The Gaza genocide is the ongoing, intentional, and systematic destruction of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip carried out by Israel during the Gaza war. It encompasses mass killings, the targeted killing of children (who account for 30% of those killed), deliberate starvation, infliction of serious bodily and mental harm, and prevention of births. Other acts include blockading, destroying civilian infrastructure, destroying healthcare facilities, killing healthcare workers and aid-seekers, causing mass forced displacement, committing sexual violence, and destroying educational, religious, and cultural sites. The genocide has been recognized, in either a legal or scholarly sense, by a United Nations special committee and commission of inquiry, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, multiple human rights groups, state governments, numerous genocide studies and international law scholars, and other experts.
As of September 2026, at least 73,400 people in Gaza had been killed. The vast majority of the victims were civilians, and around 50% were women and children. Compared to other recent global conflicts, the numbers of known deaths of journalists, humanitarian and health workers, and children are among the highest. Thousands more uncounted bodies are thought to be under the rubble of destroyed buildings. A study in the medical journal The Lancet estimated that traumatic injury deaths were undercounted by June 2024, while noting an even larger potential death toll with indirect deaths included. The number of injured is greater than 174,000. Gaza has the most child amputees per capita in the world; the Gaza war caused more than 21,000 children to be disabled. In July 2025, 18,457 children were listed among the war dead by health authorities in Gaza, excluding indirect deaths and those buried under rubble.
An Israeli blockade heavily contributed to starvation and confirmed famine. In August 2025, about 641,000 people experienced catastrophic levels of food insecurity. Early in the conflict, Israel cut off Gaza's water and electricity. It later partially restored the water. As of October 2025, 94% of Gaza's health centres had been destroyed or damaged. Israel also destroyed numerous cultural heritage sites, including all 12 of Gaza's universities, and 80% of its schools. Over 1.9 million Palestinians—85% of Gaza's population—were forcibly displaced. Israel's bombing also caused severe environmental devastation across the territory.
In December 2023, the government of South Africa instituted proceedings, South Africa v. Israel, against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), alleging a violation of the Genocide Convention. In January 2024, the court ordered Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of acts of genocide, to prevent and punish incitement to genocide, and to allow basic humanitarian service, aid and supplies into Gaza. The court later ordered Israel to increase humanitarian aid into Gaza and to halt its Rafah offensive. Israel did not fully comply with the court's orders. Separately, in November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. In response, the United States imposed sanctions on the ICC in February 2025.
Palestinians have emphasized the relationship between the Gaza genocide and Zionist political violence, describing it as a continuation of the Nakba and its ongoing effects. Israel and its supporters maintain that its actions do not constitute genocide, that they are a response to the October 7 attacks, and that Israel's aim has been to destroy Hamas and free Israeli hostages. There is increasing consensus among genocide and international legal scholars on the genocide assessment, although some academics and countries challenge it.
The Gaza genocide is the ongoing, intentional, and systematic destruction of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip carried out by Israel during the Gaza war. It encompasses mass killings, the targeted killing of children (who account for 30% of those killed), deliberate starvation, infliction of serious bodily and mental harm, and prevention of births. Other acts include blockading, destroying civilian infrastructure, destroying healthcare facilities, killing healthcare workers and aid-seekers, causing mass forced displacement, committing sexual violence, and destroying educational, religious, and cultural sites. The genocide has been recognized, in either a legal or scholarly sense, by a United Nations special committee and commission of inquiry, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, multiple human rights groups, state governments, numerous genocide studies and international law scholars, and other experts.
As of October 2026, at least 74,500 people in Gaza had been killed. The vast majority of the victims were civilians, and around 50% were women and children. Compared to other recent global conflicts, the numbers of known deaths of journalists, humanitarian and health workers, and children are among the highest. Thousands more uncounted bodies are thought to be under the rubble of destroyed buildings. A study in the medical journal The Lancet estimated that traumatic injury deaths were undercounted by June 2024, while noting an even larger potential death toll with indirect deaths included. The number of injured is greater than 174,000. Gaza has the most child amputees per capita in the world; the Gaza war caused more than 21,000 children to be disabled. In July 2025, 18,457 children were listed among the war dead by health authorities in Gaza, excluding indirect deaths and those buried under rubble.
