Rights group Amnesty International has accused Israel of carrying out a “live-streamed genocide” in Gaza by deliberately engineering a humanitarian disaster and forcibly displacing the vast majority of the enclave’s population.
In its annual report released Tuesday, Amnesty charged that Israel had acted with “specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, thus committing genocide.”
Israel has rejected accusations of “genocide” from Amnesty, other rights groups and some states in its war on Gaza.
The conflict was triggered by Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas incursion, which caused around 1,218 deaths and took 251 hostages, according to Israeli figures.
Israel’s genocidal war, in comparison, has killed at least 52,243 Palestinians, mostly women and children.
“Since 7 October 2023, when Hamas perpetrated horrific crimes against Israeli citizens and others and captured more than 250 hostages, the world has been made audience to a live-streamed genocide,” Amnesty’s Secretary-General Agnes Callamard said in the introduction to the report.
“States watched on as if powerless, as Israel killed thousands upon thousands of Palestinians, wiping out entire multigenerational families, destroying homes, livelihoods, hospitals and schools,” she added.
‘Extreme levels of suffering’
Gaza’s civil defense agency said early Tuesday that four people were killed and others injured in an Israeli airstrike on displaced persons’ tents near the al-Iqleem area in Southern Gaza.
The agency earlier warned fuel shortages meant it had been forced to suspend eight out of 12 emergency vehicles in Southern Gaza, including ambulances.
The lack of fuel “threatens the lives of hundreds of thousands of citizens and displaced persons in shelter centres,” it said in a statement.
Amnesty’s report said the Israeli campaign had left most of the Palestinians of Gaza “displaced, homeless, hungry, at risk of life-threatening diseases and unable to access medical care, power or clean water.”
Amnesty said that throughout 2024, it had “documented multiple war crimes by Israel, including direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects, and indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks.”
It said Israel’s actions forcibly displaced 1.9 million Palestinians, around 90% of Gaza’s population, and “deliberately engineered an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe.”
Even as protesters hit the streets in Western capitals, “the world’s governments individually and multilaterally failed repeatedly to take meaningful action to end the atrocities and were slow even in calling for a ceasefire.”
Meanwhile, Amnesty also sounded the alarm over Israeli actions in the occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank and repeated an accusation that Israel was employing a system of “apartheid.”
“Israel’s system of apartheid became increasingly violent in the occupied West Bank, marked by a sharp increase in unlawful killings and state-backed attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinian civilians,” it said.
Heba Morayef, Amnesty director for the Middle East and North Africa region, denounced “the extreme levels of suffering that Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to endure on a daily basis over the past year” as well as “the world’s complete inability or lack of political will to put a stop to it.”
