analogy and 5.2% an apartheid analogy.

The study analysed 1,504 UK comments on the Facebook pages of leading British media outlets reacting to the May 2021 escalation, of which 26.9% were coded antisemitic against an IHRA-based scheme; the analogy shares are of those coded comments.

The same study coded 1,500 French comments (12.6% antisemitic) and 1,520 German comments (13.6%), and reported that thread context was needed to infer the antisemitic meaning in 38.7% of the UK antisemitic comments, about 62% of the French and 48.3% of the German. The dominant framings in the UK set were not analogies at all but the “evil” stereotype at 39.8% and the attribution of sole guilt to Israel at 27.9%.

Two further peer-reviewed studies measure what such framings are associated with, both correlational and both stating that limit. Enstad (2026, abstract-sourced) ran two nationally representative Norwegian surveys, Study 1 with 1,575 respondents and a preregistered replication with 1,653, and reported that endorsement of Holocaust inversion, the belief that Israel treats Palestinians as badly as Jews were treated during the Second World War, was associated with justification of harassment and violence against Jews and with refusal to take a stance against it. Harber, Bulska, Malloy and Vila (2026, abstract-sourced) reported across three preregistered studies that a model built on conspiracy beliefs implicating Israel and Zionists accounted for over 55% of the variance in anti-Israel attitudes, while conspiracy beliefs about Jews unrelated to Israel did not mediate the relationship.

These are measurements of discourse and of survey attitudes. They record how certain framings travel and what they correlate with, and they carry no information about whether the underlying characterisation of events in Gaza is correct.

Methodology and limitations

This report reads four kinds of material: the treaty text, the findings and orders issued by named bodies, the counts published by parties to the conflict, and peer-reviewed research measuring discourse and attitudes.

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide is a primary record, quoted from its adopted text of 9 December 1948. The Commission of Inquiry’s conclusion of 16 September 2025 is an investigative finding by a body established by the United Nations Human Rights Council, made on a reasonable-grounds standard, and is not a judgment. The provisional measures orders of the International Court of Justice are court records at an interim stage, made on a plausibility standard that the orders themselves distinguish from the merits. The 2007 Bosnia judgment is named here for the timeline it establishes, not for its holdings.

Determinations by Amnesty International, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel are organizational conclusions reached by bodies with stated advocacy missions. The International Association of Genocide Scholars resolution is a membership vote of a professional association; the 86% is a share of members who voted, and the association has not published the number of eligible or participating members.

Every Israeli figure in this report is the publishing body’s own count of its own activity: the Foreign Ministry’s hostage and aid totals, the Military Advocate General’s Corps investigation counts, the IDF Spokesperson’s operational figures, and COGAT’s tonnages, which rest on self-declaration by suppliers rather than measurement at the crossings. None has been independently verified, several are stated as floors (“over,” “approximately”) and must keep those words, and the classification of persons counted as combatants is the IDF’s own and is contested. Figures published by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs and by NGO Monitor are likewise those institutes’ own arithmetic and counts on unstated or partly stated methods.

The research findings in the final section are correlational. Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022) measured comment corpora on three national media Facebook pages during one escalation and does not generalise to platforms or periods it did not sample. Enstad (2026) and Harber and colleagues (2026) are carried from published abstracts, so the reported detail is limited to what those abstracts state, and neither establishes direction of effect. Those studies measure discourse and attitudes; the legal question about events in Gaza is a separate question, settled by neither.

Conclusion

The question has a two-part answer because the Convention has two parts. On the acts, a United Nations commission of inquiry concluded in September 2025 that four of the five acts listed in Article II had been committed, and a professional association of genocide scholars, three organizations with advocacy missions, and two mandate holders have each published the characterisation in their own instruments, dated between December 2024 and October 2025. On the second part, intent, and on the adjudication that would settle it, the record holds three interim orders, a plausibility standard the orders themselves distinguish from the merits, and the fact that the only merits judgment ever entered under the Convention arrived fourteen years after filing.

Alongside those findings sit the counts Israel publishes about itself: 207 hostages returned or recovered as of September 2025, 74 criminal investigations opened by August 2024 out of more than 1,000 incidents referred, on a stated threshold under which civilian death does not by itself establish suspicion, and 1,778,363 metric tons of food recorded entering Gaza across eight months of ceasefire, none of it verified by anyone other than the body that counted it. A reader who wants the answer from an authority that binds will not find it in this record; a reader who wants to know who has said what, when, and on what standard, will.

What the measured research adds is about the words rather than the events. In one coded corpus of British comment threads, the Nazi analogy appeared in 4.2% of antisemitic comments and the apartheid analogy in 5.2%, while the older stereotypes carried far more of the traffic. In two Norwegian national surveys, endorsement of Holocaust inversion tracked with the justification of harassment and violence against Jews. The vocabulary of the gravest crime in the treaty book is now everyday vocabulary in feeds where the underlying question will never be adjudicated, and that raises a question worth sitting with: when a legal term with a fourteen-year evidentiary road becomes a daily assertion in a comment thread, what does the thread do with it, and who ends up standing in for the accused?

