IT is clear to any observer that what Israel is doing in Gaza is not about destroying Hamas, but exterminating and ethnically cleansing the Palestinian population of the besieged Strip.

Soon after Tel Aviv launched its barbaric assault on Gaza, following the Hamas attacks of Oct 7, 2023, there were clear signs that Israel was indiscriminately and purposefully targeting civilians, including children. In the years since, credible voices from around the world have said that what the Zionist state is doing in Gaza amounts to genocide.

The UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry is the latest to endorse this view. On Tuesday, the UN body said that Israel’s leadership, including its prime minister, president and former defence minister “incited the commission of genocide”.

Many other respectable voices have earlier come to the same conclusion. This includes Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, MSF, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, as well as the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Israel may dismiss all of this as “distorted and false”, but the evidence against it is damning.

It has also been pointed out that the descendants of those who themselves faced a genocide are today perpetrating a modern-day holocaust. It is a shocking irony that the children of Holocaust survivors should themselves have unleashed monstrous violence on the men, women and youngsters of occupied Palestine.

Some argue that the seeds of the present butchery were sown during the Nakba. But while the events of eight decades ago may be open to historical interpretation, Israel’s holocaust in Gaza is being carried out live, unfolding on our TV and mobile screens. Despite Tel Aviv’s repeated denials, the tiny corpses of Palestinian children murdered by Israel, as well the lifeless bodies of toddlers wasting away due to a man-made famine, are undeniable evidence of the Zionist state’s cold-blooded, inhuman tactics in the occupied territories.

There should be no more waffling about what is going on in Gaza. Those who raise the slogan of ‘never again’, and keep reminding humanity of the horrors Europe’s fascists unleashed on the continent’s Jewish population, need to help bring to an immediate end the Gaza genocide. In fact, the global community must unite to bring the perpetrators of the Palestinian genocide to justice. The Israeli leadership, as identified by the UN commission, must be tried for crimes against humanity, just as Nazi Germany’s leaders faced the law at the Nuremberg trials.

Moreover, there should be a global, UN-backed arms, economic and diplomatic embargo — along the lines of what apartheid-era South Africa faced — of Israel until it stops its campaign of extermination in Gaza. And if states refuse to cooperate and continue to arm and fund Israel, they must be considered partners in crime with Tel Aviv.

Published in Dawn, September 18th, 2025