OPINION
What do you call the relentless, systematic slaughter of civilians in the Gaza Strip carried out by the State of Israel between 2023 and 2025? What do you call a brutal military campaign and an unyielding blockade that has extinguished tens of thousands of innocent lives—women, children, and families? What do you call the deliberate destruction of the essential conditions needed for human survival?
This is genocide.
In January 2024, South Africa filed a case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing Israel of genocide under the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). The court recognized the “plausibility” of the allegations and imposed provisional measures, confirming the seriousness of the accusation. Several UN special rapporteurs, as well as organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have denounced practices of extermination, including:
- Massive bombardment of densely populated civilian areas.
- Systematic targeting of hospitals, schools, journalists, and critical infrastructure.
- Induced famine through the destruction of crops, blockade of humanitarian aid, and denial of drinking water.
- Large-scale child mortality, with estimates exceeding 18,000 children killed by August 2025.
According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, over 62,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023, a significant portion of whom were women and children. It is also estimated that more than 160,000 have been injured, including thousands of amputations, and that 2 million people have been displaced or subjected to acute hunger.
Conceptually, the Palestinian genocide in Gaza has been compared to the Jewish Holocaust (Shoah), not in terms of absolute historical equivalence, but because both represent state-sponsored mass destruction programs aimed at eliminating or drastically reducing a population deemed “undesirable.” While the Holocaust during World War II exterminated approximately six million European Jews under the Nazi regime, the genocide in Gaza represents a twenty-first-century paradigm of extermination: televised, digitalized, yet often hidden by media silence and international complicity.
Just as the Shoah is remembered as the greatest genocide of the twentieth century, many experts — including Francesca Albanese (UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine) and legal scholars such as William Schabas — consider that Gaza may be recorded as the first widely documented real-time genocide of the twenty-first century.
©TNPP
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