Around 3,500 young people had gathered in a dusty field outside the Re’im kibbutz — located hardly 3.3 miles (a four-minute and 12-second drive) from the wall that separates Gaza from southern Israel — on October 7 last year. The Tribe of Nova gathering was celebrating the Jewish holiday of Sukkot when white flashes of rockets filled the horizon.
Within minutes, the dance field and several other neighbourhoods turned into a slaughterhouse as Hamas fighters breached the border fence — some descending in paragliders, others by road — killed over 1,100 Israelis and took dozens of hostages in what went on to become the worst civilian massacre in Israel’s history.
Tel Aviv immediately responded with massive retaliatory air strikes, killing scores of Palestinians in the crowded Gaza Strip, where 2.3 million people have been living under an Israel-imposed land, sea and air blockade for the past 16 years. “Our enemy will pay a price the type of which it has never known,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed in an address following the attack.
A year on, Israel has turned Gaza into a “death zone”, killing almost 42,000 people and injuring thousands more (these are conservative estimates and only account for the deaths of Palestinians whose identities have been ascertained — there may be thousands others under the rubble or simply incinerated by Israel’s munitions who are unaccounted for). Every one in five Palestinians, or about 96 per cent of the enclave’s population, is facing starvation. Over 60pc of Gaza’s farmland — known for producing strawberries, olives, dates, oranges and grapefruit — has been wiped out.
For Palestinians, the last 364 days can be described in three words: decimation, destruction and displacement. United Nations experts have even gone on to say that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the crime of genocide … has been met” during the Israeli offensive in Gaza. The International Court of Justice also hinted at the same in its landmark ruling on January 26.
Israel, the state which was born in the aftermath of a carnage that gave the world the word “genocide”, has now been accused of committing the same in Gaza.
Genocide, coined by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, consists of the Greek prefix genos, meaning race or tribe, and the Latin suffix cide, meaning killing. The term was developed partly in response to Nazi policies of the Jewish people’s systemic murder during the Holocaust.
The UN General Assembly first recognised genocide as a crime under international law in 1946. It was later codified as an independent crime in the 1948 Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, also known as the Genocide Convention.
According to the Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group:
- 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
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
“The victims of genocide are deliberately targeted — not randomly — because of their real or perceived membership of one of the four groups protected under the Convention (which excludes political groups, for example). This means that the target of destruction must be the group, as such, and not its members as individuals,” the Convention says.
This piece is an attempt to document all the genocidal acts, which fall within the parameters set by the convention, committed by Israel against Palestinians during the last one year — from bombing hospitals and shelter camps to driving vulnerable Gazans out of their homeland.
A note of caution here: while we have tried to be as comprehensive as possible, this list may not cover all of Israel’s atrocities simply because of the information blockade imposed by the Israeli government on Gaza.
