On April 4, the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha posted a video of an obliterated urban landscape. Suddenly, there are bombs: Smoke erupts from the base of the buildings, and two large objects are ejected from the rooftops into the sky. Arms and legs seem to undulate in the air — they appear to be human bodies — before they crash down onto the pyre. “This is scary more than ever,” Abu Toha wrote on Instagram. “In the air strikes, two people flew even above the clouds of death.” In the background, the girl videotaping is crying as she holds the phone. She knows that those two people, perhaps briefly alive in the sky, have died, that Israel is bombing an already annihilated place, and that eventually those bombs may come for them all.
That there are no longer words to capture the horrors taking place in the Gaza Strip has long been said and felt, but then a video like Abu Toha’s appears, clarifying how extreme and otherworldly this catastrophe has become. In the 1980s, the American philosopher Edith Wyschogrod recognized that the Holocaust and Hiroshima and other crises in which huge numbers of people had died required a new language. In her 1985 book, Spirit in Ashes, she called them “death events.” These, she wrote, could be large-scale bombing campaigns, forced famines, or deportations. Most important, these manmade events were collective global experiences and involved the shared knowledge that people have made the extinction of mankind possible. In some cases, these events gave rise to something she called the “death world,” which had the “imagined conditions of death, conferring upon their inhabitants the status of the living dead.” Wyschogrod had the Nazi camps in mind; today, the death world we know is Gaza.
It’s clear now that Hamas’s terroristic and sadistic attack on October 7, 2023, was meant to transform the region. Its acts against both Israeli soldiers and innocent civilians, including massacring women, children, and grandparents; burning homes; and taking about 250 hostages, accompanied by the images and videos the group posted online, were unmistakably triumphant, flagrantly criminal, and intentionally terrifying for Israelis and Jews around the world. The daylong offensive across land, sea, and air struck military outposts, a rave, and kibbutzim, killing some 1,200 people and wounding thousands more. For Israelis, it was the worst attack on their country in its history, from an extremist group that has often pledged to destroy them.
That day was so vivid and enormous it’s difficult to remember now, almost two years later, that expert warnings of Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide came as early as one week into its retaliatory campaign. The Israeli genocide scholar Raz Segal had called it a genocide by October 15, eight days after it began; 800 genocide scholars signed a letter warning of genocide soon after. By early November, the Israelis had reportedly struck in the vicinities of Al-Shifa Hospital — so shocking at the time — the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, and the Al-Quds and Indonesian Hospitals, and a third of all hospitals and health clinics had closed. In the first seven weeks alone, Israel unleashed 30,000 munitions on Gaza, which the New York Times wrote was “one of the most intense bombing campaigns in contemporary warfare.”
On October 25, Israel, by then already flattening entire refugee camps and neighborhoods in one of the densest urban areas on earth, struck seven residential towers in Yarmouk in northern Gaza, including one in which more than 91 Palestinians, including at least 28 women and 39 children, died. The writer Atef Abu Saif said, “Last night was the worst so far.” His Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide is a rare detailed daily record of the first three months of Gaza’s ordeal, and what is harrowing about reading the book now is that the suffering was already unimaginable from the very first days: the constant terror of planes or drones overhead; the deaths of multiple relatives; the lack of food, water, and electricity; the digging in the rubble and finding fingers, heads, part of an arm. That was the first three weeks; it has now been 88 weeks.
By December, Israel had killed 20,000 people, according to the Gaza health ministry, including 8,000 children, 60 journalists, and 130 aid workers. Photos emerged of naked prisoners tied up and piled in the backs of trucks. That was when South Africa brought its case of genocide against Israel to the International Court of Justice. Soon after, the ICJ determined there were plausible merits to the case and ordered Israel to take measures to prevent a genocide.
The next month, the U.S. and other countries stopped funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, which practically serves as Gaza’s government in providing public services, over allegations that 12 of UNRWA’s 30,000 employees were involved in the October 7 attack. In March 2024, news came that newborns were dying of malnutrition. By April, it was known that Israel was relying on often-faulty artificial intelligence to identify targets on the ground and was depriving Gaza of food. The U.S., evidently unable to persuade its Israeli partners to exhibit humane behavior, began air-dropping food and ultimately built a pier to transport aid, but it was swept out to sea.
That spring, Israel announced it would attack Rafah, to which a million people had fled. This was part of a pattern in which the Israelis dropped leaflets and posted confusing orders online for thousands of people to “evacuate” their homes to another area (often described as a “safe zone”), which they then also bombed. President Joe Biden withheld a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs and warned the Israelis not to attack Rafah, but they bombed it anyway. In May, the International Criminal Court announced applications for arrest warrants for the leaders of both Hamas and Israel. In July, Israel dropped eight 2,000-pound bombs on the southern coastal region of al-Mawasi, which was supposed to be a safe zone. The weapons killed 90 people and injured 300, according to the Gaza health ministry.
There was always more. That summer, doctors returned from Gaza speaking of snipers shooting toddlers in the head. “No toddler gets shot twice by mistake,” Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon from North Carolina, told the media. In 30 years working in conflict zones, he had never seen children who had been “incinerated” or “shredded” the way they were in Gaza. “Of 70 people every hour” coming into the hospital, he said, “40 are going to be children. I’ve never seen that before.” The children told staff they were waiting to die. Acronyms and phrases emerged: WCNSF, for “wounded child, no surviving family,” and the “dead children’s area.” Unni Krishnan from Plan International told me he realized Gaza was different when a doctor informed him during a call that he had to operate on his own child.
The autumn brought another campaign against northern Gaza, the most populous part of the Strip. In October, the American doctor Feroze Sidhwa, along with 98 other medical professionals, sent a letter to Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris that read, “With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. That includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child.” In November, an American doctor named Tanya Haj-Hassan testified at the United Nations that “everything needed to sustain life is under attack” and that Gaza is the “prelude to the end of humanity.” She relayed the testimony of a nurse named Saeed who had been detained and tortured by Israeli forces:
We are being buried, every minute we are being buried, every minute we disappear, every minute we are abducted, we are experiencing things that the mind cannot even comprehend. We die and don’t find anyone to bury us. I am asking you to share my story, my whole story, with my name. I want the whole world to know that I am a human being … I am a human being created by God.