Frequently Asked Questions

What does the Genocide Convention punish besides the act itself?

Article III of the 1948 Convention lists five punishable forms: genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, attempt to commit genocide, and complicity in genocide. Incitement is punishable as a separate offence whether or not the act follows.

Does the Convention set a minimum number of deaths?

No numeric threshold appears in the text. Article II carries the scale question in the words “in whole or in part,” and supplies no count above which the crime is made out or below which it is not, which is why the dispute runs on the acts and the intent rather than on a figure.

How does an investigative finding differ from a judgment on the merits?

A commission of inquiry established by the United Nations Human Rights Council reports to that Council on a reasonable-grounds standard and cannot enter a binding determination against a state. A merits judgment follows adversarial proceedings and a higher evidentiary standard; the only one ever entered under the Genocide Convention was delivered in 2007, fourteen years after the case was filed.

What does Israel’s military ethical code require toward civilians?

The IDF’s published code states under Purity of Arms that a soldier “will not use their weapon or power to harm uninvolved civilians and prisoners and will do everything in their power to prevent harm to their lives, bodies, dignity and property,” and under Discipline that soldiers “do not follow illegal orders.” The code records the standard the force sets for itself and is not evidence about conduct in any particular incident.

How much aid does Israel report entering Gaza in trucks?

Israel’s Foreign Ministry reported that more than 106,000 aid trucks carrying over two million tons of food, water, medicine and equipment had entered Gaza since October 2023, as of 14 September 2025, and more than 12,000 trucks since May 2025, 80% of them carrying food. Those are Israel’s stated totals, and the Ministry refers readers to COGAT’s data site for the underlying detail.

Do the Norwegian surveys measure how widespread Holocaust inversion is?

Enstad (2026) reports associations rather than prevalence: across two nationally representative surveys, Study 1 with 1,575 respondents and a preregistered replication with 1,653, endorsement of Holocaust inversion was associated with justification of aggression against Jews and with refusal to take a stance against it. No population share for endorsement appears in the published abstract.

Why does the number of criminal investigations depend on the threshold applied?

Because the threshold decides which referred incidents become investigations. The IDF Military Advocate General’s Corps states that in armed conflict civilian death or injury “in most cases do not by themselves indicate a reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct,” so a count of 74 investigations drawn from more than 1,000 referred incidents reflects that standard as much as it reflects the incidents.

Sources

• Becker, M. J., Ascone, L., and Troschke, H., 2022. Antisemitic comments on Facebook pages of leading British, French, and German media outlets. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 9. DOI 10.1057/s41599-022-01337-8. Peer-reviewed.
• Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, 2025. The Gaza Terror Offensive, 1 August to 5 September 2024. besacenter.org. Research institute.
• COGAT (Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories), 2026. Humanitarian Situation Report During the Ceasefire. gaza-aid-data.gov.il. Official record, party’s own reporting.
• Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted 9 December 1948, United Nations General Assembly resolution 260 A (III), Articles II and III. Treaty text, primary record.
• Enstad, J. D., 2026. Holocaust inversion and justification of anti-Jewish aggression: evidence from two national surveys in Norway. American Psychologist. DOI 10.1037/amp0001704. Peer-reviewed, abstract-sourced.
• Harber, K. D., Bulska, D., Malloy, T. E., and Vila, J., 2026. Antisemitism, conspiracy beliefs, and anti-Israel attitudes. American Psychologist. DOI 10.1037/amp0001635. Peer-reviewed, abstract-sourced.
• Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, Indiana University. The Genocide Libel: Research Paper Series. isca.indiana.edu. Academic research institute.
• Israel Defense Forces, 2024. Press briefing by IDF Spokesperson, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, 29 February 2024. idf.il. Official record, party’s own reporting.
• Israel Defense Forces, 2025. Clearing Up the Misconceptions: Everything You Need to Know About the Humanitarian Aid Situation in Gaza. idf.il. Official record, party’s own reporting.
• Israel Defense Forces. The Spirit of the IDF: the ethical code and its values. idf.il. Official record, party’s own published doctrine.
• Israel Defense Forces, Military Advocate General’s Corps, 2024. Addressing Alleged Misconduct in the Context of the War in Gaza, published 24 February 2024, updated 3 August 2024. idf.il. Official record, party’s own reporting.
• Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2023. Israel-Hamas Conflict 2023: Humanitarian Efforts. gov.il. Official record, party’s own reporting.
• Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Permanent Mission of Israel to the Multilateral Organizations in France, 2025. Israel’s Objectives and Current Operation, updated 17 September 2025. embassies.gov.il. Official record, party’s own reporting.
• Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, 2025. The Death of Genocide. jcfa.org. Research institute.
• NGO Monitor, 2025. Annual Report 2024. ngo-monitor.org. Monitoring organization, advocacy mission.
• Reuters, 2025. How did a UN inquiry find genocide has been committed in Gaza, and Leading genocide scholars association resolution, September 2025. reuters.com. News report.