THE GAZA GENOCIDE
Yes, This is Genocide.
Bearing witness to the catastrophe Israel has unleashed upon Gaza requires understanding one simple, but devastating, fact:
This is not a “war against Hamas.”
What we are witnessing is a genocide of the Palestinian people.
This site was created to explain this simple truth with clarity and evidence—and to encourage all those who visit to use their voice to speak up.
IN BRIEF
Understanding Gaza, Genocide &
Why This Is a Genocide
IN-DEPTH
This section describes Israel's use of starvation as a weapon of war and the catastrophic suffering it has caused. This includes completely blocking the entry of humanitarian aid for months on end, destroying food and water sources inside Gaza, and systematically attacking people delivering aid while also killing civilians seeking food aid. The result: the entire population of Gaza faces catastrophic food insecurity and famine ; over 50,000 children under 5 years old require treatment for acute malnutrition and scores of children have starved to death. Children drink from dirty puddles or seawater, while Israel blocks aid and bombs water treatment facilities. Finally, this section addresses Israeli claims and shows, with extensive evidence, why they are untrue.
DESTROYING HOSPITALS
Israel has systematically annihilated the health care system in Gaza - bombing, besieging, and invading 33 out of 36 hospitals.
Israel blocks fuel to hospitals, while bombing hospital generators and solar panels. It blocks medical aid, including incubators, anesthetics, and insulin, leaving innocent civilians to die slow, painful, and preventable deaths. Children undergo amputations without anesthetic; doctors perform c-sections on mothers without anesthesia. At the same time, Israel has targeted over 200 Red Crescent ambulances and killed over 1,500 health care workers, while disappearing, detaining, and torturing countless others.
OBLITERATING CIVILIAN LIFE
Israel has damaged or destroyed 92% of residential buildings, displacing over 90% of the population. One look at the destruction tells you everything. But it doesn't stop there. Israel has destroyed the fabric of Palestinian society by deliberately targeting civilian institutions such as universities, libraries, archives, religious buildings, historical sites, farms, schools, cemeteries, museums and markets. Israel has attacked an astonishing 95% of school buildings, obliterated 88% of commercial facilities, and destroyed 81% of the road network. More recently, it has ramped up attacks on civilian governance, simultaneously arming Isis-linked gangs in order to sow chaos and desperation.
DESTROYING HOPE: Killing Aid Workers
Israel has killed over 400 humanitarian aid workers in Gaza.
This includes staff of the U.N., Doctors Without Borders, the International Rescue Committee, ANERA, World Central Kitchen, Save the Children, and Project Hope. It has bombed Red Crescent convoys, Doctors Without Borders clinics, and World Central Kitchen volunteers distributing food in the starved enclave. Israel killed more U.N. employees in 40 days than any state in the history of the UN. It has turned Gaza into the deadliest place to be an aid worker - by far.
TORTURE &
MASS DETENTIONS
Israel is detaining Palestinian civilians en masse - subjecting them to widespread abuse, starvation, torture, sexual assault, and even death in what Israeli human rights NGO B'tselem calls "a network of torture camps." Palestinians are detained without charge, and often released, but only after harrowing experiences in which they are stripped of every shred of dignity and humanity - all in violation of every principle enshrined for decades in the Geneva Conventions. The goal: to terrorize and traumatize, to break the Palestinian spirit and will to live on their land.
TERROR & TRAUMA
Israel has inflicted "record levels of psychological trauma and terror," according to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. UNICEF has said that over 1 million children in Gaza - likely every single child - is traumatized and requires mental health support. One mother called it "complete psychological destruction." A survey found 96% of children in Gaza believed death is imminent and nearly half “wish to die” due to the trauma they are being subjected to.
ATROCITIES
The unspeakable atrocities committed by Israeli forces are heartbreaking - and numerous. We record them here for two reasons. First, so that there is no denying that this is a genocide, and not simply a war with inevitable "collateral damage." And second, to tell their stories - the stories of Palestinian families and children - and to highlight the humanity that Israel all too often seeks to deny.
WAR ON TRUTH:
Banning & Killing Journalists
Ever since October 7, 2023, Israel has banned all international reporters from entering Gaza, and killed over 230 local Palestinian journalists. Israel has also banned UN personnel from conducting independent investigations. This is the deadliest conflict for journalists ever recorded. According to a study by Brown University, the daily average of journalist deaths in Gaza is higher than all other wars combined. You only target journalists if your enemy is the truth.
