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The new 72-page legal analysis from the United Nations’ commission of inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel is the strongest finding by part of the UN on Gaza to date.
It accuses Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, saying that its offensive there has been waged “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”.
Created four years ago by the UN’s human rights council and staffed by three independent experts, the commission does not officially speak for the UN, which has not yet used the term “genocide” itself but is under increasing pressure to do so.
Israel’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Daniel Meron, called the report “scandalous” and “fake”, saying it had been authored by “Hamas proxies”. He told journalists: “Israel categorically rejects the libellous rant published today by this commission of inquiry.”
Israel has rejected the charge of genocide, citing its right to self-defence after the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, andtook 251 hostages. The subsequent war in Gaza has killed more than 64,000 people, mostly civilians, and injured more than 160,000.
What the report says
To count as genocide under the 1948 UN genocide convention, adopted after the murder of 6 million Jewish people in the Holocaust, at least one of five acts must have occurred. The UN commission accuses Israel of committing four. It cited as evidence interviews with victims, witnesses and doctors, verified open-source documents, reporting by media and NGOs, and satellite imagery analysis compiled since the war began.
In the first category of killing, the commission quotes UN reporting that as of 15 July 2025, at least 46% of Palestinians killed in Gaza were women and children. The commission also cited reporting by the Guardian based on Israeli intelligence that 83% of those killed in Gaza were civilians.
Israel has used heavy unguided munitions with a wide margin of error in densely populated residential areas … The number of bombs used by Israel since 7 October 2023 is extraordinary even in comparison to other world conflicts.
Palestinians in Gaza were attacked in their homes, at hospitals, in shelters (including schools and religious sites), during the evacuations and in designated safe zones. At times, civilians, journalists, healthcare professionals, humanitarian workers and other protected persons were directly targeted and killed.
The commission highlighted the killing of five children when their family car was targeted near a petrol station in the Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood of Gaza City on 29 January 2024, noting that Israeli security forces fired on an ambulance, “preventing access to the victims”.
It also pointed to casualties that resulted from tight restrictions on humanitarian aid – especially medicine and medical equipment – from entering Gaza, quoting an obstetrician who spoke about deaths of pregnant women he had treated, whom he referred to as “indirect victims of war”.
The commission describes at length the killing of 15 paramedics by Israeli forces in southern Gaza in March and “notes the consistent pattern of conduct demonstrated by the Israeli security forces in the aftermath of attacks, in that they have often denied and shifted responsibilities until evidence that contradicts their narrative surfaced”, also pointing to an acute lack of accountability.
The report said Israeli authorities knew of the high numbers of casualties in Gaza since 7 October 2023 but “did not intervene to change the means and methods of warfare employed [but] persisted over time and caused even more Palestinian deaths”.
“The Commission therefore finds that the Israeli authorities intended to kill as many Palestinians as possible through its military operations in Gaza since 7 October 2023 and knew that the means and methods of warfare employed would cause mass deaths of Palestinians, including children,” it says.
Turning to the second category of acts that qualify as genocidal, causing serious bodily or mental harm, the commission highlighted the mistreatment of Palestinian detainees by Israeli security forces and mass displacement which, it said, “has caused serious and irreparable physical and mental harm to Palestinians in Gaza who have lost their homes and have been forced to live in inhumane conditions”.
In the third category of deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, the report noted that much of Gaza had been rendered virtually uninhabitable, that huge numbers of bakeries, schools, cultural sites and religious landmarks had been completely destroyed, and that attacks on hospitals had led to a collapse of the healthcare system. It also highlighted the recent declaration by respected UN-backed monitors of famine in parts of Gaza.
Considering the evidence in totality, the Commission has found that Israeli authorities were aware of the high probability that their military operations, the imposition of a total siege … and the destruction of housing and of health systems and facilities would lead to the physical destruction of Palestinians, in whole or in part, in Gaza … The Commission therefore finds that Israeli authorities knowingly and deliberately inflicted such conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of Palestinians in Gaza.
The section on the fourth category of imposing measures intended to prevent births is more concise, and focuses largely on the high proportion of casualties who were children, and the attack in December 2023 against the al-Basma IVF clinic, Gaza’s largest fertility clinic, which reportedly destroyed about 4,000 embryos and 1,000 sperm samples and unfertilised eggs.
“It is reasonable to conclude that the Israeli security forces knew of the function of the clinic and intended to target it and destroy the reproductive material within,” the report concludes, adding that “the widespread and systematic targeting of children is part of a strategy to destroy the biological continuity and future existence of the Palestinian group in Gaza”.
Intent
International law experts say that it is often difficult to support genocide charges because of the requirement to prove intent, or even in some circumstances, sole intent.
The commission concluded that statements by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, and other officials were “direct evidence of genocidal intent”.
The report cited his letter to Israeli soldiers in November 2023 comparing the Gaza operation to what the commission describes as a “holy war of total annihilation” in the Hebrew Bible.
The report also named the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, and the former defence minister Yoav Gallant.
Navi Pillay, the South African former judge who is the most senior of the report’s three authors, headed a UN tribunal for Rwanda where more than 1 million people were killed in 1994.
“The commission concludes that statements made by Israeli authorities are direct evidence of genocidal intent [and] also concludes that the pattern of conduct is circumstantial evidence for genocidal intent and that genocidal intent was the only reasonably inference that can be drawn from the totality of the evidence,” she told reporters on Tuesday.