Near the end of 2024, Jan Egeland of the Norwegian Refugee Council said Israel’s campaign “is in no way a lawful response, a targeted operation of ‘self-defense’ to dismantle armed groups, or warfare consistent with humanitarian law.” By then, according to the United Nations, Israel’s bombing had displaced 1.9 million out of 2.2 million people. Former Israeli Defense Forces head Moshe Ya’alon called what was happening “ethnic cleansing.”
Then, in January 2025, there was a cease-fire and images of Palestinians celebrating in the streets. Then Donald Trump took office. With him came the words “Gaza Riviera,” the most grotesque AI video ever made, and a baleful new euphemism: “voluntary emigration,” a public confession that the Israelis and the Americans wanted to force the Palestinians to leave Gaza entirely. “We will … allow the realization of the Trump plan for voluntary migration,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. “This is the plan. We are not hiding this and are ready to discuss it at any time.”
“We are disassembling Gaza and leaving it as piles of rubble,” his Cabinet minister Bezalel Smotrich said in May. “And the world isn’t stopping us.”
Today, Gaza is scarier than ever, as Abu Toha wrote, because a new phase of the extermination of Palestinian life has begun. On March 18, the Israeli government unilaterally broke the cease-fire and dropped so many bombs that it killed 436 people in one night, including 183 children and 94 women, according to the Gaza health ministry. Israel imposed a complete siege for 77 days, preventing all food, fuel, and medical aid from getting in — the longest of Israel’s many acts of deprivation — which meant “not a grain of wheat, not a drop of water, no medical supplies, no vaccines for children,” Juliette Touma, the director of communications at UNRWA, told me. The Israelis cut the electricity, disabling life-sustaining medical machines and desalinization plants in an area that has sandy, undrinkable water. Almost all the farmland has been destroyed, as have the local fishing industry, the sewage system, nearly all the schools, and more than 90 percent of the housing, so that people must live in tents or on hospital floors or in collapsed buildings. All 2.2 million people in Gaza, trapped and unable to flee, are at risk of manmade famine. “As aid has dried up, the floodgates of horror have reopened,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said. “Gaza is a killing field — and civilians are in an endless death loop.”
In May, Netanyahu launched an operation he named “Gideon’s Chariot,” sending in ground troops again. He also said he would end the siege but take over aid distribution through the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” which turned out to be run by ex–American military contractors. It replaced the U.N.’s 400 food-distribution sites with four. When the malnourished people rushed to the sites with buckets and pots, the Israelis opened fire, killing 27 on one day and 31 on another, according to health officials in Gaza. (Israel has admitted only to firing warning shots.) The siege has essentially continued with barely any aid getting in, while the total number of deaths at the distribution sites has surpassed 200.
According to the Gaza health ministry, Israel has killed nearly 56,000 Palestinians, including 15,613 children, 8,304 women, and 3,839 elderly, since October 7 and has injured 116,991, many of those injuries, such as severed limbs, grave and life-changing. The Costs of War Project estimates that all these figures are much higher, as do medical experts: In an October 2024 letter to President Biden, a group of American doctors suggested the tally of dead could be closer to 118,000. The British medical journal The Lancet estimated the cumulative number, including indirect deaths and the missing, could be more than 186,000 — and that was in July 2024, almost a year ago. One reason the figure is difficult to pinpoint is that thousands of people are likely buried under rubble; in an area the size of Philadelphia, as much as 50 million tons, or 100 billion pounds, of rubble is on the ground. The U.N. estimates it will take nearly two decades to clean up.
Israel’s critics continue to use the word genocide to describe this all-encompassing destruction, which U.S. officials and Israel’s supporters scoff at as leftist agitprop, an attempt to delegitimize Israel. But the accusation that Israel has committed war crimes — likely hundreds, maybe even thousands of war crimes — has become all but undeniable. Even Israel’s supporters, those who defended or withstood this publicly broadcast nightmare for 19 months, have reached some semblance of a limit. In May, the leaders of the U.K., France, and Canada said the expansion of the Israeli military offensive was “wholly disproportionate.” Germany’s chancellor said he “no longer sees any logic as to how they serve the goal of fighting terror and freeing the hostages.” Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert said, “What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limit-less, cruel, and criminal killing of civilians,” adding, “It’s the result of government policy — knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated. Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.”
In its annihilative force and ambition, the Israeli campaign is unique among modern conflicts. In fact, the term war crime is not even adequate for what’s happening in Gaza, in that it suggests that there is a war happening and there are some crimes in it. Gaza is different, the number of war crimes virtually incalculable, the war not really a war but rather the ceaseless pummeling of one side by the other. “If what we are seeing in the Gaza Strip is the future of war,” Pierre Krähenbühl of the Red Cross said in April, “we should all be very concerned, terrified.”
Even the most hardened cynic may ask, What system could possibly have allowed this? Unlike the Holocaust, whose horrors were properly understood by the outside world only after the fact, the evidence of Gaza’s horrors is immediately known and ubiquitous thanks to smartphones, despite the lack of on-the-ground reporting from western journalists barred from the Strip. The postwar legal order established to prevent the atrocities of World War II has failed, and worse, the U.S., which nominally took on the responsibility of preserving that order, is abetting the killing and abandoning any pretense of adhering to the law. “It’s not that huge numbers of potential incidents of war crimes don’t happen in places like Ukraine or Congo,” Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch, told me, and he could have added Sudan or China. “What has brought a lot of attention to Gaza is that it’s a very sophisticated military backed by the United States, which is essentially bombing and starving at will. The outrage is about the relentless and very one-sided nature of the conflict.”
