By Charlie Lewis

Copyright crikey

Israeli authorities are committing genocide in Gaza, intended to “kill as many Palestinians as possible”, and have committed the crime against humanity of extermination, a UN report has found.

The report, from the United Nations Commission of Inquiry, established by the UN Human Rights Council, cites direct targeting of civilians, including children, and mass killings in “far larger numbers compared to previous 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.

In response, Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong — who has refused to say whether any new action would be taken in light of this report — said, vaguely, that Australia has “condemned Israel’s denial of aid and the killing of civilians seeking to access water and food”. She added: “We reiterate our demand on the Netanyahu government to reach a ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza, and to stop undermining a two-state solution.”

It’s clear this report has failed to change anything in the government’s response — and that it still refuses to utter the g-word.

But as the report starkly puts it (in paragraph 249), the plausible case that Israel was perpetuating a genocide in Gaza was becoming clear as early as the International Court of Justice’s order of January 26, 2024:

… the Commission finds that, since at least 26 January 2024, when the International Court of Justice ordered its first provisional measures, all States Parties to the Genocide Convention, and all other States too, have been on notice of a serious risk that genocide was being or would be committed. As such, the duty to prevent genocide was triggered due to the actual or constructive knowledge of the immediate plausibility that genocide was being or was about to be committed.

That, clearly, wasn’t enough for any concrete action or condemnation from the Albanese government. Since January 2024, it has had the following opportunities to act:

In March 2024, Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur, delivered a report that found:

there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the following acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has been met: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to groups’ members; and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. Genocidal acts were approved and given effect following statements of genocidal intent issued by senior military and government officials.

On May 15, 2024, a group of international legal experts called the University Network for Human Rights submitted a report to the UN after conducting a legal analysis of Israel’s military operation in Gaza since October 7, 2023, finding that Israel has committed and continues to commit genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

In a November 2024 interview, Israeli-American Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University Omer Bartov said: “You can say now that this is clearly an operation whose goal is to destroy the ability of Palestinians to live in that area as a group. And, in my definition, that is genocide.” Many, many other genocide and international scholars have concurred.

On December 4, 2024, Amnesty International concluded that there was a genocide taking place in Gaza.

On December 19, 2024, Human Rights Watch called it a genocide, concluding, “Israeli authorities have deliberately inflicted conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of part of the population in Gaza by intentionally depriving Palestinian civilians there of adequate access to water, most likely resulting in thousands of deaths.”

As we’ve previously noted, the August 2025 assessment of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) that “Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in Article II of the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948)” wasn’t enough for Australia to accept the responsibility to “punish and prevent” genocide under the UN convention.

Also this week, Israel has followed days of aerial bombardment by launching a ground offensive into Gaza City. Thousands have had to flee. “Gaza is burning,” Defense Minister Israel Katz posted as the operations commenced. United Nations secretary-general António Guterres said:

What happened in Gaza today is horrendous. We are seeing massive destruction of neighbourhoods, now the systematic destruction of Gaza City. We are seeing massive killing of civilians in a way that I do not remember in any conflict since I am secretary-general.

We’ll just add the UN report to the pile.