An Israeli blockade heavily contributed to starvation and confirmed famine. In August 2025, about 641,000 people experienced catastrophic levels of food insecurity. Early in the conflict, Israel cut off Gaza's water and electricity. It later partially restored the water. As of October 2025, 94% of Gaza's health centres had been destroyed or damaged. Israel also destroyed numerous cultural heritage sites, including all 12 of Gaza's universities, and 80% of its schools. Over 1.9 million Palestinians—85% of Gaza's population—were forcibly displaced. Israel's bombing has also caused severe environmental devastation across the territory.
In December 2023, the government of South Africa instituted proceedings, South Africa v. Israel, against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), alleging a violation of the Genocide Convention. In January 2024, the court ordered Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of acts of genocide, to prevent and punish incitement to genocide, and to allow basic humanitarian service, aid and supplies into Gaza. The court later ordered Israel to increase humanitarian aid into Gaza and to halt its Rafah offensive. Israel did not fully comply with the court's orders. Separately, in November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. In response, the United States imposed sanctions on the ICC in February 2025.
Palestinians have emphasized the relationship between the Gaza genocide and Zionist political violence, describing it as a continuation of the Nakba and its ongoing effects. Israel and its supporters maintain that its actions do not constitute genocide, that they are a response to the October 7 attacks, and that Israel's aim has been to destroy Hamas and free Israeli hostages. There is increasing consensus among genocide and international legal scholars on the genocide assessment, although some academics and countries challenge it.
Since 2007, the Gaza Strip has been governed by Hamas, an Islamist militant group, while the West Bank remained under the control of the Palestinian Authority. After Hamas took over, Israel intensified its blockade of the Gaza Strip, citing security concerns; international rights groups have called the blockade a form of collective punishment. UNRWA reported that, due to the blockade, 81% of Gazans were living below the poverty level in 2023, with 63% food insecure and dependent on international assistance. Since 2007, Israel and Hamas (and other Palestinian militias in Gaza) have engaged in conflict, including four wars in 2008–2009, 2012, 2014, and 2021.
The Israeli government has said that the military actions it has undertaken are in response to the October 7 attacks and sought to destroy Hamas, overthrow its governance of the Gaza Strip, and free Israeli hostages. It has denied that its military operations constitute genocide. Multiple commentators argue that part of the motive is retaliation for the 7 October attacks. Nimer Sultany argues that anti-Palestinianism is also a motive.
Definitions of genocide and legal challenges
The 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction". The International Court of Justice has never held a state liable for genocide. The legal threshold for genocidal intent remains a major barrier to prosecution.
Scholars have developed broader sociological and cultural definitions that are distinct from the legal definition under the Genocide Convention. The public perception of what genocide means is also broader than the legal definition. As to the legal definition, there has been scholarly advocacy for expanding or adjusting it, while others seek to adhere to the original intent under the Genocide Convention.
The original definition coined by Raphael Lemkin was broader than that used by the Genocide Convention and included cultural and social destruction. In contrast, orthodox scholarly definitions emphasise actions targeting a group's physical survival. No minimum number of victims or intended victims is required to establish the crime, nor is complete destruction of the group. In the Rohingya genocide case, several states contended that the ICJ should "adopt a balanced approach that recognizes the special gravity of the crime of genocide, without rendering the threshold for inferring genocidal intent so difficult to meet so as to make findings of genocide near-impossible."
Genocidal intent and incitement
Experts affirm that statements by Israeli political and military leaders—coupled with eliminationist media rhetoric and Israel's conduct in Gaza—indicate genocidal intent and incitement against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Israeli officials and journalists have made verbal statements that dehumanise Palestinians and incite, justify, or praise atrocities against them as a group. Genocidal intent is also evidenced by the scale and systematic nature of actions that exceed any legitimate military objective—including the extensive targeting of children, widespread sexual violence, destruction of cultural heritage, and imposition of life-destroying conditions—together with the persistence of these practices despite awareness of their catastrophic effects.
"I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly."
— Yoav Gallant, Minister of Defense of Israel, on 9 October 2023
Both a United Nations commission of inquiry and Amnesty International documented a "pattern of conduct" by Israeli authorities, concluding that genocidal intent is the "only reasonable inference" that can be drawn from the evidence. Other organisations that have attributed genocidal intent to the actions or statements of Israeli officials include a United Nations panel and Genocide Watch. As part of Defense for Children International – Palestine v. Biden, the historian Barry Trachtenberg said that the rhetoric used by Israeli officials underlies the consensus among genocide historians that the situation in Gaza constitutes genocide. Navi Pillay, the chair of the UN commission of inquiry, compared the statements of Israeli politicians to the genocidal incitement during the Rwandan genocide.