The reemergence of Trump has underscored that the U.S. and the world are in a legal crisis. Trump returned to office ready to abuse the Constitution, the presidency, and common decency. He has added a sleazy carelessness to the destruction of Gaza as well as a terrifying ruthlessness to the persecution of pro-Palestinian protesters on U.S. university campuses. And he is supporting Netanyahu as the Israeli leader strikes Iran as part of his own maniacal bid to remain in power. But the onslaught against Palestinians that began with Biden has been just as damaging to the rule of law. It was the Biden administration — with the support of both the Democratic and the Republican parties and the complicity of many media organizations and millions of indifferent Americans — that finally shattered the postwar legal order and allowed the death world to flourish. Only by our first recognizing this terrible fact can the law’s spirit ever be reclaimed, and with it the baseline respect for human life that the world spent nearly a century establishing.
The laws of war are complicated and often entirely inadequate to the goal of protecting civilians, but they contain basic principles at their foundation. According to the Red Cross, “The main purpose of international humanitarian law is to maintain some humanity in armed conflicts,” or as Janine di Giovanni, the head of the war-crimes investigation group the Reckoning Project in Ukraine, put it, “to prevent total anarchy.” International humanitarian law, or IHL, allows for states to wage war and achieve their war aims while imposing limits on human suffering. Anyone fighting in wars, both government forces and non-state groups, is bound by these rules. The purpose of IHL is to create an outcome in which, according to the Red Cross, “living together again is possible.”
The core of IHL is the Geneva Conventions — which were ratified in 1949, then updated with further protocols in the 1970s in response to the rise of armed groups and other non-state actors — and the older Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. This realm of international law also includes the 1948 Genocide Convention, as well as treaties and laws like those that regulate land mines and chemical weapons. In 1998, a group of states issued the Rome Statute, which established the jurisdiction of a permanent legal entity, the International Criminal Court, that has since convicted mainly African militants from places like Uganda and Congo. The International Court of Justice was also established after World War II; it regulates disputes between states. For example, in 1984, Nicaragua brought a case, which Nicaragua won but the U.S. refused to recognize, against the U.S. for arming the Contras in its dirty war. Other famous conflicts have been judged at bespoke tribunals, like the International Criminal Tribunal, which tried Slobodan Milosevic; the Rwandan Tribunal after the 1994 genocide; the Nuremberg trials; and the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, all of which inform what is called “customary IHL.”
Neither the U.S. nor Israel is party to the ICC, and, in fact, Trump sanctioned the court’s prosecutor and one of its staff members in 2020 and the court itself by executive order in 2025. Both the U.S. and Israel, as U.N. member states, are party to the ICJ, but neither has accepted its compulsory jurisdiction; the U.S. withdrew from it in 1986 over that Nicaragua decision. In the case of Gaza, the ICC can investigate potential crimes committed by Israel in Palestine only because Palestine accepted its compulsory jurisdiction in 2015. That is not to say that the U.S. government rejects IHL wholesale; government lawyers and lawmakers write laws and regulations with IHL as their precept, and there has been a concerted effort not to repeat the war crimes of the Vietnam War.
Within this world of IHL are specific acts considered “war crimes”: the willful killing of civilians, torture or inhuman treatment, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, extensive destruction or appropriation of property not justified by military necessity, depriving prisoners of war of their rights or compelling them to fight, unlawful deportation or transfer, the taking of hostages, and intentional starvation or denying humanitarian assistance to civilians. War crimes can be committed against civilians and combatants, but the concept of “crimes against humanity” concerns more systematic and widespread crimes that specifically target civilians and can also happen outside of a war. Ethnic cleansing has never been defined by international law but was recognized by a U.N. commission of experts after the war in Yugoslavia as “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.”
And then there is genocide, defined by the Genocide Conventions as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,” through killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and transferring children of the group to another group. That “as such” is tricky because it requires proof that the destruction was perpetrated against not individuals but a group.
Moral outrages and the legal definitions of those outrages are separate things. One could believe an atrocity has occurred, but that doesn’t mean the atrocity meets the legal definition of a crime. And sometimes, an atrocity could meet that definition but lawyers fail to prove it in court. As in all areas of the law, accusations of crimes are considered alleged until proven, which is one of many reasons the law can feel inadequate to the gargantuan task of delivering justice to a people suffering the unimaginable.
The May 2024 ICC prosecutor’s applications for arrest warrants of Israeli and Hamas leaders concern war crimes, not genocide. They were brought by the prosecutor Karim Khan against three leaders of Hamas for a wide range of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, hostage taking, and outrages on personal dignity, and two Israeli leaders, Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare as well as the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts related to the policy of starvation and deprivation. Few, if any, government officials in the West seriously disputed the charges against the three Hamas leaders, who at any rate have since been killed by Israeli forces. But Israel and its staunchest allies do reject the claims against Israeli officials. If tried, a case would likely last years, even decades, because of how difficult it is to apprehend the accused and how long it takes prosecutorial teams to process all the evidence and conduct their investigations.
These teams do their own research but can draw on a whole world of foundations, individuals, and experts collecting and documenting incidents of potential crimes in many conflicts around the world. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, OCHA, several U.N. committees, and open-source intelligence-based research groups like Airwars and Forensic Architecture all produce such reports. In the region, there are also smaller, highly esteemed groups that have long done human-rights documentation or advocacy work about the occupation, particularly Al-Haq, the Bisan Center, the Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, and B’Tselem.
Al-Haq, for example, submits reports to U.N. bodies as well as to the ICC and ICJ. It currently has two field researchers in the Gaza Strip. “Both have been forcibly displaced many times and had some of their family members killed,” said Al-Haq’s Tahseen Elayyan. “A third colleague who is based outside of the Gaza Strip had 80 members of his extended family killed.” In such conditions, these researchers document violations based on firsthand information given to them by victims and witnesses, as well as open-source intelligence. “We used to document every single case of killing and destruction in the Gaza Strip,” Elayyan said. “But considering the high scale of killing and destruction and the constant displacement of our field researchers,” they have had to work with witnesses outside their organization.
