A UN commission of inquiry has concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and accused senior Israeli officials including Benjamin Netanyahu of inciting it.

The United Nations independent international commission of inquiry (COI), which does not speak on behalf of the UN and has been criticised strongly by Israel, cited the scale of the killings, aid blockages, forced displacement and the destruction of a fertility clinic in the territory to support its finding of genocide.

In its latest report on the rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territories, published nearly two years after the war erupted, it found that “genocide is occurring in Gaza and is continuing to occur”, said its head, Navi Pillay.

Pillay, a former UN human rights chief, added: “The responsibility for these atrocity crimes lies with Israeli authorities at the highest echelons, who have orchestrated a genocidal campaign for almost two years now with the specific intent to destroy the Palestinian group in Gaza.”

Israel’s foreign ministry said it categorically rejected the report and called for the COI to be abolished. Israel’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Daniel Meron, called the report a scandalous and fake “libellous rant” that had been authored by “Hamas proxies”. Israel has declined to cooperate with the COI, accusing it of having a political agenda.

The report was published as Israel launched a ground offensive in Gaza City after weeks of intense bombardment across the territory’s largest urban centre.

Nearly 65,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Hamas’s deadly attack against Israel on 7 October 2023, according to figures from the health ministry in Gaza, and a global hunger monitor has said part of the territory is suffering from famine.

Although the independent COI's 72-page report is the most compelling UN judgement to date, the UN does not formally endorse its conclusions. Although there is increasing pressure on the international organisation to use the term "genocide," it has not done so yet.

Israel has continuously denied all such charges, claiming the right to self-defence, in which 251 people were taken hostage and 1,200 people were slain. At The Hague's International Court of Justice (ICJ), it is battling a genocide case.

The COI came to the conclusion that Israeli authorities and forces had committed "four of the five genocidal acts" listed in the 1948 genocide convention since October 2023, citing verified open-source documents, satellite imagery analysis gathered since the start of the war, and interviews with victims, witnesses, and medical professionals as evidence.

Genocide is defined as actions done "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, as such," according to the convention, which was enacted in the wake of Nazi Germany's mass murder of Jews during World War II. At least one of the five actions must have taken place for it to be considered genocide.

The five acts include: killing group members, seriously injuring group members physically or mentally, purposefully subjecting the group to living conditions that are calculated to cause its physical destruction in whole or in part, enforcing laws meant to prevent births within the group, and forcibly moving group members' children to another group.

According to the investigators, the pattern of behaviour of the Israeli troops and specific remarks made by Israeli military and civilian leadership "indicated that the genocidal acts were committed with intent to destroy … Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as a group."

Netanyahu linked the Gaza campaign to what the panel called a "holy war of total annihilation" in the Hebrew Bible in a letter he addressed to Israeli forces in November 2023, which it referenced as evidence.

The investigation came to the conclusion that Israeli authorities had "failed to take action against them to punish this incitement" and that Israel's prime minister, president, and former defence minister Yoav Gallant had "incited the commission of genocide."

The international community "cannot stay silent on the genocidal campaign launched by Israel against the Palestinian people in Gaza," according to Pillay, a former South African judge who has presided over the international tribunal for Rwanda and served as a judge at the International Criminal Court (ICC).

"I find that the facts of the genocide in Rwanda are remarkably similar to this," she stated. Your victims are dehumanised by you. Since they are animals, you can kill them without feeling guilty.