In September 2025, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, president Isaac Herzog, and former defence minister Yoav Gallant were found by a United Nations commission of inquiry to have engaged in "direct and public incitement to commit genocide". Israeli leaders' repeated references to Amalek—the biblical enemy of Israelites whose annihilation is commanded by God—have been considered evidence of genocidal intent by many critics, including South Africa.
Onset
B'Tselem, the South African legal case against Israel, and some scholars who argue Israel is committing genocide argument give 7 October as its start date. According to B'Tselem, "The genocidal assault on the residents of Gaza, and on all Palestinians as a group, cannot be understood without acknowledging the impact of the 7 October attack on Israeli society. The shock, fear and humiliation elicited by the attack, and the societal upheaval it triggered, served as a driving force for a shift in government policy toward the Palestinians—from oppression and control to destruction and annihilation."
During the first 48 hours of Israel's retaliatory attack, IDF chief Herzi Halevi reported that the IDF attacked 1,000 targets. According to his wife, he told her that "Gaza will be destroyed". Reportedly, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu subsequently said he wanted 5,000 targets to be attacked, even though the IDF had not confirmed 5,000 enemy targets. Artificial intelligence was used to generate a list of targets, in many cases based on unconfirmed or outdated intelligence. About 10,000 Palestinians were killed in a month, including entire families. Shmuel Lederman called this "as criminal as it gets". Martin Shaw and A. Dirk Moses argue that this "front-loaded violence" makes it harder to argue that the genocide began after the initial Israeli attack on Gaza.
On 13 October 2023, the historian Raz Segal said Israel was committing a "textbook case of genocide". He was one of the first scholars to do so. Others argue that the war was initially legitimate and the genocide started later, in 2024 or 2025. In September 2024, a UN Special Committee concluded, "the policies and practices of Israel during the reporting period [i.e. October 2023 to July 2024] are consistent with the characteristics of genocide."
Genocidal acts
Mass killings and physical harm
Direct killings
UN experts and human rights organisations have characterised Israel's actions in Gaza as extermination, a crime against humanity that involves "the act of killing on a large scale". During the first two months of bombing, Israel dropped 25,000 tonnes of explosives on the Gaza Strip. Many of these were unguided bombs dropped in densely populated areas, obliterating entire neighbourhoods. Since 7 October 2023, the IDF has been accused of extrajudicial killing of unarmed Palestinians and healthcare personnel. Israeli soldiers have killed Palestinian civilians, with a December 2023 UN report stating that they allegedly shot them in front of their families. In January 2024, Israeli soldiers shot at civilians waving white flags, killing one. Doctors have identified numerous Palestinian children with single gunshot wounds to the head and chest, consistent with intentional targeting by Israeli forces.
In April 2024, mass graves were found containing over 300 corpses, allegedly including older people, women and wounded, and others with their hands tied. The IDF said accusations that it caused the killings were "baseless and unfounded", and that during its operation "in the area of Nasser Hospital, in accordance to the effort to locate hostages and missing persons, corpses buried by Palestinians in the area of Nasser Hospital were examined." It added, "Bodies examined, which did not belong to Israeli hostages, were returned to their place."
At least 14,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza by December 2023. In late 2024, a study limited only to those fatalities confirmed by at least three independent sources, and only from November 2023 to April 2024 (about 8,100 people), corroborated previous reports by the UN and news outlets that 70% of fatalities were women and children. As of 31 August 2024, data from the Ministry of Health (only for those of the dead who were fully identified, about 34,000 people at the time) showed that 60% of those killed were women, children, and the elderly. Eleven months later (31 July 2025) the number of those of the dead who were fully identified reached 60,199, 52.6% of whom were women, children, and the elderly.
By 14 January 2024, over 23,900 Gazans had been confirmed killed. By 10 May, deaths had topped 35,000, a third of them unidentified, with over 10,000 more estimated to be buried under the rubble. Within the first three weeks, the Israeli assault killed more children in Gaza than were killed worldwide across all conflict zones in any year since 2019. Over 52,000 people had been wounded by December 2023, and by May 2024 this number had risen to over 77,700. As of 10 October 2025, the Gaza Health Ministry reports that at least 67,194 Gazans were killed, which is between 3% and 4% of Gaza's total population.