Is There a Genocide in Gaza?

The word genocide was born from despair. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer who lost dozens of relatives in the Holocaust, coined it in 1944 as he struggled to capture what he called the “crime of crimes.” For him, genocide meant not just mass murder but the destruction of a people’s way of life: their families broken apart, their culture erased, their survival made impossible.

Four years later, the United Nations drafted the Genocide Convention. In doing so, it narrowed Lemkin’s vision. The Convention recognized genocide only when directed against national, ethnic, racial, or religious groups, and only when committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part. Cultural destruction and political groups — both central to Lemkin’s conception — were left out.

That narrowing set the stage for decades of disputes. Is genocide about bullets and gas chambers? Or can it also mean starvation, the collapse of hospitals, the grinding down of life until survival is no longer possible?

The shifting bar

Courts have wrestled with this question again and again. The International Court of Justice (ICJ), in its 2007 judgment on Bosnia v. Serbia, acknowledged that genocide requires a “special intent,” a plan to destroy a group as such. Yet it also admitted that intent can be inferred from patterns: the scale of atrocities, the systematic targeting of civilians, the destruction of conditions of life.

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) found that genocidal intent could be inferred from “the general context,” including propaganda and mass killings, even if no smoking-gun order was found. In contrast, the ICTY (tribunal for Yugoslavia) sometimes raised the bar higher, demanding closer proof of a coordinated plan.

“Sometimes courts stretch the concept to meet atrocity; other times they tighten it to avoid dilution.”

Scholars have followed this pendulum. Sheri Rosenberg urged us to see genocide as a process, not an event, where famine and disease can be tools of destruction. Martin Shaw argued that genocide is a social relationship: it exists even when victim groups resist. Thomas Simon, by contrast, sought a narrower definition, centered on intentional killings alone.

The result is an unstable boundary. Sometimes courts stretch the concept to meet atrocity; other times they tighten it to avoid dilution. The bar has risen and lowered over time, and that instability is precisely what shapes today’s debate.

Why the technical question matters

Some will ask: does it really matter whether Gaza is called genocide, or war crimes, or crimes of aggression? Isn’t it enough to know that civilians are dying in catastrophic numbers?

The answer is that these legal categories, technical as they may seem, shape the world’s response. War crimes punish excess in conflict. Crimes of aggression punish unlawful wars. Genocide punishes the attempt to destroy a people. Each carries a different weight, and only genocide carries the promise of “never again.” To call something genocide is to say it is not merely illegal, but existential.

Explainer: War Crimes, Crimes of Aggression, Genocide — What’s the Difference?

• War crimes: violations of the laws of war (targeting civilians, torture, starvation as a weapon). Punish how wars are fought.
• Crimes against humanity: systematic or widespread attacks on civilians, in war or peace.
• Crimes of aggression: punish the decision to launch an unlawful war.
• Genocide: the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group “in whole or in part.” Includes killing and also creating conditions that make survival impossible.

All are atrocities. But genocide carries a unique weight: it names an attempt to erase a people’s existence.

Gaza: famine and health system collapse

Two recent reports put the issue starkly. Amnesty International’s August 2025 assessment describes Gaza not as a battlefield but as a place where civilians are systematically deprived of survival. It documents the targeting of aid convoys, the destruction of homes and hospitals, and the blocking of food and medicine. Amnesty concludes these are not accidents of war but deliberate policies whose effects — predictable and sustained — are to destroy life.

Physicians for Human Rights–Israel (PHRI) takes a similar line, focusing on health. It shows that Gaza’s healthcare system has been dismantled: hospitals destroyed, doctors killed or detained, patients denied treatment. PHRI links these facts directly to Article II(c) of the Genocide Convention: “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.”

“The Convention explicitly recognizes that genocide can mean creating conditions where survival becomes impossible, not only direct killings.”

Together, these reports argue that Gaza today is experiencing precisely what Lemkin feared: destruction not only through bombs, but through the deliberate unmaking of life.

The hinge of intent

In Gaza, as in other cases before, the sticking point is intent. International courts have often insisted that genocidal intent while it can be inferred, it must be sole — that destruction of a group must be the primary, overriding goal. If leaders can plausibly claim another motive — territorial control, counterterrorism, even self-defense — tribunals have sometimes refused to call the acts genocide.

This is what William Schabas calls the “single-minded” standard: if genocidal acts are committed, but leaders can say they were also pursuing military necessity, the charge of genocide falters. The ICJ in Bosnia v. Serbia leaned this way, finding genocide only in Srebrenica where extermination was undeniable, while treating other mass atrocities as war crimes.

But as Martin Shaw and Sheri Rosenberg remind us, real-world politics almost always mixes motives. No genocide in history has been carried out without leaders claiming they were defending themselves, preserving order, or protecting national security. To require sole intent is to make genocide almost impossible to prove — because perpetrators never confess to destruction for its own sake.

Should the bar shift?

That raises the question: has international law set the bar too high? If genocide can only be proven where destruction is the exclusive intent, then systemic starvation, the collapse of health care, and the displacement of millions may still fall short. That would mean the worst atrocity crime of all is almost never prosecutable.

“To require sole intent is to make genocide almost impossible to prove — because perpetrators never confess to destruction for its own sake.”

Rosenberg’s “process not event” view, and Shaw’s critique of sole intent, suggest a different path: intent can and should be inferred from patterns, even when other motives are present. Otherwise, the law risks hollowing out Lemkin’s promise. The preventive power of the word genocide lies in naming destruction as it happens, not in forever finding reasons to call it something else.

To lower the bar would, inevitably, be politically fraught. Any court that labels Israel’s actions genocide will face accusations of antisemitism. But the legal community must ask itself: does the current, narrow definition still serve the purpose Lemkin intended — to stop destruction before it is complete?

The situation in Gaza

The answer -complicated as it may be- is that Gaza today presents a strong genocide case on the acts, contested on intent. The moral answer is harder to avoid. When famine is declared man-made, when hospitals are systematically destroyed, when civilians are stripped of food, water, and medicine, we are witnessing not just the tragedies of war, but the conditions of annihilation.

The word genocide was meant to shock, to bind the world to action. To invoke it is not to end debate but to demand clarity: what exactly do we think is happening when survival itself is being dismantled?

Whether courts will apply the label remains uncertain. But the evidence is already before us.