The Wire Staff 
New Delhi: The visual of the shooting of a Palestinian woman with a child as she kept waving a white flag, or that of starving girls being crushed to death while queuing for bread, show the extent of the atrocities being committed by Israeli forces in Gaza.
These, and countless other tales of pain, suffering and Israel’s absolute indifference for Palestinian lives have been documented in a powerful report by Israeli historian Lee Mordechai is a grim reminder of the war crimes being committed daily in Gaza.
Mordechai, an associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who has also held a fellowship at Princeton University in the US has published a report which is in the form of a database titled “Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War”, which methodically documents stopping instances of excesses committed by the Israeli forces, reported Middle East Eye.
In the 124-page long report – translated to English from original Hebrew – that contains over 1,400 footnotes, Mordechai has used eyewitness reports, video footage, articles, photographs, eyewitness evidence and investigatory material to conclude that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
The Haaretz has called the report “the most methodical and detailed documentation in Hebrew of the war crimes that Israel is perpetrating in Gaza”.
The database includes photos, videos, testimonies, reports and investigations detailing the atrocities committed by the Israeli forces in Gaza, where more than 44,500 Palestinians have been already killed.
Dogs eating corpses, children killed by Israeli soldiers
As a dog eats the corpse of a Palestinian, an Israeli soldier expresses his jubilation by filming a video of the act and saying that “now the terrorist is gone in both senses.”
“But what a gorgeous view, a gorgeous sunset. A red sun is setting over the Gaza Strip,” he says just moments later.
Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. Credit: Wikimedia Commons/ WAFA/ CC BY-SA 3.0
The database created by Mordechai also details the killing of Gazan children by Israeli soldiers, murder of entire families, incidents of starvation, shooting of civilians and tanks running over prisoners and corpses alike.
“I felt that I could not continue to live in my own bubble, that it was a matter of life and death, and what was happening was too big and contradicted the values I grew up with here,” he told Haaretz.
In the database, Mordechai confirmed the veracity of the fatality figures published by Gaza’s Ministry of Health.
He said that claims that these numbers are exaggerated are groundless, and even the Israeli government treats the health ministry’s data as accurate.
‘Death camps are not needed for this to be considered a genocide’
In the appendix to the report, Mordechai has reasoned that why Israel’s war on Gaza is a genocide.
“We need to disconnect the way we think of genocide as Israelis – gas chambers, death camps and World War II – from the model that appears in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948),” he has said in the report.
“There don’t have to be death camps for it to be considered genocide. It all boils down to the commission of acts and the intent, and the existence of both has to be established. In regard to committing acts, it’s killing, but not only – [there is] also wounding people, abduction of children and even just attempts to prevent births among a particular group of people. What all these acts have in common is the deliberate destruction of a group,” adds Mordechai.