The International Association of Genocide Scholars, the world’s largest body of genocide scholars with 500 academics including Holocaust experts, has voted overwhelmingly to recognise Israel’s war on Gaza as genocide. 

The resolution is unequivocal: Israeli operations meet the legal threshold of genocide under the 1948 UN Convention. Nearly 50,000 children killed or injured. Calls from Israeli leaders for expulsion. Systematic destruction of homes, schools, hospitals, and lives. This, the IAGS declared on Monday, is not just a war, not just crimes against humanity. It is genocide.

But if you turn on CNN, scan the Reuters headlines, or even prominent Indian outlets (here, here and here), the word is missing from many reports. Gaza is a “conflict”. It’s a “military campaign”. It’s a “war”. It is anything but what genocide scholars have said it plainly is.

Some of it may not be accidental. The Intercept revealed last year that the NYT instructed its reporters to avoid terms like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and even to steer clear of describing Palestinian territory as “occupied.” In the UK, television hosts have cut off or corrected panelists who dared to utter the word genocide.

Though there are some cracks in the wall of silence. 

This year, the NYT published an op-ed by a genocide scholar who had once denied that Gaza met the threshold of genocide, but who now admits that it does. In Britain, prominent journalist Alastair Campbell told listeners on a podcast that there was no other way to see the situation except as a genocide. Independent outlets, advocacy groups, and UN experts have been using the term for months. 

A piece by a contributor at the London-based independent outlet Novara Media had underlined how such reportage is not new.

“For 23 years at least, the war on terror has been the lazy and simplifying lens through which western powers and their allies have been able to justify asset-grabs, contraventions of international law and domestic political suppression. That fake stamp on the Arab world has erased all distinctions between different groups of ‘rebellious’ Muslims, merging resistance with insurgence, independence movements with Islamist-imperialist projects, and positioning all as a threat. Do it right, and political parties become terrorists, journalists become combatants, Hamas becomes Al Qaeda becomes Hezbollah becomes Isis becomes hospital doctors and patients and poets and taxi drivers; becomes housewives and husbands, becomes humanitarian workers and teachers, and eventually becomes five-year-old Hind Rajab dying of her gunshot wounds, terrified and alone amongst the bodies of her murdered family as the dark sets in.”

All this, as more than 240 journalists have been killed in the region.

Rights groups say Israel has routinely sought to discredit Palestinian journalists since its offensive on Gaza began in October 2023 by labeling them as Hamas operatives. The UN has condemned the killings and renewed calls for international media access to Gaza, urging Israel to uphold press freedom.

Last month, a Reuters stringer quit, accusing the global news agency of being complicit in the Israeli attack by publishing the country’s baseless claims about journalists being Hamas operatives. More than 250 media outlets in around 70 countries recently staged a front page protest highlighting the killing of journalists.

Meanwhile, a junket by a group of Indian journalists to Israel asked few questions around press freedom and produced reports predominantly centered on the Israeli hostages held by Hamas.

What the genocide scholar’s association said

In a three-page document on Monday, the International Association of Genocide Scholars laid out the litany of actions Israel has carried out in Gaza since October 2023. It pointed to the mass killings, the flattening of entire neighbourhoods, the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, and the deprivation of food, water, and medical care. It cited UNICEF’s staggering figure: 50,000 children killed or injured in less than two years. It recalled statements by Israeli leaders openly calling for the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.

The resolution concluded that these acts amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crucially, genocide. The vote was decisive: 86 percent of those who participated supported the resolution. And it was not the first such decision. 

It further noted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s endorsement of the US President’s plan to expel Palestinians from Gaza permanently, which Navi Pillay, head of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian UN investigators, described as “ethnic cleansing.”

They said the deliberate destruction of agricultural fields, food warehouses, and bakeries and other violence that prevents food production, in conjunction with denial and restriction of humanitarian aid, “indicate the intentional infliction of unlivable conditions resulting in starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.”

“Whereas Israel’s actions in response to the October 7 attack and subsequent holding of hostages have not only been directed against the Hamas group responsible for these, but have also targeted the entire Gazan population,” they said.

The resolution recalled that the International Criminal Court had issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, charging them with crimes under the Rome Statute, including starvation of civilians and intentionally directing attacks against civilians.

It also underlined that the International Court of Justice, in three provisional orders in 2024, found it “plausible that Israel is committing genocide” and ordered it to prevent and punish incitement to genocide and ensure humanitarian access.

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