By Thursday, 18 September 2025, 12:14 Pm Opinion: Binoy Kampmark

Copyright scoop

Yet another blistering addition to the ghoulish accounts
of cruelty regarding the ongoing actions of Israel in Gaza
made its appearance on September 16. It came in the form of

report by the United Nations Independent International
Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory,
a lashing publication finding Israel guilty of committing
genocide on the Strip. Of the five elements outlined in the
1948 Genocide Convention, Israel was found guilty of four.
(The state’s interest in transferring Palestinian children
from one group to another is yet to show itself.)

relevant acts outlined in the report include instances of
killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, the
deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to
bring about physical destruction, and imposing measures
intended to prevent births, all conducted with the specific
intent to destroy the Palestinian people as a group.
“Today we witness in real time how the promise of ‘never
again’ is broken and tested in the eyes of the world,”

the Commission’s chair Navi Pillay in a press conference
following the report’s release.

This report finds
itself in the adhesive if gruesome company of such
publications as Amnesty International’s December 2024
effort, You
Feel Like You are Subhuman to the August 2025 conclusions
of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. The
Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the
Palestinian territories, occupied since 1967, Francesca
Albanese, has also been admirably busy drumming
up interest in the links between genocide and
starvation. Such bountiful material has yet to convince the
Israeli authorities to pause their efforts in Gaza, now
culminating in the systematic destruction of Gaza City and
the displacement of its population.

The Commission
authors, all sound and weighty figures of international
jurisprudence, also found that Israeli President Isaac
Herzog, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence
Minister Yoav Gallant “incited the commission of genocide
and that Israeli authorities have failed to take action
against them to punish this incitement.” More broadly,
Israel’s political and military leaders responsible for
prosecuting the war strategy “are ultimately responsible
for the commission of the underlying acts of genocide by
members of the Israeli security forces”, with such leaders
being “agents of the State of Israel”.

state for establishing genocide had been established by
relevant statements made by members of the Israeli
authorities. In addition to this, there was
“circumstantial evidence of genocidal intent and that
genocidal intent was the only reasonable inference that
could be drawn from the totality of the evidence.” Israeli
authorities and security forces “had and continue to have
the genocidal intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

Commission also makes various recommendations, including the
obvious one of ending the commission of genocide and
Israel’s compliance with the three provisional orders of
the International Court of Justice (ICJ) made in January,
March and May last year; the immediate implementation of a
permanent ceasefire in Gaza and conclusion of military
operations in the occupied Palestinian territory that entail
genocidal acts; the restoration of the United Nations aid
model, unimpeded; and the investigation and punishment of
acts of genocide and incitement to genocide against the
Palestinians in the Strip.

Pointed words
are also reserved for the international community, among
them that all Member States pull their weight in insuring
the prevention of genocidal acts in the Strip, cease the
transfer of arms and equipment to Israel or third parties
“where there is reason to suspect their use in military
operations that have involved or could involve the
commission of genocide”, ensure that corporations and
individuals within their territories and jurisdiction are
not part of the genocidal program, and facilitate necessary
investigations and prosecutive proceedings against the State
of Israel and corporations and individuals regarding
genocide, its facilitation and incitement.

Commission arose in 2021, when it was
established by the UN Human Rights Council to
investigate alleged violations of international law in the
Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem,
and in Israel. The September report makes much of three
previous reports issued by the COI, and three papers
relevant to international law violations committed by all
the parties to the conflict.

To have reached findings
of genocidal intent is a tall order indeed. The mental
threshold needed to satisfy genocidal intent is a dizzyingly
high bar to meet. The ICJ, even as it considers Israel’s
own actions in Gaza at the litigious
prodding of South Africa, has shown itself reluctant to
identify the destructive intent (dolus specialis)
against an identifiable group as protected by the UN
Genocide Convention. In the Bosnia v
Serbia case, Serbia was not found to be responsible
for the commission of genocide, but for its failure in
preventing it with respect to the killings of over 7,000
Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in July 1995. The Court
imposed a giddy standard of proof: that the pattern of acts
in destroying the identifiable group should “have to be
such that it could only point to the existence of such
intent”. It was a standard criticised by Judge Awn
Al-Khasawneh in his dissenting
opinion, feeling that such acts as “population
transfers” and “evidence of massive killings
systematically targeting the Bosnian Muslims” evidenced
obvious genocidal intent.

In 2015, the ICJ also found that
neither Serbia or Croatia had committed acts of genocide
against each other’s populations during the disintegration
of Yugoslavia, despite killings and the infliction of
serious bodily or mental harm to both groups by virtue of
them being members of an ethnic group.

Judge Antônio
Augusto Cançado Trindade, in his dissenting opinion in
Croatia v Serbia, proffers a salutary observation:
“perpetrators of genocide will almost always allege that
they were in armed conflict, and their actions were taken
‘pursuant to an ongoing military conflict’; yet,
‘genocide may be a means for achieving military objectives
just as readily as military conflict may be a means for
instigating a genocidal plan”.

There is certainly
much to draw upon, be it the Commission’s findings, or the
excoriating report
by UN Special Rapporteur Albanese. The latter tartly exposes
the misuse of international humanitarian law as an
instrument of Israeli advancement, making a mockery of aid
to the very people the state seeks to dislocate, kill and

The response from Israel is also instructive
in terms of how that state fits within the law of nations,
which it has sought to reinterpret with postmodern
elasticity. A statement
from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs makes short
work of the report as “distorted” and “false”,
accusing the authors as “Hamas proxies, notorious for
their antisemitic positions” and demanding the
“immediate abolition of this Commission of Inquiry.”
That would be all too convenient.

Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College,
Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email:
bkampmark@gmail.com

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