Researchers from Israel, the Netherlands, the US, the UK, Australia, Croatia and Canada say Israel’s conduct meets the legal threshold of genocide
By Sondos Asem, Reposted from Middle East Eye, May 17, 2025
A growing number of the world’s leading genocide scholars believe that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide, according to an investigation by Dutch newspaper NRC.
The paper interviewed seven renowned genocide and Holocaust researchers* from six countries – including Israel – all of whom described the Israeli campaign in Gaza as genocidal. Many said their peers in the field share this assessment.
“Can I name someone whose work I respect who does not think it is genocide? No, there is no counterargument that takes into account all the evidence,” Israeli researcher Raz Segal told NRC.
Professor Ugur Umit Ungor of the University of Amsterdam and NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies said that while there are certainly researchers who say it is not genocide, “I don’t know them”.
The Dutch paper reviewed 25 recent academic articles published in the Journal of Genocide Research, the field’s leading journal, and found that “all eight academics from the field of genocide studies see genocide or at least genocidal violence in Gaza”.
“And that is remarkable for a field in which there is no clarity about what genocide itself exactly is,” it noted.
Leading human rights organisations have also reached the conclusion that Israel is committing genocide. In December 2024, Amnesty International became the first major organisation to conclude that Israel had committed genocide during its war on Gaza, while Human Rights Watch more conservatively concluded that “genocidal acts” had been committed.
Francesca Albanese, the UN’s top expert on Palestine, authored two reports last year suggesting that genocide was taking place in Gaza.
Genocide studies as a discipline does not treat the issue as a binary, the NRC report said. Rather than asking whether genocide has happened or not, scholars see it as a gradual process.
Ungor compares it to a “dimmer switch” rather than an on-off light.
“Contrary to public opinion, leading genocide researchers are surprisingly unanimous: the Netanyahu government, they say, is in that process – according to the majority, even in its final stages,” the investigation concluded. “That is why most researchers no longer speak only of ‘genocidal violence’, but of ‘genocide’.”
Since Israel’s devastating onslaught on Gaza in October 2023, at least 53,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 15,000 children.
The World Health Organisation reported this week that 57 children have died of malnutrition since Israel’s total ban on humanitarian aid, in effect since 2 March.
The WHO predicts that nearly 71,000 children under the age of five will suffer acute malnutrition over the next 11 months if the ban on aid continues.
Meanwhile, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a global network of UN agencies and humanitarian groups, reported last week that nearly half a million people in Gaza, or 22 percent of the population, are expected to face “catastrophic” hunger from May to September.
‘It happens because it happens’
The report noted that even researchers who had previously hesitated to use the term have since changed their position, such as Shmuel Lederman of the Open University of Israel.
It also referred to the opinion of Canadian international law scholar William Schabas that Israel is committing genocide, although he is considered otherwise conservative with respect to genocide labelling.
In an interview with Middle East Eye last month, Schabas said Israel’s campaign in Gaza was “absolutely” a genocide.
“There’s nothing comparable in recent history,” said Schabas. “The borders are closed, the people have nowhere to go, and they’re destruction has made life essentially impossible in Gaza.
“We see that combined with the ambition, expressed sometimes very openly by both Trump and Netanyahu, and by the Israelis, to reconfigure Gaza as some sort of eastern Mediterranean Riviera.”
Israel’s inaction following the January 2024 interim ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) was a decisive factor in leading many scholars to conclude that its conduct in Gaza amounts to genocide, NRC reported.
The legally binding ruling ordered Israel to take immediate steps to prevent genocide by allowing aid into Gaza and stopping dehumanising rhetoric that incited the extermination of Palestinians.
Lederman initially opposed the use of the genocide label. However, following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s dismissal of the ICJ’s ruling, the continued closure of land crossings to Gaza, and a letter by 99 US health workers stating that the death toll in Gaza exceeded 100,000, he was convinced that Israel’s actions do in fact constitute genocide.
Meanwhile, Melanie O’Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, told NRC that Israel’s deliberate denial of food, water, shelter, and sanitation was the key factor in her determination that the military campaign was a genocide.
For all scholars interviewed by NRC, what ultimately influenced their assessment was a holistic view of the situation, the totality of the conduct and the sum of all war crimes viewed together.
The scholars also refuted claims in western public debate that Israel’s military campaign is solely aimed at defeating Hamas, that there is no explicit plan to annihilate the population, that the entire Gaza population has not been killed, that the situation is unlike the Holocaust or that a legal ruling has yet to be issued.
They argued that these points reflect fundamental misunderstandings of how genocide is defined under international law.
The Genocide Convention is a treaty on the prevention and punishment of genocide, rather than waiting for it to fully unfold. The treaty also refers to the partial or complete destruction of a group, not solely its total eradication. For example, the killing of 8,000 Bosniak men in Srebrenica in 1995 is legally recognised as genocide, despite being smaller in scale than the Holocaust.
O’Brien noted that genocide is not dependent on judicial confirmation to be real. “It happens because it happens.”
*The scientists interviewed by NRC are:
Shmuel Lederman: Israeli researcher at the Open University of Israel
Anthony Dirk Moses: Australian professor at the City University of New York and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Genocide Research
Melanie O’Brien: Australian lawyer, researcher at the University of Western Australia, and president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars
Raz Segal: Israeli genocide researcher at Stockton University in New Jersey, US
Martin Shaw: British professor at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals, emeritus professor at the University of Sussex, and author of the book What Is Genocide?
Ugur Umit Ungor: Dutch professor at the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies
Iva Vukusic: Croatian genocide researcher at Utrecht University
Sondos Asem is a journalist and news editor at Middle East Eye in London. She is a specialist in international law, human rights, and public policy in the Middle East and North Africa. She holds an MSc in International Human Rights Law (2024) and a Master of Public Policy (2015) from Oxford University. She has over 20 years of experience in journalism, publishing, human rights, and translation.
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