Fact Sheet: Two Years of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

By IMEU
October 04, 2025

Hungry and distressed child in Gaza trying to get food

Note: The following contains a partial summary of the genocidal acts Israel has committed in Gaza and genocidal statements made by Israeli leaders. For a more comprehensive summary, see the reports by human rights organizations referenced in the final section.

Definition of genocide

According to the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, also known as the Genocide Convention: “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

What acts of genocide has Israel committed in Gaza?

Deliberate mass killing of civilians

In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former minister of defense, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza, including:

“intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

Since October 2023, the Israeli military is confirmed to have killed at least 66,148 Palestinians in Gaza (as of October 1, 2025), the vast majority civilians. This only includes people who hospitals have identified and officially confirmed to have been killed. At least ten thousand others are missing under the rubble and presumed dead.
The Israeli military has killed at least 20,000 children - about 2% of all the children in Gaza - including at least 953 babies under one year of age. That’s an average of at least one child killed every hour since October 2023.
The proportion of women and children violently killed by Israel in Gaza is more than double that of almost all other recent conflicts, including Syria, Iraq, and Sudan.
The Israeli military has engaged in the massive, indiscriminate bombardment of civilians using some of the most destructive weapons on earth, including bombing areas that Israel designated “safe zones” and ordered people to flee to, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times. As one military historian told the Associated Press in December 2023:

“Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history… It now sits comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever.”

Israeli soldiers have repeatedly massacred starving Palestinian civilians trying to get food aid (at least 2,000 as of September 2025), as well as first responders, aid workers, journalists, and people carrying white flags.
In July 2024, the British medical journal The Lancet published a study that found that the total number of Palestinians killed by Israel’s assault on Gaza at that point may have exceeded 186,000, including unnecessary deaths caused by malnutrition, inability to access medical treatment, and reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases.

Depriving Palestinians of the necessities of life & inflicting conditions to bring about their physical destruction

1. Weaponizing hunger to deliberately starve the population

The crimes that Netanyahu is charged with by the International Criminal Court include using “starvation as a method of warfare.”
Starting in October 2023, Israel started blocking the entry of sufficient supplies of food, electricity, and fuel, while systematically destroying Gaza’s food infrastructure, including bombing bakeries, factories, farms, and agricultural land, deliberately engineering widespread hunger and malnutrition. In March 2025, Israel tightened its siege even further, imposing a near total blockade.
Israel even restricted the entry of baby formula to Gaza, confiscating it from doctors, nurses, and aid workers trying to bring it in.
In August 2025, the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification declared Gaza to be in phase 5 famine, the highest level, meaning: “Starvation, death, destitution and extremely critical acute malnutrition levels are evident.”
As of October 1, 2025, at least 445 Palestinians are confirmed to have died from hunger and malnutrition in Gaza as a result of Israel’s starvation policy, including at least 151 children. The actual number is likely much higher.

2. Cutting off water supplies, destroying Gaza’s water treatment and sanitation systems

The Israeli military has systematically targeted Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, including water and sanitation systems, while cutting off the supply of water, fuel, and electricity as part of its siege, causing severe shortages of potable water and the spread of disease from untreated sewage.
In May 2024, an investigation by the BBC found that the Israeli military had damaged or destroyed more than half of Gaza’s water facilities, including desalination plants and boreholes, and four of Gaza’s six wastewater treatment plants, while the other two were closed down due to lack of fuel or other supplies. The report quoted the executive director of Medecins Sans Frontieres UK, noting this has had “disastrous health consequences for the population. The rates of diarrhoeal disease have gone catastrophically high.”

3. Destroying Gaza’s health care system & targeting medical workers

The Israeli military has systematically targeted Gaza’s health care system and workers, repeatedly attacking and invading hospitals, which is a war crime, and cutting off their supplies of basic medicines, equipment, and fuel.
There are no longer any fully functional hospitals in Gaza and no functioning MRI machines. In May 2025, the Israeli military completely destroyed the only cancer hospital in Gaza in a controlled demolition, which was shut down previously due to damage caused by Israeli airstrikes and a lack of fuel.
Israeli soldiers have killed more than 1,500 health workers, including doctors, nurses, and medics, including the massacre of 15 medics and rescue workers in March 2025, which made international headlines after the Israeli military buried the bodies in a mass grave and lied about the circumstances of their deaths.
The Israeli military has abducted hundreds of doctors, nurses, and other medical workers, imprisoning, starving, and torturing them, in some cases to death.
In July 2025, Physicians for Human Rights - Israel released a report documenting Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health care system, which noted:
“The evidence shows a deliberate and systematic dismantling of Gaza’s health care system and other vital systems necessary for the population’s survival… This includes direct attacks on hospitals, blocking of medical aid and evacuations, and the killing and arrest of medical personnel. This is not incidental damage from war – it is a deliberate policy aimed at harming the Palestinian population as a group.”

4. Forcibly displacing Palestinians and seriously damaging or destroying nearly every home and building so they have nowhere to live

The Israeli military has ethnically cleansed more than 90% of the population of Gaza, about 2 million people, from their homes. As noted by Human Rights Watch in November 2024:

“the Israeli government’s acts of forced displacement are widespread and systematic. Statements by senior officials with command responsibility show that forced displacement is intentional and forms part of Israeli state policy and therefore amount to a crime against humanity. Israel’s actions appear to also meet the definition of ethnic cleansing.”