ISRAEL'S FINAL SOLUTION: The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation
After nearly 3 months of not letting a single ounce of food or water into Gaza, Israel officially banned all international aid organizations and announced that a "minimal" amount of aid would instead be distributed by a newly-created, shadowy group of military contractors dubbed the "Gaza Humanitarian Foundation." The reality is apocalyptic: There is not nearly enough aid or hubs to actually feed people. Instead, Israel is using the lure of food to entice starving Palestinians into a tiny, guarded corner of southern Gaza - a concentration camp - where aid seekers are massacred on a daily basis. UNICEF called it "a facade" and the UN humanitarian chief has said it is "a fig leaf for further violence and displacement." Meanwhile, every day, babies starve to death as Israel blocks even baby formula from entering Gaza.
ISRAEL'S CLAIMS
Israel makes a variety of shifting claims, throwing around words like "self-defense," "terror," and "human shields." It has claimed it is not blocking humanitarian aid, that people aren't actually starving, and that Hamas has been stealing aid. It alternates between claiming it aims to protect civilians and saying it believes "there are no innocent people in Gaza." Here we provide independent evidence to help understand Israel's claims and reveal so many of them for what they are: lies. Take a look, decide for yourself.
Conclusion.
As South Africa wrote in its submission to the International Court of Justice:
“Against a background of apartheid, expulsion, ethnic cleansing, annexation, occupation, discrimination, and the ongoing denial of the right of the Palestinian people to self- determination”
Israel is now committing the crime of genocide.
Over the last 20 months, Israel has inflicted unceasing terror and suffering on the people of Gaza.
It has targeted children, women, the elderly - civilians all stripes. It has destroyed an entire society.
Israeli genocide scholar Amos Goldberg has said this "deliberate crushing of Palestinian existence in Gaza" - the industrial-scale extermination of every trace of Palestinian life in Gaza - is "undoubtedly genocide."
We know what the reaction would be if the roles were reversed: if someone bombed virtually every school and hospital in Israel, severely damaged or destroyed 90% of housing, destroyed hundreds of synagogues, forcibly starved the entire civilian population, banning even baby formula, and repeatedly shot children in the head and hearts, all while openly trying to ethnically cleanse the population, forcing them into tiny, militarized concentration camps, where it committed daily massacres of starving people seeking food. No one would hesitate to call this what it is: a genocide.
Only during a genocide could a stream of atrocities occur in a single day, and then keep on unfolding each and every day. Take for example:
Examples of the kinds of atrocities that occur in a single 24 hour period on any given day in Gaza.
Only during a genocide would the most murdered age group be 5-9 year olds. Only during a genocide would you find countless children who are simultaneously orphaned, limbless, and starving. Only during a genocide could the onslaught be so violently indiscriminate that a new acronym would be needed: WCNSF - "wounded child, no surviving family."
What is happening in Gaza is a Holocaust, one in which the killing of children and civilians is terrifyingly normalized (by the international community), justified (by Western powers and media), and even applauded (inside Israel).
All this is happening before our eyes. In the words of Amnesty International, Israel is carrying out the first "live-streamed genocide." The internet is awash with footage of Israeli soldiers boasting, celebrating, and reveling in the destruction of Gaza. Palestinian parents show us, every day, the bodies of their dead children. Videos abound of children begging for food, safety, and a normal life, while doctors plead for the madness to stop.
As the South African legal team told the ICJ: This is "the first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate so far vain hope that the world might do something."
These words were written by Dr. Mahmoud Abu Nujaila on October 20th, 2023 on a whiteboard normally used for planning surgeries. He was killed by a strike on Al Awda Hospital a month later in Gaza.
The result has been the shredding of international law. Our collective failure to stop a genocide committed in full view has signaled the death of international law – the “rules-based order” that was created in the wake of WWII to place limits on war and protect civilians from its worst ravages. It has highlighted the hypocrisy of Western countries like the United States and Europe that have for so long preached about human rights and democracy. Gaza was the testing ground where Israel realized there is no red line. With the help of the United States, Israel has shred international law to irrelevance.
