Key points
- Israel has killed 52,243 Palestinians in Gaza in one and a half years
- Lack of fuel threatens lives of hundreds of thousands: Gaza civil defence
- Amnesty says throughout 2024, it documented multiple war crimes by Israel
ISLAMABAD: Amnesty International on Tuesday 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, Amnesty charged that Israel had acted with “specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, thus committing genocide”.
Israel’s relentless bombardment of the Gaza Strip and a ground operation have left at least 52,243 dead, AFP reported, citing Gaza officials’ figures.
Amnesty’s secretary general Agnes Callamard said in the introduction to the report that “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,” she added.
“Extreme levels of suffering”
Gaza’s civil defence agency said early Tuesday that four people were killed and others injured in an Israeli air strike on displaced persons’ tents near the Al-Iqleem area in Southern Gaza.
The agency earlier warned fuel shortages meant it had been forced to suspend eight out of 12 emergency vehicles in Southern Gaza, including ambulances.
The lack of fuel “threatens the lives of hundreds of thousands of citizens and displaced persons in shelter centres,” it said in a statement.
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”.
Forcibly displaced
It said Israel’s actions forcibly displaced 1.9 million Palestinians, around 90 per cent 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 the 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”.
“Unprecedented forces”
In its report, Amnesty also raised alarm about “unprecedented forces”, including the administration of United States President Donald Trump, that it said posed a threat to human rights globally, Al Jazeera reported.
“A multiplicity of assaults – against human rights accountability, against international law, and against the UN – have been but some of the hallmarks of the first 100 days of US President Donald Trump’s ‘reign’ in 2025,” Callamard said.
“But those reckless and punishing offensives, against efforts to end global poverty and undo long standing racial and gender-based discrimination and violence, did not start this year. Red lines don’t turn green overnight.”
