The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, established by the United Nations Human Rights Council, has merely put an institutional seal on what the world has suspected for long — that Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu regime is guilty of perpetrating genocidal acts in Gaza. In its latest report, a 72-page document, the Commission has stated that there are reasonable grounds to conclude that four of the five genocidal acts defined under international law have been perpetrated on Palestinians in besieged Gaza. These include killing members of a group; inflicting bodily and mental harm on them; deliberately creating conditions to obliterate the group; and preventing births. Statements of Israeli soldiers and the pattern of Israeli aggression in Gaza were cited as evidence by the Commission to reach its conclusion. Unsurprisingly, Israel’s foreign ministry has refuted the claims and alleged that the three members of the Commission are “proxies” of Hamas. It needs to be mentioned in this context that the Commission had found Hamas and other Palestinian groups guilty of war crimes during the hideous attack on Israel in October 2023 which lit the sparks of a disproportionate — genocidal — retaliation by Israel in Gaza. The Commission’s serious charge is not an aberration. In the course of its intervention in Gaza after South Africa accused Israel of genocide, the International Court of Justice stated that the charge of genocide is plausible and instructed Israel to widen the ambit of humanitarian aid.

A conflict that has led to the systematic killing of over 60,000 people, a majority of them women and children, and caused overwhelming displacement of people and loss of property in Gaza cannot escape charges of and conviction on the grounds of a pogrom. The questions that need to be asked, however, are the following: is Israel complicit in this bloodbath alone? The answer is in the negative. The blood of Palestinians stains the hands of not only Israel but its Western allies, principally the United States of America, which have chosen to not bat an eyelid at the carnage. Would institutional censure thwart Israel’s designs in Palestine? The answer, in this instance too, cannot be in the affirmative. That Israel has launched fresh ground operations in Gaza, which are likely to cause further death and displacement, even as the Commission charged it with genocidal intent, reveals its sense of impunity
to a series of transgressions. There are many reasons to remember the genocide in Gaza. The West’s hollow commitment to its own rules-based order and attendant moral imperatives must count as the principal reason.