Yes, Israel is committing genocide

The starvation of Gaza leaves no room for doubt.

Genocide, as defined by the United Nations, is:

a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part.

The following text is from an NPR article, with the headline Israel blocked all supplies into Gaza for almost 3 months.

Israel had blocked all food, medicine and supplies into Gaza for nearly three months, the longest ever total blockade it has ever imposed on Gaza, seeking to pressure Hamas and to create a new aid distribution system to isolate the militant group from access to the aid.

But Israel is relenting amid international pressure to allow food into the territory. A United Nations-backed group of experts on hunger said there was a risk of famine in Gaza.

Responding to right-wing Israeli protest over the sudden about-face in Israel's aid blockade, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video that U.S. senators, whom he did not name, told him they would not be able to continue giving Israel military and diplomatic support if there was mass starvation in Gaza.

"We are going to take control of the entire Gaza Strip," Netanyahu said. "We need to do it in a way that they won't stop us."

That is definitionally a war crime, which is defined by Oxford Languages as “an action carried out during the conduct of a war that violates accepted international rules of war”. It’s so bad that even many Zionists (defined as people who support the establishment and protection of a Jewish state in Israel) have called Israel’s current actions a genocide. Not a war crime, not ethnic cleansing, but genocide.

The following is from an article from the Forward, with the headline I supported Israel’s actions in Gaza in October 2023 — not anymore. The subheading says “Critics were wrong that Israel’s 2023 actions constituted genocide — but they are right in 2025”.

When Israel’s military operations in Gaza began in October 2023, I defended them — several times, in fact, in this publication. But now, 19 months later, I am horrified, filled with rage and despair, and alienated from many of my friends who now openly support extreme cruelty and even ethnic cleansing. The Netanyahu regime has made me, and liberal Zionists like me, look like the worst thing any Israeli can call another: a freier. A sucker. A fool.

What has it wrought lately? A two-month suspension of humanitarian aid, which has, in the words of an Israeli-American memo, caused Gazans to “endur[e] extreme deprivation,” and now an announcement that when aid resumes, it will serve only 1.2 million of Gaza’s 2 million people. The other 800,000 are literally just supposed to starve.

I’d been arguing that Israel was trying to commit genocide (or at least ethnic cleansing) since not long after October 7th. But at that time, there was still aid going into Gaza to some extent, although its distribution was struggling. With my knowledge of the situation, I still figured that Israel was trying to commit genocide, but I was more willing to give the benefit of the doubt to people who argued the other side.

I do think that Israel deliberately blocked aid to Gaza in 2024 (from Propublica) but I’m not going to push the point too hard, because at this point it’s undeniable. Israel has already captured Rafah and reduced Hamas down from Gaza’s de facto government to a mere insurgency. There is no longer anything CLOSE to a pretense that they are still waging war. All they’re doing now is killing Palestinians.

Anyone still denying that Israel is committing genocide is either woefully uninformed or actively malicious. Or both.

I’m not inherently anti-Zionist. I lean pretty strongly towards a two state solution, simply because any one state solution has to figure out how to deal with the 7 million people from the other state. I do think that Israel is relatively responsible for the current state of the conflict—I might write more about this in the future, but for now I can recommend these three articles by Sara Roy from Harvard:

• The Gaza Strip: A Case of Economic De-Development

• De-development Revisited: Palestinian Economy and Society Since Oslo

• Reconceptualizing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Key Paradigm Shifts

My main takeaway from those articles is that Israel reduced Palestine to a welfare state via various official and unofficial economic sanctions, which led to the rise of modern-day Hamas.

This is not to take blame away from Hamas. I have a very distinct memory of me and my friends’ reactions when October 7 happened. We were all of differing political orientations, with some leftists, some Zionists, and some who were both, but I remember that we all had the same reaction. It came in two parts:

1. Oh shit. Israel is about to do some war crimes and reduce Palestine to rubble. This is very bad. Netanyahu and the right-wingers are very evil for this.

   1. Additionally, all of us were horrified by the violence that happened on October 7th. Israeli civilians were kidnapped, tortured, murdered, and raped. No amount of “but they did it first!” justifies any of these actions, and I still am quite critical of people who deny that October 7th was anything other than a terrorist attack (or in the same vein, people who think that Hamas is not a terrorist organization).

2. Why the hell did Hamas attack Israel?? They must know the same things that we do. In a time of relative peace, why would you knowingly attack Israel if you know that they’ll return your attack 100-fold??

Israel is starving millions of Palestinians, for no other reason than to kill them. Make no more excuses, and call it what it is.

Genocide.