Take the case of hospitals: sacrosanct under international law, and protected except for extremely limited circumstances - that is, (1) if a hospital is actively being used for military purposes, (2) the military advantage gained by attacking is so significant that it outweighs the potential harm to civilians, and (3) all feasible precautions are taken to avoid or minimize civilian casualties. If there is any doubt, a hospital must be protected. Despite this, Israel has bombed, besieged, and invaded nearly every single hospital in Gaza - often multiple times - destroying medical equipment, generators, and solar power, banning medical supplies and fuel, killing and torturing medical workers, all while failing to provide any serious or credible evidence of military use that could justify such attacks.
The Courage to Speak Up
“The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.”
~ Albert Einstein
In early May 2025, the World Health Organization's Emergencies Director told the international community: “We are breaking the bodies and minds of the children of Gaza. We are starving the children of Gaza. Because if we don’t do something about it, we are complicit in what is happening before our very eyes.”
This moral responsibility belongs to us all. Actor John Cusack echoed this sentiment in an open letter to the people of the world:
“If you claim to care about justice – if you ever marched, ever lit a candle for any cause—then your voice should be raised now. Or it means nothing. The children of Gaza do not need your sorrow. They need your outrage. Your pressure. Your courage. End the siege. End the weapons shipments. End the lies. Call this what it is: a genocide.”
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If history teaches us anything it’s that a lot of people will support fascism and genocide and very few of them will believe that’s what they are doing while they are doing it. And then, as Omar El Akkad writes in his beautifully written book about bearing witness to the genocide in Gaza, "One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this."
We have a choice.
We either become the generation that stopped a genocide.
Or we become the generation who let two million people - screaming and begging on their phone cameras, showing us their dead children and their emaciated bodies -
all be killed.
For Palestinians in Gaza, our Silence is Deadly.
In May 2025, 19 months into the genocide, an Israeli member of parliament boasted on television, "Tonight we killed nearly 100 people in Gaza, and no one cares." Israel, he explained, could continue killing civilians with impunity so long as the world continued to look away.
The children of Gaza increasingly feel abandoned. A child, who was pulled from under suffocating rubble after an airstrike that killed his mother, was asked by a journalist to speak to the world: "Who are you sending this to?" he asked, exhausted. "What are you filming this for? People don't feel our pain." A year and a half of Palestinians sending video missives to the world of the horrors they were suffering had not stopped the genocide.
Every day this slaughter continues, children die who would have survived if the genocide had been stopped. In such a context, as Jean Paul Sartre taught us decades ago, there is no such thing as neutrality. "Staying out of it," effecting moral superiority or equivalence by saying "both sides are wrong," throwing up one's hands and sighing "it's complicated" - that is taking a side. It's the side of the powerful against the powerless. It's the side of continued massacres. "Neutrality" helps the oppressor, never the victim. "You are either loudly, actively against genocide, or you are for it."
The time to speak is now.
Americans have a special responsibility.
This is our genocide, as Ta-Nehisi Coates explains. It is the United States that has single-handedly vetoed every single ceasefire resolution voted on at the UN Security Council. It is the United States that provides the vast majority of weapons and funding for this genocide. The American government and media provides political cover, often repeating unverified Israeli claims without question, while downplaying or ignoring human rights concerns, twisting the facts, and studiously avoiding words like "genocide," "ethnic cleansing," and "occupation," as an expose about The New York Times revealed. American support to Israel is so crucial to the Israeli military's ability to operate that past Presidents have put an end to Israeli aggression with a single phone call.
American Support for Israel's Genocide
18+ billion
in military aid to Israel while it blocks humanitarian aid to civilians
70% of the cost
of Israel's military
operations funded by the U.S.
940 weapons shipments
over 19 months. That's 1 shipment every 18 hours.
Multiple current and former high-ranking Israeli army and intelligence officials have acknowledged that Israel could not fight for more than a few months without continued U.S. weapon shipments. According to an Associated Press report in January 2024, experts are confident that the vast majority of bombs dropped on the besieged enclave are U.S.-made.
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Retired Israeli Major General Itzhak Brik said in November 2023, just one month into Israel's genocide:
All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it's all from the U.S. The minute they turn off the tap, you can't keep fighting. You have no capability... Everyone understands that we can't fight this war without the United States. Period.
This fact was echoed by Israel's former Intelligence Director for the Mossad, Zohar Palti who said simply, "Without U.S. weapons, Israel can't fight." Israel's Defense Ministry has likewise said that U.S. weapons shipments are "crucial" for continuing its "war," while a senior air force official told Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz that without US aid, Israel couldn't fight in Gaza beyond a few months.