The Israeli military has destroyed or damaged more than 90% of all homes in Gaza, and some 70% of all buildings, razing entire neighborhoods and cities to the ground. As Netanyahu explained to a closed-door parliamentary hearing in March 2025, Israel is destroying Gaza to make it uninhabitable so Palestinians have no choice but to leave or die.
As a result, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are living in tents, many of them makeshift and threadbare, while others have nowhere to shelter, leaving them exposed to the elements.

What have Israeli leaders said that demonstrates genocidal intent?

During a televised national address as Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza began in November 2023, Prime Minister Netanyahu invoked a genocidal passage from the Bible calling for the extermination of the Amalek people down to the last man, woman, child, and baby, telling Israeli soldiers:
“You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.”
Netanyahu invoked the story of the Amalekites again in a letter to soldiers preparing to invade Gaza.
On October 9, 2023, as Israel’s assault on Gaza began, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared: “We are imposing a complete siege on [Gaza]. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel— everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”
On October 10, 2023, Gallant declared: “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate everything. If it doesn’t take one day, it will take a week. It will take weeks or even months, we will reach all places.”
A week after Israel’s assault began in October 2023, President Isaac Herzog told journalists that there are no civilians in Gaza and therefore Israel is justified in attacking anything and anyone, declaring: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible” for the October 7 attack.
In November 2023, Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu called for Israel to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza and declared there are “no uninvolved civilians [in Gaza].” In May 2025, Eliyahu defended Israel’s starvation policy in Gaza, declaring:
“If the people of Gaza suffer, Hamas will suffer. There is no problem bombing their food and fuel reserves. They should starve.”
In August 2024, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told a conference that cutting off supplies of food and starving Palestinians in Gaza might be “justified and moral.” In May 2025, Smotrich declared: “Gaza will be entirely destroyed.”
In February 2025, the deputy speaker of Israel’s parliament from Netanyahu’s Likud party, Nissim Vaturi, told an interviewer that all adults in Gaza should be killed, declaring:
“[Palestinians] are scum, no one in the world wants them. The children and women need to be separated and the adults in Gaza eliminated.”
In August 2025, Israeli media reported that retired general Aharon Haliva, who was head of Israeli military intelligence from the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza until he stepped down in April 2024, had said in a recent interview that 50 Palestinians, including children, should be killed for every Israeli killed on October 7, 2023, to send a message to future generations of Palestinians, declaring:
“The fact that there are already 50,000 dead in Gaza is necessary and required for future generations… for every person on October 7, 50 Palestinians must die. It doesn’t matter now if they are children.”

Who has accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza?

The International Court or Justice

In a case brought by South Africa, the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, ruled that it’s plausible Israel is guilty of violating the Genocide Convention in Gaza and continues to investigate.

Human rights organizations

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Doctors Without Borders have all released reports concluding that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza. Amnesty’s report, released in December 2024, found:

“sufficient basis to conclude that Israel committed, during the nine-month period under review, prohibited acts under Articles II (a), (b) and (c) of the Genocide Convention, namely killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part. The organization has also found sufficient basis to conclude that these acts were committed with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.”

B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights - Israel, two of Israel’s leading rights groups, released reports in July 2025 accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, with B’Tselem concluding:
“An examination of Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads us to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip.”

Genocide & Holocaust scholars

A week after Israel’s assault on Gaza began in October 2023, more than 800 legal experts and Holocaust and genocide scholars issued a statement declaring:
“we are compelled to sound the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. We do not do so lightly, recognising the weight of this crime, but the gravity of the current situation demands it.”
The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS). In September 2025, the IAGS, the oldest and largest organization of genocide scholars, voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution declaring: “Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide.”
Israeli genocide and Holocaust scholars, including Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, and Raz Segal, associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University and the endowed professor in the study of modern genocide. As Segal wrote in mid-October 2023, it is “a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes.”
The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention. In May 2025, the institute, named for Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide,” issued a statement noting:
“Israel’s genocide against Palestinians involves the planned and entirely intentional murder and forced displacement of all Palestinians from their ancestral homes across historical Palestine using all available means.”“The goal is to create a Greater Israel that is completely cleansed of Palestinian life. The monstrous nature of this goal has been evidenced every day by the statements of Israel’s leadership and civil society, by the unrelenting destruction of Palestinian life, including resources necessary for life, and by the grotesque behavior of Israeli soldiers. It has not been hidden.”

Independent UN rights experts

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. In September 2025, the commission issued a report accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. As noted by the commission’s chair:
“Israel is responsible for the commission of genocide in Gaza… It is clear that there is an intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza through acts that meet the criteria set forth in the Genocide Convention.”
The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese, has also accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.

Other notable individuals

Former Attorney General of Israel and acting judge on the Supreme Court of Israel, Michael Ben-Yair. In July 2025, he wrote on X (Twitter): “Jews, who suffered genocide 80 years ago, are committing genocide in Gaza.”
The European Commission’s second-highest ranking official, Teresa Ribera. In August 2025, she told an interviewer: “If it is not genocide, it looks very much like the definition used to express its meaning.”
The former High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy from 2019-2024, Josep Borrell. In May 2025, he accused Israel of committing ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza, declaring:
“[Israel is] carrying out the largest ethnic-cleansing operation since the end of the second world war in order to create a splendid holiday destination… We all know what’s going on there, and we’ve all heard the objectives stated by Netanyahu’s ministers, which are clear declarations of genocidal intent. Seldom have I heard the leader of a state so clearly outline a plan that fits the legal definition of genocide.”

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