The Wire Staff 
New Delhi: Amnesty International, in a new report, has said that its research has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip.
The report, ‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza, documents how, during its military offensive launched in the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel has set itself on a path of death and destruction on the Gaza Strip.
“Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now,” Agnès Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International, said.
All members of the Abdelal family who died in an Israeli airstrike.
“Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them,” Callamard said, adding that states that continue to transfer arms to Israel must know they are violating their obligation to prevent genocide and are complicit in it.
In the press release announcing the report, Amnesty has called out the “international community’s seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers.”
Closer home, India’s reported arms ‘exports’ to Israel amid the airstrikes have sparked controversy.
The Amnesty report considers the attacks on Gaza for a period of nine months between October 7, 2023, and early July, 2024. Attacks have continued since then too.
Amnesty considers that around 42,000 Palestinians, including over 13,300 children, were killed by Israel in the one year from October 7 2023 to 2024. Over 97,000 were injured. Entire multigenerational families were wiped out.
The report interviews 212 people including Palestinian victims and witnesses, local authorities in Gaza, and healthcare workers. It also relies on fieldwork, image analysis, statements from Israeli government and military officials.
One Mohammed, who fled with his family from Gaza city to Rafah in March 2024 and was displaced again in May 2024, said that the scene at Deir al-Balah is like an “apocalypse” where it is not just the bombing that is a source of worry but also other multi-faceted dangers like – insects, the heat, and the fact that there is no clean water or toilets.
The report finds that the conditions imposed by Israel in Gaza prepared the ground for malnutrition, hunger and diseases, and “exposed Palestinians to a slow, calculated death.” This is in addition to the detention, torture and other ill-treatment Israel has subjected hundreds of Palestinian prisoners to.
Amnesty describes Israel’s actions as those laden with an “intent to physically destroy” Palestinians in Gaza.
The rights body documented the genocidal acts of killing and causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinians in Gaza by reviewing the results of investigations it conducted into 15 air strikes between October 7, 2023 and April 20, 2024 that killed at least 334 civilians, including 141 children, and wounded hundreds of others. It “found no evidence that any of these strikes were directed at a military objective.”
As an example it cites an attack on April 20 which destroyed the Abdelal family house in the Al-Jneinah neighbourhood in eastern Rafah, killing three generations of Palestinians, including 16 children, while they were sleeping.
The organisation reviewed 102 statements that were issued by Israeli government and military officials and others between October 7, 2023 and June 30, 2024, and dehumanised Palestinians, called for or justified genocidal acts or other crimes against them.