Amnesty International has accused Israel of committing a "live-streamed genocide" against Palestinians in Gaza by forcibly displacing most of the population and deliberately creating a humanitarian catastrophe.
In its annual report issued on Monday, Amnesty charged that Israel had acted with "specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, thus committing genocide".
Israel has rejected accusations of "genocide" from Amnesty, other rights groups and some states in its war in Gaza.
"States watched on as if powerless, as Israel killed thousands upon thousands of Palestinians, wiping out entire multigenerational families, destroying homes, livelihoods, hospitals and schools," Amnesty's secretary general Agnes Callamard said.
'Extreme levels of suffering'
Amnesty's report said the Israeli campaign had left most of the Palestinians of Gaza "displaced, homeless, hungry, at risk of life-threatening diseases and unable to access medical care, power or clean water".
Amnesty said that throughout 2024 it had "documented multiple war crimes by Israel, including direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects, and indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks".
‘I know the weight of these words. I don’t write them lightly. I write them because I’m tired of euphemisms. Tired of pretending this is a conflict when it is clearly a massacre.’
'Unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe'
It said Israel's actions forcibly displaced 1.9 million Palestinians, around 90 percent of Gaza's population, and "deliberately engineered an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe".
Even as protesters hit the streets in Western capitals, "the world's governments individually and multilaterally failed repeatedly to take meaningful action to end the atrocities and were slow even in calling for a ceasefire".
Meanwhile, Amnesty also sounded alarm over Israeli actions in the occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank, and repeated an accusation that Israel was employing a system of "apartheid".
"Israel's system of apartheid became increasingly violent in the occupied West Bank, marked by a sharp increase in unlawful killings and state-backed attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinian civilians," it said.
Heba Morayef, Amnesty director for the Middle East and North Africa region, denounced "the extreme levels of suffering that Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to endure on a daily basis over the past year" as well as "the world's complete inability or lack of political will to put a stop to it".