Many of these organizations have produced reams of evidence of war crimes. Some have focused on the treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, like Sde Teiman, which has become notorious for testimonies of abuse, torture, and rape. In its August 2024 report on prisons, “Welcome to Hell,” B’Tselem found that “the abuse consistently described in the testimonies of dozens of individuals held in different facilities was so systematic, that there is no room to doubt an organized, declared policy of the Israeli prison authorities.” At the time, 9,623 Palestinians were held in Israeli prisons; 4,781 had been detained without trial, “without being presented with the allegations against them, and without access to the right to defend themselves” — extrajudicial detentions that could well qualify as abductions or disappearances. The men spoke of sexual assault, humiliation and degradation, deliberate starvation, sleep deprivation, and denial of adequate medical treatment. A U.N. report found similar testimony from one prisoner:
They took me into an interrogation room and suspended me by my arms behind my back. My toes barely touched the floor. A male guard inserted a metal stick in my penis on several occasions, about 20 times in total. I started bleeding. The pain was excruciating, but the humiliation was worse.
Medical personnel, who have special protections under IHL, have also suffered in prison. Currently, there are 160 Palestinian doctors from Gaza in prison, according to the World Health Organization. Khaled Alser, a Palestinian surgeon at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, told Democracy Now! that he was held by Israel for seven months last year, during which time, he said, he was tortured, humiliated, and denied medical treatment.
Attacks on specially protected civilian places like schools and hospitals can be another war crime. “One of our schools, for example, got bombed out totally,” Touma of UNRWA said. “There was a video from Beit Hanoun, in northern Gaza, early on during the war. The whole school was, like, almost booby-trapped and bombed out. That was put on video, on display.” One study found that Israel has launched 654 strikes on Gaza’s medical facilities, and another found that enormous bombs have fallen within range of more than 80 percent of the hospitals. In the fall of 2024, the U.N. called the assault on the medical community a crime against humanity. More than 1,000 health-care workers have been killed. A recent New Yorker article by a doctor mentioned “a large storage room in the corner of the I.C.U. which was crammed with medical devices: ultrasound machines, I.V. pumps, dialysis machines, blood-pressure monitors. Each had apparently been destroyed by a bullet — not in a pattern one would expect from random shooting but, rather, methodically.”
The killing of journalists can be a war crime as well because journalists are civilians protected by the Geneva Conventions. In an unprecedented move for a purported democracy, Israel prevented all foreign journalists from entering Gaza after October 7 and has targeted the Palestinian journalists who have continued to report from there, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. More than 200 journalists have been killed, pursued by drones and burned alive in fires. When the Israelis killed the Al Jazeera reporter Hossam Shabat in March 2025, they claimed he was a terrorist, as they have often done in the past. “Don’t let the press vest confuse you,” the IDF’s official account posted.
A lot of evidence for potential war crimes comes from the social-media accounts of Israeli soldiers, who have posted videos in which they blow up houses, vandalize shops, or call for Palestinian expulsion. The demolition of crucial civilian infrastructure has been broadcast across the internet; Israeli forces have also destroyed mosques, universities, and landmarks. Often, the videos are accompanied by hip-hop music and the soldiers are smiling, bobbing their heads, or celebrating. The Israeli historian Lee Mordechai has a website called Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War, a record of thousands of reports and evidentiary documents, much of which he found simply by browsing and collecting Israeli videos online. One activist has uploaded more than 12,000 of these videos to a website called TikTok Genocide.
IDF soldiers bragging about their exploits is “indicative of their sense they can get away with anything,” said Roth. The vast public archive they have produced has encouraged some lawyers to advocate for individual soldiers to be tried for crimes outside of Israel. The Hind Rajab Foundation has submitted evidence to the ICC against 1,000 IDF soldiers and called on third-party countries to arrest and prosecute soldiers who go abroad or are dual nationals. Recently, Brazil issued an arrest warrant for a former IDF soldier vacationing there, but the Israeli authorities alerted him and he fled.
Starvation and deprivation constitute the main focus of the publicized ICC charges against Netanyahu and Gallant, Israel’s former defense minister. As Roth explained, countries at war have an obligation to make sure affected civilians have access to food, and the evidence for withholding aid is easy to find. Investigators “could go to the borders of Gaza and see how Israeli forces were obstructing the aid, and there were many aid agencies inside that were reporting the consequences,” Roth said. “So the evidence was very strong.” Gallant said early on there would be “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel,” and this was all before the siege that began March 2, which no one disputes involved the deliberate withholding of aid.
Roth thinks the ICC will also take on the question of indiscriminate attacks, or attacks that fail to distinguish between military and civilian targets, noting that Khan has said it is wholly inappropriate to send 2,000-pound bombs smashing into civilian areas. More difficult to prove is disproportionality — i.e., that the number of civilians killed is disproportionate to the value of a military target, such as a Hamas militant or alleged Hamas tunnels — which would need to be proved for an indiscriminate attack to rise to the level of a criminal legal offense. Hamas does, after all, live and hide among the urban population in Gaza, and in a statement the IDF emphasized that “a central feature of Hamas’s strategy is the exploitation of civilian structures for terror purposes.” Using civilians as human shields is considered a war crime too, even if international lawyers and other experts believe the concept of human shields is overused and doesn’t justify the high civilian cost.
“Israel seems to have this kind of almost rote justification: ‘Oh, it was a Hamas command center,’” Roth said. “But when you look at that, things tend to fall apart.” He gave the example of Al-Shifa Hospital, which not only served patients but was a campus where tens of thousands of civilians and families sheltered from the bombs that were falling on their houses. In April 2024, the Washington Post conducted a study of Al-Shifa and was unable to find evidence of a command center there — or of any threat that warranted depriving Palestinians of their main hospital in the midst of a war.
Multiple media outlets have documented that the IDF has expanded the notion of proportionality in Gaza; where, say, a few civilian deaths had been tolerated in the past, now 20 deaths are. The Israeli-Palestinian +972 Magazine reported on a “loosening of restraints” at the beginning of the onslaught, revealing that Israel was using an algorithm code-named “Lavender” to choose its targets without always thoroughly checking if they were correct. Another 2024 investigation by the Times found Israel was attacking supposed military sites in Gaza that it never had in the past, suggesting its criteria for a military target had softened.
