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“Genocide is taking place in Gaza,” MSF says

Israeli forces are “crushing the entire population of Gaza”, Médecins Sans Frontières warns in a new report – the latest by an international organisation to describe Israeli military actions in Gaza as ethnic cleansing and genocide.

The Israeli military is “destroying the conditions of life” in Gaza through 14 months of attacks on civilians, dismantling the healthcare system and infrastructure, and denying humanitarian aid, the aid organisation said.

“We are seeing clear signs of ethnic cleansing as Palestinians are forcibly displaced, trapped, and bombed,” MSF secretary general Christopher Lockyear said in a statement. “What our medical teams have witnessed on the ground throughout this conflict is consistent with the descriptions provided by an increasing number of legal experts and organisations concluding that genocide is taking place in Gaza.”

Also on 19 December, Human Rights Watch released a separate report accusing Israeli authorities of committing extermination and acts of genocide in Gaza.

The analysis is hinged to water: Israeli authorities, the rights watchdog said, cut off and restricted access to piped water, destroyed sanitation infrastructure, and blocked entry for repair materials and water supplies. 

Israel’s destruction of Gaza has killed at least 45,000 people since 7 October 2023. Israeli authorities say they’re targeting Hamas for attacks that killed at least 1,200 Israeli citizens and foreign nationals. Many governments, legal analysts, health workers and humanitarians in Gaza, as well as international courts say Israel’s actions and years-long occupation are grossly disproportionate and illegal – and that Israeli forces have killed and eradicated civilians, destroyed basic infrastructure, and targeted aid workers. 

Fearing blowback from Israeli authorities and donors, many aid groups have censored their language on Israel and Gaza – particularly when it comes to describing possible war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

MSF and HRW join a growing list of international organisations who are describing Israeli actions in Gaza as a genocide. 

In October, an ActionAid International statement said Palestinian people under Israeli occupation face “violent forceful displacement, oppression, and genocide”. Earlier this month, the rights group Amnesty International concluded Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, in a report that some aid organisations were eyeing to inform their thinking on how to describe Israel’s actions.

Oxfam has called Israel’s repeated siege of north Gaza “the late stages of ethnic cleansing”.

For more, read our recent editorial, and our investigation showing how Israel’s security forces targeted and killed aid workers and destroyed a plan to distribute aid to northern Gaza:

A collage showing: On the left, a young boy sitting on two stacked aid boxes, looking to the right of the image. In the lower-third, you can see an Israeli soldier standing guard near a humanitarian aid truck. In the top right corner we see a woman called Nozha Awad fleeing with her triplets in her arms. On the left of this image we see smoke rising at a distance following an Israeli strike while Palestinians are seen on a road fleeing north Gaza to move southward.

Targeted aid killings: How Israel starved a population and sowed chaos in northern Gaza

Experts say the series of Israeli attacks that violently dismantled a UN-backed humanitarian effort shows “a pattern of apparent war crimes”.

Palestinian walk amidst the rubble of buildings destroyed after an Israeli strike, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip September 1, 2024.

Aid agencies: History will judge your failure to call out Israeli war crimes as complicity

You don’t have to wait for the charge of genocide to be legally established to condemn Israel’s generational war crimes in Gaza.

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