As affirmed by reports from Amnesty International, UN Special Rapporteurs, and international legal experts, Israel’s conduct in Gaza satisfies multiple legal and empirical criteria of genocide: the deliberate targeting of civilians, intentional starvation, infrastructural annihilation, and long-term displacement of an ethnic-national group. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) defines genocide as acts committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Israel’s campaign in Gaza exemplifies this intent, not only through direct violence but also through strategies that target the conditions necessary for Palestinian life, memory, and futurity. Therefore, the multi-dimensional Israeli structure of violence expands the classical understanding of genocide and exposes how humanitarian infrastructure, digital technologies, and global capital are being mobilized as tools of destruction.
Perhaps the most visible and visceral component of Israel’s genocidal strategy has been the mass killing of civilians, particularly children. By June 2025, over 50,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza, with children constituting nearly half of all fatalities. The UNICEF and Save the Children reports have labeled Gaza the most dangerous place on earth for a child, describing the scale of injuries, trauma, and long-term psychological devastation as “unprecedented.”
Hospitals have also become Israel’s targets. Israeli forces have besieged, bombed, and invaded major medical facilities like Al-Shifa, Al-Aqsa, and Nasser hospitals, killing medical personnel and destroying ICU units, neonatal wards, and morgues. These attacks were not accidental; they were deliberate acts of collective punishment. The World Health Organization reported that over 70% of Gaza’s health infrastructure had been rendered non-operational by the summer of 2024, effectively denying the population any chance of survival or recovery.
Alongside its attacks on human life, Israel has pursued an intentional strategy of infrastructural genocide. The scale of destruction in Gaza has reached catastrophic proportions. According to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), more than 39 million tons of debris now cover Gaza, resulting from the razing of homes, roads, mosques, schools, and power stations. This strategy ensures the collapse of civil life, sanitation, public health, and access to clean water or electricity. This is not merely wartime collateral damage—it is a weaponized policy. The systematic obliteration of Gaza’s environment has rendered the territory unlivable. Farmlands have been chemically poisoned, aquifers contaminated, and sewage systems collapsed, creating the conditions for famine and disease. In essence, Israel is not just killing Palestinians—it is killing the land that sustains them.
A less visible, but equally destructive, tactic has been Israel’s systematic control and sabotage of Gaza’s telecommunications infrastructure. According to the digital rights group 7amleh, over 50% of Gaza’s telecommunications systems were destroyed by Israeli bombardment, with the remainder barely functional due to fuel shortages, power outages, and Israeli interference. The consequences of these blackouts go beyond mere inconvenience. They have crippled humanitarian coordination, blocked emergency responses, and silenced Palestinians during massacres. Doctors have been unable to communicate across hospitals; families have lost contact with loved ones under rubble. This is what scholars now term cybernetic genocide—the use of information control to annihilate a population’s ability to communicate, organize, or document its own destruction. This digital erasure serves an ideological purpose: it allows Israel to monopolize the narrative, conceal its atrocities, and suppress resistance. Palestinians are denied not only physical presence but also narrative agency, as their testimonies and suffering are algorithmically censored and technologically contained.
Another axis of genocide involves the cultural and symbolic annihilation of Palestinian identity. Israel has bombed media offices, libraries, mosques, churches, and heritage sites in Gaza, attacking not only the people but the historical memory of Palestine. The destruction of institutions like the Islamic University of Gaza and Al-Azhar University exemplifies this logic: education, knowledge, and history are treated as threats to Israeli domination. This cultural genocide seeks to erase any form of Palestinian futurity or intellectual continuity. By obliterating the archives of memory, the centers of scholarship, and the spaces of political thought, Israel endeavors to eliminate not just bodies but the idea of Palestinian peoplehood. This extends to the realm of global perception. Israeli bombardment has targeted journalists and media workers, while Israeli social media campaigns and government agencies wage psychological warfare to delegitimize Palestinian suffering. In this dual front—physical and epistemic—Israel erases what is and what could be.
While destroying Gaza’s infrastructure and access to life, Israel has simultaneously orchestrated the illusion of humanitarian concern. The most infamous example was the floating pier project, coordinated by the U.S., UAE, EU, and an obscure American logistics firm called Fogbow. As Sharri Plonski outlines, this temporary, 25-day pier project served more as propaganda than relief. It was built, celebrated, and dismantled—all while Israel continued to restrict the entry of critical aid through land crossings. This contradiction—obliterating life while choreographing care—lies at the heart of what we may call humanitarian genocide. Aid becomes not a right, but a performance. The pier allowed the international community to claim moral legitimacy, while reinforcing Israel’s control over every grain of flour and box of medicine entering Gaza.
The manipulation of aid flows has weaponized famine through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. With this organization, Israel fully controlled the entrance of aid to Gaza. Entire families have died of hunger within kilometers of UN warehouses, while Israel selectively permits and blocks food convoys based on military calculations. In this context, the apparatus of humanitarianism is co-opted into the machinery of destruction.
Perhaps the most chilling dimension of Israeli genocide is the “Gaza 2035” transformation plan, which proposes a future in which Gaza is rebuilt not as a Palestinian society, but as a techno-utopian corridor for global capital. It imagines “modern cities” with AI architecture, hyperloop trains to Saudi Arabia’s NEOM, and investment zones administered by private developers. This vision of Gaza—depopulated, dehistoricized, and repurposed—represents a new frontier of settler-colonial imagination. It reveals that the genocide is not just about killing Palestinians but replacing them. Israel is constructing a future without Palestinians, and the mass death of today becomes the speculative capital of tomorrow. What is underway is a genocidal urbanism, in which rubble is converted into real estate, and the Palestinian people are erased in favor of economic integration and “regional prosperity.”
To sum up, the Israeli genocide in Gaza is not a singular event—it is a structure. It is a layered and multi-faceted system of violence that combines kinetic war with infrastructural destruction, digital isolation, humanitarian deception, and settler futurism. It is executed not only with bombs, but with bulldozers, algorithms, public relations campaigns, and international complicity. Amnesty International, UN reports, and hundreds of civil society organizations have documented this genocide in painstaking detail. Yet global power structures continue to shield Israel from accountability, offering aid to the victims while subsidizing the perpetrator.
At the same time, Palestinian resistance—military, civil, cultural, and digital—remains steadfast. Despite unimaginable loss, Palestinians continue to rebuild hospitals under fire, restore communications with minimal tools, and assert their right to memory, land, and life. From Gaza’s engineers and doctors to its poets and youth, Palestinian society refuses to vanish. The international community must move beyond symbolic solidarity. It must support meaningful legal accountability, sever arms trade links, challenge the legitimacy of speculative reconstruction plans, and amplify Palestinian agency at every level. For genocide not only destroys lives, but it also constructs futures. And in Gaza today, the battle is not only for survival—it is for the future itself.
Further Reading on E-International Relations
- Opinion – The Broader Significance of the ICJ’s Ruling on Genocide in Gaza
- Gaza First: The Centrality of Gaza in Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Resolution
- The Gaza Crisis: Restrictions and Challenges to the Humanitarian Space in Gaza
- Opinion – America’s Strategic Maneuver on Gaza at the United Nations
- Opinion – The West’s Approach to Gaza: A Self-Imposed Existential Crisis?
- Opinion – Double Standards and Media Bias in Israel’s War on Gaza