Though the evidence of war crimes may appear overwhelming, few experts believe Netanyahu or Gallant or their allies will ever be brought to justice by the ICC, not least because they will not surrender to the court. “People don’t fully grasp how permissive international humanitarian law is,” the legal scholar Samuel Moyn has said. “After all, it is a body of law that permits not only killing but intentional killing of civilians, at least in some number.” Israeli lawyers may argue civilian deaths are acceptable as long as they can prove necessity or that the deaths won them a significant military advantage.
“The expected military advantage here,” Eylon Levy, an Israeli-government spokesperson, told the BBC, “is to destroy the terror organization that perpetrated the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.” Yale Law School’s Oona Hathaway has pointed out that this is an unusual approach, since “by weighing any single instance of harm to civilians against a perceived existential threat, Israel can justify virtually any strike as meeting the requirements of proportionality; the purported benefits always outweigh any costs.” The Biden administration supported such arguments, claiming the point of the war in Gaza was to “prevent another October 7,” the same forever-war justification the Americans put forth during the “War on Terror.”
It is good legal cover. “The issue is not with the lack of evidence or weak cases,” Elayyan of Al-Haq told me. “Over the course of time, Israel has succeeded in convincing many people around the world of its propaganda. It has successfully manipulated international humanitarian law to justify its crimes, especially when it comes to principles such as military necessity, proportionality, and distinction.”
And as the legal scholar Neve Gordon has said, “If your ally is the United States, and if your ally can veto any U.N. Security Council resolution, and if your allies are the European states, then the chances that the ICC will bring you to justice are very, very slim.”
Whether what’s happening in Gaza is genocide as defined by international law has become the inevitable question hovering over the operation. After South Africa brought charges of genocide against Israel at the ICJ in December 2023, the court voted 15-2 that Israel must take measures to prevent genocide and 16-1 that Israel must punish those inciting genocide. In other words, genocide was plausible.
The word genocide is both a general term and a legal term. Israel’s supporters believe the word is being used cynically to undermine the Jewish people’s status as historical victims of genocide. “A lot of the slogans that people use either are or slide into antisemitism. The one that bothers me the most is genocide,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has said. “Genocide is described as a country or some group tries to wipe out a whole race of people, a whole nationality of people. So if Israel was not provoked and just invaded Gaza and shot at random Palestinians, Gazans, that would be genocide. That’s not what happened. In fact, the opposite happened. And Hamas is much closer to genocidal than Israel.” In Schumer’s recent book about antisemitism, he cites the enormous numbers killed during the Holocaust: more than 33,000 in two days in Babi Yar, up to 20,000 a day in Auschwitz.
Even if esteemed experts — including the Israeli historian of genocide studies Omer Bartov, Human Rights Watch founder Aryeh Neier, and U.N. special rapporteur Francesca Albanese — have argued Israel’s crimes qualify as genocide, any such case is exceedingly hard to prove in court. That’s because genocide has two parts to it: act and specific intent. “The acts are clearly sufficient — there’s roughly 55,000 dead now, let’s say, very conservatively, two-thirds of those civilians,” Roth said. “Those numbers are much higher than the 8,000 killed at Srebrenica, which was deemed to be genocide. And similarly, the starvation strategy and the deprivation strategy that are the subject of the ICC prosecution are genocidal acts and are very well documented.”
Specific intent is harder, even if eliminationist statements by Israeli officials are not difficult to find. Al-Haq has published an archive of these statements, as have Human Rights Watch and others. On October 28, 2023, as Israel began its ground invasion of Gaza, Netanyahu invoked a line from the Torah exhorting followers “to wipe out the memory of Amalek from under the heavens” — often understood as a perpetual commandment to kill any descendants of the Amalekite people, or the Israelites’ enemies. In April 2024, Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said, “There are no half-measures. Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat — total annihilation.” A year later, Moshe Saada of the Likud Party proclaimed, “I do intend to starve the Gazans — that’s our duty. Our duty is to expel the Gazans.” And on and on.
The court may look to historical precedent here. “In the end, intent is really going to be determined by inferences from the conduct, the clear disregard for civilian life,” Roth said. “In the case of Croatia v. Serbia, the ICJ ruled that intent can be inferred from conduct only if it’s the only reasonable inference.” That ruling was premised on the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, in which the aims were to kill every Jew or every Tutsi the perpetrators could find.
But, contra Schumer, genocide doesn’t have to be whole; it can also be in part, and it can be a means to another end. Take the Rohingya: The Myanmar military killed 30,000 Rohingya, not everybody, by any means, in order to send 730,000 fleeing to Bangladesh. Even before Netanyahu and Trump straightforwardly declared they wanted the Palestinians to leave, “the Israelis were not trying to kill every single Palestinian,” Roth said, “but they’re trying to kill enough and have conditions be so awful that they can get rid of 2 million Palestinians.”
The Palestinian writer and lawyer Raja Shehadeh has said that as soon as he heard of the first Israeli order in October 2023 for 1 million people to leave northern Gaza for the south, he worried that this was another Nakba — the original 1948 expulsion of the Palestinians from the land that would later be called Israel. Over the past 20 months, the Israelis have herded Palestinians back and forth into the so-called safe zones, often giving children, the wounded, and the elderly very little time to move. Israel will claim it “evacuated” people to protect them, but, to state the obvious, it’s impossible to move a million people virtually overnight in a safe way. Today, the Israelis are pushing the Palestinians into an ever-shrinking area, roughly a third of the Strip.
The expansiveness of the Israeli campaign would not be possible without the constant supply of U.S. weaponry. “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S.,” retired Israeli major general Itzhak Brik said in late November 2023. “Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.” The Biden administration also consistently protected Israel by vetoing four U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding a cease-fire.
More broadly, the two countries have laid the legal groundwork for what we are seeing in Gaza. After September 11, the U.S. looked to Israel as a model, using the legal-military concepts the latter had developed to maintain its decadeslong occupation of Gaza and combat insurgent groups. “Israel and the United States together ushered a lot of folks into a new world of normalized counterterrorism and counterinsurgency,” Moyn told me. “That is absolutely central to the whole moral world we live in today.”