America's involvement is so deep, it is like the tentacles of an octopus. As Americans, we are all participants in Israel's oppression and genocide of Palestinians. A young Rachel Corrie, an American who volunteered in Gaza in 2003 to help Palestinians resist the bulldozing of their homes by the Israeli army, recognized this fact decades ago, telling her parents in a letter, before being crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer at age 23: "This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don’t think it’s an extremist thing to do anymore. ... Disbelief and horror is what I feel. Disappointment. I am disappointed that this is the base reality of our world and that we, in fact, participate in it. ... I could live a comfortable life and possibly, with no effort at all, exist in complete unawareness of my participation in genocide. More big explosions somewhere in the distance outside."
After the U.S. vetoed yet another UN resolution calling for a ceasefire, Palestine's representative spoke to the Security Council. He not only admonished them for their failure to stop the massacres, and their hypocritical insistence on Palestinian pacifism while supporting Israeli militarism. He also described the possibility of a brighter future:
"There is a world out there where Palestinian children are able to grow. We are not born to be occupied and killed and displaced. ... That world can exist today if we were to act. ... There is a world where there is no war in the Middle East, where Palestinian and Israeli civilians go about their lives, where maybe they can look confidently towards the future and even envisage more bridges between them. Where our region unleashes its true and full potential for the benefit of all states and all peoples. It's this future that is being destroyed before our very eyes."
Palestine is not only a site of intense suffering, it is the nexus of what ails the world - and if that can be changed, so too can the world. British actor and activist Khalid Abdalla described this battle, between a current world "disorder" of neoliberalism, oligarchy, and increasing authoritarianism on the one hand, and a world of greater justice and equality on the other.
"Authoritarian norms are being established on the back of the genocide in Palestine and those who try to stop it. Universities, the media, culture, and protest - all subject to acts of authoritarianism. ... And yet, the moral spine of the world is regenerating from the ground up. Palestine is a space of consciousness that is animating deep realignments ... and what it means to build an international world order built on equal rights. It's not that solving the question of Palestine will magically solve the world's problems, but rather that it will mean we have dynamics in which the world’s politicians are able to take on vested interests while guided by moral grit. ... it requires us all to rise beyond our hesitations to create the world we know is necessary and worth the difficult journey to make real."
The alternative is dark: a world of growing authoritarianism and dehumanization, a world without any of the protections of international law, a world where only "might is right." We see this already in the United States, where the government's oppression of pro-Palestinian protestors - anti-genocide protesters - is being used to concentrate executive power and slash the First Amendment, where it deploys dehumanizing rhetoric and masked ICE agents as Gestapo-like thugs to kidnap people off the street and detain them without charge in far off prisons. If you think this type of vilification and oppression will not come for you and those you love, history tells us otherwise. Once this type of no-holds-barred violence is countenanced, it can be turned against anyone.
What should be done
End Genocide.
End Occupation.
End Apartheid.
Ensure the Palestinians' Right of Return.
Seek a long-term, political solution based on justice and the equality of all people.
By far the most urgent imperative is to stop the genocide. Once that is done, the root of violence must finally be addressed by ending Israel's occupation and annexation of Palestinian land, dismantling its system of apartheid, and honoring the Palestinians' right of return and self-determination.
This is not controversial - it is mandated by international law and agreed to by the vast majority of countries. In 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel's over half a century occupation of Palestinian territories, including the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, is unlawful and constitutes apartheid. The ICJ called for Israel to end its occupation, withdraw its settlers, and provide reparations to Palestinians.
The Right of Return is enshrined in every human rights charter, and the right of Palestinians to return to land from which they fled or were expelled since 1948 is enshrined in UN Security Council Resolution 194 of 1948. This Resolution, and the Palestinians' right of return, was included as a condition of Israeli admission to the United Nations. It has been reaffirmed annually by the UN General Assembly. But Israel has always denied it.
These are the rights we must seek to protect. This is the only path to long-term peace. And if you want to support that path: call and email your representatives, follow and amplify Palestinian voices and independent media that honestly covers what is happening in Israel/Palestine, join organizations, talk to friends and family, protest, boycott, and most importantly, use your voice - speak up.