10 Things to Know About Three Years of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

1. Israel has been carrying out a campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza uninterrupted since October 2023.

• Human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Israeli groups like B’Tselem, hundreds of genocide and Holocaust scholars, including the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and independent UN experts, have all concluded that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The genocide slowed but did not end with the ceasefire announced by President Donald Trump in October 2025.
• The Israeli military continues to kill Palestinians in Gaza almost every single day, mostly civilians, and to restrict the entry of food, medicine, housing and construction materials, fuel, and other humanitarian supplies, denying the population many of the basic necessities of life.
• Israel has forcibly displaced 90% of the population of Gaza, about two million people, from their homes, concentrating most of them along the coast where they’re struggling to survive in desperate, overcrowded, unsanitary conditions under ongoing attack from Israeli soldiers. At the same time, the Israeli military continues to take over more and more land in violation of the ceasefire deal, pushing Palestinians into a smaller area.

2. Israel continues to destroy Gaza to make it uninhabitable so Palestinians have no choice but to leave.

• Israel has been systematically bombing, bulldozing, and burning Palestinian communities and civilian infrastructure to make Gaza unlivable, seriously damaging or destroying almost every home and other structure, forcing Palestinians to choose between leaving or facing death. This destruction has continued unabated during the supposed ceasefire.
• Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials employ euphemisms like “voluntary migration” to describe their efforts to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians. They’ve set up a governmental body, the “emigration directorate,” to oversee the process and say they’re waiting for Trump to give them a green light to implement their plans.

3. Israel has killed more than 21,000 Palestinian children in Gaza over the last three years.

• The Israeli military has violently killed at least 21,638 Palestinian children in Gaza since the start of the genocide, including more than 1,000 babies under the age of one. This amounts to about 2% of all the children in Gaza. Thousands of others are still missing underneath the rubble and presumed dead.
• According to a report released in June 2026 by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory:

“Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children, resulting in genocide and atrocity crimes in the Gaza Strip and war crimes in the West Bank.”

• The proportion of Palestinian children and women violently killed by Israel in the genocide is more than double that of almost all other recent wars and conflicts, including Syria, Iraq, and Sudan.
• The Israeli military has also injured approximately 44,500 children in Gaza, including more than 21,000 children who are permanently disabled. As noted by the Commissioner-General of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in December 2025:

“Gaza now hosts the largest group of child amputees in modern history.”

4. The actual number of Palestinians killed during the genocide is much higher than the official total.

• The official death toll from the Ministry of Health in Gaza, which stands at more than 74,000 (as of September 29, 2026), only includes people who hospitals have identified and officially confirmed to have been killed by acts of violence committed by Israel. It does not include thousands of others who are missing and presumed dead or those who’ve died from malnutrition, disease, medical conditions that went untreated because of Israel’s siege and destruction of the health care system, and other indirect ways.
• A November 2025 study by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research estimated the total number of Palestinians killed violently by the Israeli military since October 2023 was between 100,000 and 126,000, of which 27% were children under the age of 15. The Lancet medical journal published a study in July 2024 that found the total number of Palestinians killed in the genocide at that point may have already exceeded 186,000, including unnecessary deaths caused by malnutrition, inability to access medical treatment, and reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases.

5. Israel continues to kill Palestinian journalists and to prevent foreign journalists from entering Gaza to hide its crimes from the world.

• Since the start of the genocide, the Israeli military has systematically targeted Palestinian journalists in Gaza to prevent them from exposing Israel’s crimes to the world, killing at least 262 journalists and other media workers, according to the Palestinian Journalist Syndicate.
• As noted by the head of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) as early as January 2024: “Israel’s war on Gaza is more deadly to journalists than any previous war.” A CPJ report released the previous month said it was “particularly concerned about an apparent pattern of targeting of journalists and their families by the Israeli military.”
• At the same time. Israel has barred foreign journalists from entering Gaza except on propaganda tours embedded with the Israeli military.

6. The world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, ruled it’s plausible Israel has violated the Genocide Convention and its investigation is ongoing.

• In January 2024, the ICJ issued an interim ruling in a case brought by South Africa accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. The ruling found that it was plausible Israel was committing genocide and issued urgent provisional orders to Israel to stop and prevent genocidal acts, including allowing the unfettered entry of food and other humanitarian aid to Gaza, while the court continues to investigate.
• Israel responded by systematically flouting the ICJ’s orders, including imposing a total siege on Gaza in March 2025 causing widespread starvation and continuing its systematic destruction of Palestinian homes, communities, the healthcare system and other civilian infrastructure.

7. Netanyahu and his former defense minister are wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza.

• In November 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Galant for “the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

8. Israel is also ethnically cleansing Palestinians in the West Bank.

• In the West Bank, the Israeli military and settlers backed by the government are waging an intensifying campaign of terror to force Palestinians out of their homes so Israel can take them over. According to the UN, as of August, more than 2,200 Palestinians had been forcibly displaced from their homes in 2026 due to settler attacks or Israeli access restrictions and hundreds of others had been displaced due to Israel’s destruction of their homes.
• As noted by Amnesty International in a statement accompanying the release of its June 2026 report, Israel’s ethnic cleansing of West Bank Bedouin and herding communities:

• According to Israeli rights group, B’Tselem, since the current Israeli government took power in December 2022, Israeli soldiers and settlers have forcibly displaced at least 75 Palestinian communities in the West Bank and about 33,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced from refugee camps.

9. As signatories to the Genocide Convention, the U.S. and other western countries are obligated to prevent and punish acts of genocide, yet many continue to be complicit in Israel’s crimes.

• Governments, in particular the U.S. and Israel’s other western backers, should be imposing sanctions and an arms embargo on Israel and arresting Israeli leaders implicated in war crimes in Gaza and elsewhere.
• Instead, the U.S, and other governments continue to arm and fund Israel’s military, maintain good economic and diplomatic relations with Israel, and allow Netanyahu and other alleged Israeli war criminals to travel through their airspace and enter their territory, fueling a sense of impunity among Israelis that they can do whatever they want without consequences.

10. Israel has been brutally oppressing and ethnically cleansing Palestinians since Israel was established as an apartheid state in 1948. This is the root cause of all the violence between Israelis and Palestinians.

• During Israel’s founding in 1948, some three-quarters of all Palestinians were violently expelled from their homes and land. Ever since, Israel has imposed a racist system of apartheid on Palestinians under its control while continuing to dispossess them. As noted by Amnesty International in its 2022 report, Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity:

• Israel’s apartheid system must be dismantled and its oppression of Palestinians must end for there to be lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Go deeper

• Fact Sheet: Two Years of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
• Fact Sheet: 5 Things to Know About Israeli Settler Violence Against Palestinians
• Quick Facts: The Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe)
• Fact Sheet: Is Israel an Apartheid State?