A concept the Americans and Israelis have both expanded is “dual use,” the argument that civilian objects or sites have lost their protections under the law and can be considered military weapons or installations. The Israelis have worsened Gaza’s humanitarian crisis by holding up deliveries of oxygen cylinders, tent poles, and other objects they deemed dangerous. Hathaway has noted that Israel also “treats hospitals, schools, apartment buildings, and even places of worship as legitimate military targets if Hamas has used them for military purposes.” Israel’s looser definition of war outside the battlefield can be linked to innovations made during the “War on Terror,” when the U.S. decided it was fair game to target militants even when they were at home with their families, which we have also seen in Gaza. “The military logic behind Israel’s air and ground campaign in Gaza is, in part, a result of these incremental changes,” Hathaway has said.
But as destructive as the U.S. was in the “War on Terror,” military and human-rights experts say Israel’s behavior in Gaza has been far worse. In September 2024, Franklin Foer reported in The Atlantic that Brett McGurk, a member of Biden’s National Security Council, would invoke “his stint overseeing the siege of Mosul during the Obama administration, as the U.S. attempted to drive ISIS from northern Iraq,” as a way to defend the Israelis. In Foer’s paraphrase, “We flattened the city. There’s nothing left. What standard are you holding these Israelis to?”
Wes J. Bryant, a former chief of civilian-harm assessments at the Department of Defense, called this “just an irresponsible statement.” The military has since formally evaluated those battles in Mosul and Raqqa as grave violations of the U.S.’s own norms even during the “War on Terror.” They were aberrations in the era of “precision bombing” and other innovations intended to avoid the atrocities of Vietnam and other American wars. “We had an incredibly low civilian casualty rate relative to previous periods of war in human history,” Bryant said. “But then Mosul and Raqqa were starkly different. The military said, ‘We don’t want to repeat that again.’” Furthermore, even if you use Mosul and Raqqa as examples, “there’s no comparison” to Gaza, Bryant said. “Looking at the ‘War on Terror’ as a whole and Gaza, it’s night and day.”
As Roth explained, “The U.S. obviously still commits war crimes, but the U.S. is guided by military lawyers who read the Geneva Conventions and make some kind of conscientious effort to abide. The Israeli government has pretty much ripped up the Geneva Conventions, has interpreted them out of existence.”
The Democrats allowed themselves to be dragged into lawlessness by Netanyahu and his virulently racist Cabinet members like Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Even as the U.S. undergoes a reckoning about Biden’s age, few have asked how his senility affected his direction of U.S. policy in Gaza. Instead, administration veterans keep repeating that the one area in which Biden remained engaged was foreign policy, as if those policies were actually good ones and not flawed, cataclysmic, or potentially criminal.
Explanations for the Biden administration’s unconditional support for Israel include geopolitical concerns about Hezbollah, Iran, and the possibility of a wider war. That might have been true in the beginning, but those concerns ring hollow now that Israel has aggressively bombed the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria and, most recently, struck Iran. The most common view is that Biden’s long-standing pro-Israel ideology single-handedly drove U.S. policy and officials executed that policy. At this point, after all those images and videos of maimed and dead children, such explanations feel inadequate. Other factors must have been present that are so powerful they disable people’s most basic human instincts, the natural reflex to look at a video of starving masses or wounded babies and know that what is happening is beyond the pale.
When Hala Rharrit resigned from the State Department in early 2024, she had been a diplomat for 18 years, most recently based in Dubai as a spokesperson for the U.S. assigned to communicate with Arabic media. Rharrit had previously been a “political officer” privy to classified information; had lived in Qatar, Yemen, and other Middle Eastern countries; and had sent detailed cables about those places back to Washington. She knew the Arab world and Middle Eastern history, and, perhaps most important, she followed Arabic social media.
On October 7, 2023, Rharrit received the State Department’s talking points, which were heavy on Israel’s right to self-defense but not much else. Even after the Israeli bombardment of Gaza began, there were no words of empathy for Palestinian civilians. Rharrit asked for some. “You can use those talking points in South America, in Europe, even Africa,” she said. “I cannot use them in this media market. You need to give me something to talk about the Palestinian deaths as well.” She couldn’t even acknowledge the apparent targeting of journalists, at first. When she went online, she saw Palestinians in Gaza posting graphic scenes of lifeless bodies, crushed apartment buildings, and wounded children. The Arab world experienced a profound disconnect between what it was seeing and the deadening, equivocal language the U.S. was using to describe the carnage. In the Arab world, the talking points were met with rage.
Rharrit began to wonder if, in fact, her American counterparts were not seeing what the Arab world was seeing. Maybe they weren’t on the same social-media channels? Maybe they weren’t checking Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok? She began sending daily reports to Washington, compiling photos and videos from Gaza into one readable document. She included “what was going viral, and often those were the most graphic, most gruesome images — of children, of babies,” she said. “I had the thought that if they only understood the implications of our messaging, then they would realize what they were saying was insane.”
But in January 2024, Rharrit was told her reports were no longer needed. “The devastation in Gaza is understood,” her superiors told her. She decided to resign.
“The words war crimes were never used when it came to Israel’s actions, even when we all knew what was happening was war crimes,” she told me. “In similar actions — for example, Russian actions in Ukraine, bombing civilian infrastructure — we always used the words war crimes.”
Another State Department early resigner was Josh Paul, who oversaw weapons sales to foreign countries. America’s Leahy Laws stipulate that the U.S. does not give weapons to any country that commits gross human-rights violations. But Israel had a different process entirely, called the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum. “Every other country, if there is grant U.S. military assistance going to a unit, that unit is vetted before it receives the assistance,” Paul has said. “In the case of Israel, we provide the assistance and then look out for reports of violations.” Such violations have never been found.
