Approximately 68,000 Palestinians have reportedly been killed by the Israeli Defence Forces over the past 710 days – a period marked by what scholars and scientists are now calling a horrific genocide. This staggering estimate, compiled by independent researchers, may rise further if all occupied Palestinian territories are fully accounted for.

“If this number is confirmed, then 38,000 of these are infants under five, 1,581 earth workers killed in Gaza, 252 is the number of the journalists, and 346 of the United Nation staff,” notes Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.

On Monday (September 15), four UN special rapporteurs – Albanese, Irene Khan, special rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Mary Lawlor, special rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders; and George Katrougalos, UN special rapporteur on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order – jointly presented their findings on Israel’s allegedly engineered human catastrophe unfolding in Palestine.

So far, Albanese says, “10,000 Palestinians have been detained, mostly arbitrarily by an unlawful occupation, which has been starving, torturing, and even raping inmates, including doctors and patients.”

The ongoing IDF assault is now targeting Gaza City – the last remaining urban stronghold in Gaza. Simultaneously, Israeli far-right extremists are reportedly advancing plans to annex the entirety of the West Bank. “The situation is unravelling under intensified pressure,” says Albanese, who is currently under sanctions imposed by the United States – Israel’s largest supplier of arms, military equipment, and bulldozers.

With annexation accelerating and Palestinian families enduring “multiple cycles of displacement,” it is clear: “no space is safe for Palestinians, but no space is safe for international law under this brutal occupation.”

Moral collapse

Meanwhile, powerful nations – particularly the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom – “continue to look away, normalise the suffering, and even profit from it (the genocide).”

Even more damning: countries like India, signatories to the 1948 Genocide Convention, continue arms trade and diplomatic normalisation with Israel.

“This is not just morally wrong… This is unlawful,” Ms. Albanese argued.

Last week, the Narendra Modi government signed a new bilateral free trade agreement with Israel – fully aware that Israel is perpetrating a genocide of historic proportions.

“As I argued in my last report to the Human Rights Council, this genocide has become profitable,” she pointed out. And this is not only Israel’s crime – “a world's crime sustained by silence, complicity and the supply of funds, weapons and political cover.”

History will remember this genocide in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories – though it is not the first. It is another link in the chain of genocides stretching from Auschwitz to Bosnia, from Rwanda to the countless small-scale pogroms repeatedly carried out against minorities – including in India.

But there is one defining difference about the genocide now unfolding before our eyes in Gaza. It is “openly incited, cynically denied, and relentlessly supported, armed, and weaponized, while those who oppose it are silenced, beaten, criminalized, and smeared.”

It signifies, Ms. Albanese says, “the shame of our time and the collapse of the international legal order.”

She asks, with piercing clarity: “Prime ministers, Presidents, Foreign ministers, and so-called world leaders, how do you sleep?”

The only glimmer of hope? The courage of ordinary people: “dock workers, trade unions, students, mothers and fathers, ordinary people everywhere are refusing this complicity, and their message is clear. No more genocide, no more apartheid, starting in Palestine.”

Freedom of expression under fire

“Gaza has become the deadliest conflict ever for journalists,” says Khan, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression. “More journalists have been killed in Gaza than in both World Wars, the Vietnam War, wars in Yugoslavia, the war in Afghanistan combined, according to one research institute.”

The UN estimates that approximately 252 journalists have been systematically killed – or murdered – by the IDF in Gaza and the West Bank. Last month alone, nine “journalists were killed in three horrific bloody incidents.”

This is not random violence – it is targeted extermination. “A gruesome phase of targeted killing of journalists,” she notes, suggesting reporters are “deliberately picked out and killed because of the work that they are doing to expose the atrocities, the crimes, the genocide on the ground.”

Israel’s strategy is methodical. It begins with “delegitimizing and discrediting a journalist,” says Khan.

Then comes the smear campaign – “accusing the journalists of being terrorist supporters or terrorists themselves.” The final act? Murder in broad daylight. “A killing attempt is being very clearly made here to kill the story, because journalists, at least, local journalists in Gaza today are carrying the brunt of that killing spree.”

“What is happening in Gaza is extremely unusual,” Khan observes, “in that I cannot recall another situation where a member state of the United Nations has denied access to independent international media for a conflict, for atrocities, for unfolding the genocide, and now genocide actually happening over almost three years at this stage.”

Her message is unequivocal: “Journalism is not terrorism, journalism is not a crime, and journalists are civilians under international humanitarian law, and therefore protected like other civilians.”

Al Jazeera journalists have borne the brunt of Israel’s campaign. The network has been banned from operating in the West Bank and Israel itself. Ms. Khan concurs: this is part of “an anatomy and economy of genocide.”

Human rights defenders under siege

In her harrowing testimony, Lawlor, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders, detailed how defenders are being hunted, displaced, and destroyed. Her findings are drawn from direct testimony – a hearing with ten human rights defenders from diverse organisations.

Like journalists and civilians, they too face “the same catastrophic situation.”

“They have no homes and they have no offices,” Lawlor noted, adding that the situation has “worsened incredibly.”

Displacement is relentless. “One woman said she had already moved five times, starting with her children every time again,” Lawlor said. “And another woman, human rights defender, said she had been displaced seven times. And she said, and I quote her, I myself have been displaced seven times. Each time I was forced to begin from scratch.”

Their homes have been demolished. They “lacked the basic needs for living.” Their work – defending human rights – has made them targets.

Destruction of the international order

Israeli diplomat, historian, and former minister Shlomo Ben-Ami has said that Israel “is committing atrocities that may remain a mark of kind on the forehead of the Jewish state for years to come.”

The echoes of the Holocaust now reverberate through Gaza. “Is it possible that the people who endured the Holocaust are now committing the most heinous of crimes, genocide, against their neighbours?” asked Ben-Ami.

Though rhetorical, the question confronts a terrifying reality: “the international legal order is now being undermined in the Middle East,” affirmed Katrougalos, UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order.

“There is an unravelling pattern of lawlessness by the multiple attacks of Israel against almost all its neighbours and also some of non-neighbouring states, like Iran and Qatar.”

“By this attack,” Katrougalos concluded, “Israel clearly undermined one of the few credible avenues to prevent further destruction, release the hostages, and to open a path to peace. But this goes beyond that. All these attacks have, as I said, the explicit or tacit support of the United States.”

Worse still: “the impunity that these acts entail, the lack of accountability, the selective application of international law weaken the credibility of the United Nations, undermine multilateralism and the international post-war order based on the United Nations Charter and the human rights system of law.”

Note: An earlier version of this article had misstated the death toll in Palestine. The error is regretted.

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