By Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg
Copyright truthout
The Israeli government has “deliberately deprived Palestinians in Gaza of resources indispensable for their survival,” according to a United Nations report released Tuesday.
The report, released by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, found that “such actions deliberately inflicted conditions of life on the Palestinians in Gaza calculated to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians in Gaza, which is an underlying act of genocide.”
Earlier this month, on September 16, the UN concluded that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
The commission’s report found that Israel “extensively and systematically demolished civilian infrastructure in the corridors and buffer zone and continuously enlarged areas under their control reaching 75 percent of the Gaza Strip by July 2025.”
Since October 2023, Israel has decimated Gaza, destroying schools, universities, homes, and hospitals, and forcibly displacing about 90 percent of the population. The UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) has declared famine in Gaza, which UN Secretary-General António Guterres called “a man-made disaster, a moral indictment — and a failure of humanity itself.”
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently said that the destruction of Gaza will mean “a real estate bonanza,” for Israel and that they had “already begun negotiations with the Americans” on a “business plan” that was on President Donald Trump’s desk, according to Haaretz.
“We paid a lot of money for the war, so we need to decide how to divide the percentages of the land in Gaza. The demolition phase is always the first phase of urban renewal. We did that, now we need to start building,” he said, per Haaretz.
The UN report also examined Israel’s actions in the occupied West Bank, where settlers have violently attacked Palestinians and soldiers have demolished their homes.
“In the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Israeli policies and actions implemented since October 2023 – including explicit and implicit support for actions of violent settlers – demonstrate clear intent to forcibly transfer Palestinians, expand Israeli Jewish civilian presence and annex the entirety of the West Bank, preventing any potential Palestinian self-determination and statehood and maintaining an indefinite occupation,” the report reads.
Navi Pillay, chair of the UN commission, said, “Israeli encroachment into the entirety of the West Bank and the dispossession and relocation of multiple Palestinian communities are now explicit goals, which Israeli officials proudly boast about.”
“I am particularly appalled by the Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich’s recently announced plan of annexing 82 percent of the occupied West Bank, and by the approval of a plan cementing the E1 settlement expansion, with Prime Minister Netanyahu asserting that this will ensure there will be no Palestinian State,” she said. “These plans and statements are abhorrent and must be condemned widely.”
The report identifies six Israeli ministers as “likely bearing the most responsibility for international crimes relating to land and housing, as well as other crimes identified in the Commission’s previous reports,” including Smotrich and Minister of Settlements and National Projects Orit Strock, who “are jointly responsible for driving settlement construction and expansion in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”
The report says Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “ultimately responsible for Israel’s conduct in the whole of the Occupied Palestinian Territory and is directly responsible for ordering the commission of acts that constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of genocide.”
