A UN rights expert says there are reasonable grounds to determine that Israel has committed acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing in its onslaught on Gaza.
Francesca Albanese, the UN Human Rights Council special rapporteur, was due to present her report to the council on Tuesday. The report, titled “Anatomy of a Genocide,” was leaked to the public on Monday by a pro-Israeli group.
She said in her report that Israel violated three of the five acts listed under the international genocide convention.
The expert added that the overwhelming scale of Israel’s attacks on Gaza reveals the regime intends to destroy Palestinians as a group physically.
“The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group,” Albanese wrote in the report.
She argued that Israel has “destroyed Gaza” over the past five months, killing over 30,000 Palestinians, destroying 70 percent of residential areas and displacing 80 percent of the residents.
The report accused Israel of violating three criteria of the Genocide Convention: killing members of a community, inflicting “serious mental or bodily harm” to the group, and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
Albanese also asserted that statements by senior Israeli officials about the forcible displacement of Palestinians and replacing them with settlers amount to ethnic cleansing.
Israel waged its brutal US-backed war on the Gaza Strip on October 7 after Hamas carried out a historic operation against the usurping entity in retaliation for the regime’s intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
However, almost six months into the offensive, the Tel Aviv regime has failed to achieve its objectives of “destroying Hamas” and finding Israeli captives despite killing at least 32,226 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injuring 74,518 others.