In early 2024, the first months of the conflict, the Biden administration was at work on an assessment called the National Security Memorandum-20 to address Congress’s concerns, beginning with the war in Yemen and through Gaza, about U.S. weapons sales to countries that may be using them unlawfully or impeding the delivery of humanitarian assistance. Stacy Gilbert, who also eventually resigned from her State Department post, worked in the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration and was involved in the research and writing of the report. “For the NSM report, what we were looking at was: Is Israel using U.S. weapons in a manner inconsistent with international humanitarian laws?” she explained.
“This was back in a time when you could list the number of incidents that were shocking,” she said. “It quickly became a situation where you couldn’t list this stuff anymore. It would cripple a database. You just couldn’t recognize these neighborhoods anymore. It became clear that that was the M.O. for all of this.” In other words, these bombings weren’t mistakes.
Gilbert said the Americans would engage in absurd debates about Israeli military strikes. “It was like, ‘Yeah, they did that massive crater, but was that actually caused by a U.S. weapon, or could it have been something else?’” It shouldn’t matter where the weapon came from, but that’s how the law works. “Maybe it came from another country?” Gilbert said people would suggest.
The other question they grappled with was whether Israel was allowing humanitarian aid, food, and supplies to flow into Gaza. The State Department’s main partner was UNRWA. “There’s a database that documents, on any given day, how many trucks are going in, what commodities are they carrying, what is the expiration date of those commodities, who’s supposed to pick the stuff up,” Gilbert said. “This would be true in any situation, but Israel in particular had this constantly changing list of what is allowed in and what isn’t. And on the best of days, what was not allowed in was just ludicrous, like flashlights and medical scissors.” Medical NGOs would put those items into their kits, but after they were added to the prohibition list, the whole truck would be sent to the back of the line. They had to unpack the entire delivery, which inevitably slowed down the influx of everything, including food. OCHA has said, for example, that in September 2024, Israel blocked 83 percent of its aid deliveries to northern Gaza.
In advance of the NSM report, Gilbert and her team submitted their analysis to Blinken, as did USAID, both of them concluding that Israel was blocking aid into Gaza. Other agencies submitted reports on whether Israel had used U.S. weapons inconsistent with IHL. In the resulting report Blinken submitted to Congress, some of the language on weapons was included. “It was the first time the U.S. acknowledged that Israel may be violating IHL with our weapons,” Gilbert said. But the report’s other claim stunned her: that Israel was fully complying at the border and not blocking humanitarian assistance. That was, she said, “ludicrous.”
“That wasn’t even anything we had debated internally because it was so obvious,” she said. But the Biden administration could not admit the obvious “because if you say that Israel is blocking humanitarian assistance, it trips another part of U.S. law, Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act, which says that if it is made known to the president that a country is blocking U.S. humanitarian assistance, it triggers a cessation of security assistance to that country.” Former State Department spokesman Matthew Miller, who had been on the front lines of the Biden administration’s defense of Israel, epitomized the phenomenon of Biden officials being privately aware of Israel’s conduct when he admitted in June that Israel had been “without a doubt” committing war crimes. When asked by Sky News why he didn’t point this out when he was in office, he replied, “When you’re at the podium, you’re not expressing your personal opinion. You’re expressing the conclusions of the United States government. The United States government had not concluded that they committed war crimes.”
Most infuriating to Gilbert was that as long as Israel said it was adhering to IHL and taking measures to mitigate civilian harm, that was enough for not only U.S. politicians but U.S. lawyers. “We take their word for it, and we use that to basically green-light more weapons for them,” she said. Israel never had to prove, for example, that a Hamas militant was living in an apartment building full of civilians it had destroyed. “We had a decision to make about sending them weapons, and we chose again and again and again not to use that leverage,” Gilbert said.
“I would say every person in the Biden administration who signed off on policies, decisions, and statements on Gaza completely forfeits any right to critique the Trump administration for lack of morals, lack of adherence to law, lack of respect for facts, because they laid the groundwork for it,” she went on. “Trump and Elon Musk have absolutely terrorized government staff. But the undermining of trust of their own staff happened on the Democrats’ watch.”
When Rharrit returned to Washington after quitting in 2024, she met with members of Congress. Aides told her their offices had endured so much backlash after Biden paused delivery of shipments of a few 2,000-pound bombs in early May of that year — the only time he did so — that they knew they would never halt shipments of weapons again. In June 2024, the House even passed a resolution barring the State Department from publicly citing casualty data from the Gaza health ministry as an authority, in effect preventing them from acknowledging the Palestinian death toll.
Rharrit believes only the thorough dehumanization of the Palestinians could have allowed for such behavior. “It’s almost expected for people over there to get killed,” she said. “It has been normalized. There’s such embedded racism and dehumanization of Palestinians, to the point where they don’t even see it. They don’t even realize how racist they’re being.”
Biden’s defenders say he had no leverage over Israel because of an adamantly pro-Israel Congress, and they don’t think cutting off weapons would have changed the Netanyahu regime’s behavior. This has been disputed by people like the Jerusalem-based journalist Nathan Thrall and others who say it would have stopped the war immediately, in part because Israel would have had to conserve weapons. Ilan Goldenberg, who served as a Middle East adviser to Kamala Harris and is now at J Street, the lobbying group, told me it’s difficult to transform a relationship with an old ally. “There’s also this whole entire machinery,” he said. “The pipeline is massive. It’s hard to control this bureaucracy and modulate or condition sales in a way that would have the desired effect. It operates on its own.”
What’s remarkable about the U.S. position in all this is its assumed passivity, as if somehow the most powerful country in the world were composed of people with no power. The dance of politics, the obsession with optics, the influence of lobbies, petty careerism, ambition — all of this has eroded something more fundamental: the government’s grasp of the seriousness of life. It has also destroyed any last semblance of accountability. “Elite impunity is the sole remaining area of bipartisan consensus,” said Matt Duss, Bernie Sanders’s former foreign-policy chief and the executive vice-president of the Center for International Policy. “They understand that whatever they do, it’s not going to really hurt them because, you know, Donald Rumsfeld died in his bed.”
