Amnesty International, one of the world’s largest human rights organizations, has formally accused Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza in a report published Wednesday.

Since October 2023, Israel has killed at least 44,580 people in Gaza, according to official statistics, and the death toll has been estimated to be as high as 186,000 or more in a study published in The Lancet.

In its exhaustive 296-page report, Amnesty International demonstrated that this mass killing was motivated by genocidal intent, which permeated from the top of the Israeli government to the soldiers doing the killing.

The report brings together video, photographic, and textual evidence of hundreds of instances in which Israeli officials and members of the military made oral or written statements expressing their intention to kill the Palestinian people, drive them out of Gaza, and take their land.

Summarizing the report, Amnesty International wrote, “Israeli forces have caused unprecedented destruction, at a level and speed not seen in any other conflict in the 21st century, leveling entire cities and destroying critical infrastructure, agricultural land, and cultural and religious sites, rendering large swathes of Gaza uninhabitable.”

It declares that “Israeli forces have carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.”

Secretary-General of Amnesty International Agnès Callamard said, “Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them.”

The report, titled “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza,” describes the “killing of civilians, destruction of civilian infrastructure, forcible displacement, the obstruction or denial of life-saving goods and humanitarian aid by Israel in Gaza.”

More than 1.9 million people, or 90 percent of Gaza’s population, have been internally displaced. In a report last month, the UN’s human rights office alleged that 70 percent of verified deaths in Gaza were among women and children.

“In isolation, these are serious violations of international humanitarian law or international human rights law,” declared the Amnesty International report. “But looking at the broader picture of Israel’s military campaign and the cumulative impact of its policies and acts, the conclusion we came to is genocidal intent.”

Callamard stated, “Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now.”

The report alleges that “The government of Israel imposed conditions of life in Gaza that created a deadly mixture of malnutrition, hunger, and diseases, and exposed Palestinians to a slow, calculated death.” It also claims, “The government of Israel also subjected hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza to incommunicado detention, torture, and other ill-treatment.”

Explaining its methodology, the Amnesty report declared, “a finding of genocide may be drawn when the state intends to pursue the destruction of a protected group in order to achieve a certain military result, as a means to an end, or until it has achieved it.”

The report demonstrates the systematic, nonstop way in which Israeli officials have publicly encouraged the extermination of the Palestinian people. The report notes:

Among those who made such statements was Prime Minister Netanyahu, who referred on at least three occasions to the biblical story of the total destruction of the people of Amalek (also known as the Amalekites), killed in an act of revenge for their attack on the Israelites.

The Amnesty International report demonstrates, moreover, that these were not merely overheated rhetorical statements made by Israeli leaders, but permeated all sections of the command structure of the Israeli army. The report recalls:

Speaking anonymously in an interview which was broadcast on the UK’s Channel 4 on 23 April 2024, an Israeli soldier explained that the “ground assumption” in the army was that everyone in Gaza was complicit in Hamas’s actions. He implied that attacks on civilians were justified by the widely held view that those who took part in the 7 October 2023 attacks were “the kids that the [army] spared in [the hostilities in] 2014.” According to him, some high-ranking officers, as well as many settlers serving in the army, frequently expressed the view that there are “no uninvolved, only unarmed” Palestinians in Gaza.

The report documents that the declaration by Yoav Gallant that the Palestinians are “human animals” is not just a phrase that was used once, but has, in fact, been repeated over and over again in the communications of government officials. The report describes numerous Israeli officials using the same dehumanizing language:

Similarly, on 10 October 2023, in a video posted on COGAT’s (a unit within the Israeli Ministry of Defense tasked with administering civilian matters in the Occupied Palestinian Territory) official X account, Ghassan Alian, COGAT’s head, issued a direct message to both Hamas and Palestinian residents of Gaza in which he echoed then Minister of Defense Gallant’s statement. Speaking in Arabic, he confirmed that Israel had imposed a “complete blockade on Gaza” and promised to deliver only “destruction” instead of providing access to electricity and water to the approximately 2.2 million population of Gaza. He referred to ordinary residents of Gaza as “human beasts,” because of their perceived support for Hamas’s crimes against Israeli civilians. He stated, “With such human beasts, we will deal accordingly. Israel has imposed a complete blockade on Gaza. You will not have electricity or water, just destruction. You want hell, you’ll get hell.”

Last month, the International Criminal Court charged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant with war crimes and crimes against humanity, alleging that they used starvation as a weapon of war.

The report by Amnesty International massively substantiates these allegations. But it is, more broadly, an indictment of the imperialist powers that are funding and arming this genocide. The genocidal statements compiled in the Amnesty International report were made publicly, in real-time. And yet the US and other imperialist powers continue their support for Israel because they fully support this genocide as part of their effort to reorganize the Middle East under imperialist domination.