As the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel said, in a free society, “few are guilty, all are responsible.” This includes many institutions outside government, like the mainstream media. One of the most remarkable videos of the past couple years is of a press conference held by Palestinian journalists in which the young Palestinian reporter Abubaker Abed gave a speech in English at the podium, flanked by others in blue PRESS vests. “You’ve seen us killed in every possible way,” he said. “We’ve been immolated, incinerated, dismembered, and disemboweled — and recently, we’ve been freezing to death.”
“Our message is very clear,” he went on. “We are journalists. And we are Palestinian journalists. And we have been let down by the international community — particularly the international media organizations. We haven’t seen any sort of support.”
This sentiment suggests major western media companies could have banded together a long time ago in an act of institutional solidarity to protest what has happened to our colleagues and to publicly demand that the Israeli government allow the foreign press into Gaza. The media has also often abetted Israel’s and the U.S.’s degradation of language, parroting their legal euphemisms and doublespeak to the extent that journalists and doctors are labeled terrorists, hospitals and apartment buildings are called militant hideouts, and what we see with our own eyes is constantly cast into doubt. But for some, social media has made war visible again; imagery has triumphed over language.
“I have to say that sometimes in Hebrew, or at least in Haaretz, we see closer-to-the-truth coverage than in the western-world media,” Shai Parnes of B’Tselem said. “The way the Israeli politicians speak in Hebrew — they don’t hide anything anymore. They don’t try to say these excuses; they say out loud, ‘We’ve got to starve Gaza. No one in Gaza is innocent.’ It happens quite a lot! The reference to Amalek, which every Jewish person knows — it means a total annihilation.” Even about the killing of women and children, “they don’t bother anymore.”
“It’s just out there and then they do it,” Parnes said. “They said it’s going to be a total siege, and they’re doing it. They said it’s going to be a destroyed Strip, and they’re doing it.” Which is why he found it strange that western newspapers and networks still faithfully print Israeli talking points, excuses, and outright lies. What the Israelis and Americans do in the realm of the law, the American media mimics in the narratives it perpetuates.
In March, Israel killed 15 paramedics and aid workers in a brazen attack and buried the dead bodies in a mass grave along with their clearly marked ambulances and trucks. The Israelis said the soldiers had buried the bodies to protect them from wild animals. Nebal Farsakh, the spokesperson for the Palestine Red Crescent Society, remembers the Israelis made similar defenses after killing 5-year-old Hind Rajab with tank gunfire in 2024. The little girl had sat in a car surrounded by dead relatives, calling for help, with the audiotape broadcast to the world. The Israelis said a tank hadn’t been there. Even if the newspapers cover these events, as they did in both cases, they eventually disappear into the moral abyss. The Israelis, Farsakh said, “can make whatever narrative they want because no one questions them.”
Omer Bartov has said it is crucial to understand when studying war crimes and genocide that those carrying out these actions usually believe them to be justified. Parnes of B’Tselem said Israeli leaders “used the true emotions of anxiety and fear and the sense of loss of personal security after October 7 and mobilized it to complete the dehumanization of all Palestinians in the region.” Maybe the behavior of Israeli soldiers uploading their demolition rap videos was surprising to Americans, he said, but that was “because you don’t live in a society in which the dehumanization of Palestinians is complete.”
“Because every Palestinian, or even every Palestinian building or establishment, is threatening us,” he said, describing the Israeli mind-set. “Because they’re all evil; they’re all Amalek. It’s an order from God. I’m doing God’s will.”
But what then of the psychology of those sending the weapons? Do the Americans believe the killing is justified? After decades of superpower status and 25 years of the “War on Terror,” has human suffering as a means to unending dominion simply become justifiable in the American psychology? Gaza has by now become part of the American story, and it is not surprising that it mirrors the contradictions of U.S. history, with the protection of one minority group and the elimination of another. The Americans and the Israelis have created a world in which such hypocrisy is endemic: Children are terrorists, safe zones are killing fields, and the norms to protect civilians against violence are used to annihilate them. The U.S. might have long been on the same page as Netanyahu’s Israel, but, perhaps faster than it recognized, Netanyahu became Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, so the U.S. too is a far-right country, one that is fanatical and inured to death.
A society still conducting this kind of manmade technological violence after many decades of knowing exactly the suffering it causes to innocent people must believe in these weapons much more than in life itself. In her work, Edith Wyschogrod, the philosopher, refers to something called the “authenticity paradigm,” in which “a good death, even if not free from pain, is the measure of a good life.” The Americans and Israelis have stolen the promise of both a good death and a good life from Palestinians since 2023. And the world has left the Palestinians to face this excruciating fate alone.
In 2024, the legendary Israeli journalist Amira Hass finally got frustrated on an Australian news program about people splitting hairs over the word genocide. “I’m so tired of the legal terms for things,” she said. “The enormity of it is genocidal … You destroy culture, you destroy academics, you destroy schools, you destroy clinics. When you kill so many families, you don’t have a chain, no memories left for the family, no chain of descendants for the family.” What else can the Israelis be doing when they bomb an already-destroyed place until its ruins spit up two more bodies from the vast grave, throw them into the sky like trophies, and scar a girl’s mind forever? The only explanation is that they want to demoralize it beyond repair, demoralize the land, demoralize children, demoralize the elderly until there is nothing, no chain, no hope.
But Palestinians do have some hope. The lawlessness of the campaign against them has spurred a renewal of interest in international law, which Raja Shehadeh told me he finds moving. More than 75 years ago, the world’s powers recognized that humans were capable of unspeakable barbarities and built legal structures, however imperfect and haphazardly applied, to contain them. Now that those same powers have all but abandoned those structures, who will rebuild them? Where would we even begin? “Things have become even worse,” Elayyan wrote to me in May, “but our presence on this land is not transitory and precarious. Palestinians are fettered to this land and have their origins deeply rooted since thousands of years. What makes us hopeful is the changes in the public opinion, especially among the young generations, over the past few years. Al-Haq still believes that justice will one day prevail.”
“The peoples of the world need to know that the issue today is not only about the rights of the Palestinians,” he went on. “They need to know that the Palestinians are defending human values and trying to free the world.”
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New York Magazine
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