On October 25, 2025, Myjoyonline carried a news item under the title above in which the Israeli Ambassador to Ghana, Roey Gilad, criticised Ghana’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa and the United Nations for labelling Israeli actions in the Gaza conflict as genocide. The Ambassador based his criticism on the legal definition of genocide which requires establishing specific intent to annihilate completely a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.
With regard to Gaza, the Ambassador rightly points to the provision in international law which requires that a case of intent must be established before any mass killing can be labelled as genocide. The point must be made that statements demonstrating this intent are a key element in proving the crime of genocide.
So, we start with the Prime Minister of Israel himself, Benjamin Netanyahu. Before the Israeli onslaught on Gaza, he literally called for the annihilation of the Gaza population when he referred to Palestinians as ‘Amalek’ whose extermination is permitted by the Jewish scripture where God gives the command to ‘attack … and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys’. This explains why the Israeli occupation forces were not inhibited by any moral compunction as they embarked on their killing spree in Gaza because in their mindset annihilating Palestinians is divinely ordained.
Announcing the beginning of the attack on Gaza on October 9, 2023, the then Israeli Defence minister, Yoav Gallant, made the following statement: ‘I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.’ Depriving the entirety of the population of Gaza of critical essentials that sustain life, was a calculated attempt to ensure the physical destruction of that population, including civilians and children. In other words, a genocide was intended.
In yet another example of genocidal rhetoric, Israel’s Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu advocated the use of a nuclear weapon on Gaza because, according to him, ‘there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza‘. This clearly amounts to a call for the mass extermination of the entire population of Gaza, including civilians.
The Deputy Speaker of the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, called for the destruction not only of the Gaza population, but of the territory as well when he declared: ‘Burn Gaza now. There is no place for them here. We need to burn it. we need to erase the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.’
So, after more than a year after the ‘Amalek’ style destruction of Gaza was ordered, more than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed, over 70 percent of whom are women and children while over 100,000 have been wounded with thousands more buried under the rubble. With an average of 420 Palestinian children that were being killed or injured every day, the UN described Gaza as a ‘graveyard for thousands of children. Lancet, a medical journal and one of world’s highest-impact academic journals, estimates that the true death toll could be 186,000.
Amnesty International, in its December 2024 report, stated clearly that ‘there is sufficient evidence to believe that Israel’s conduct in Gaza … amounts to genocide.’ Likewise, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation in Palestine, Francesca Albanese, has reported that there are ‘reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.’
Even Israeli human rights organisations such as B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, say their country is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and that Israel’s Western allies have a legal and moral duty to stop it.
Equally important, hundreds of scholars of Holocaust, including Jewish professors, have signed public statements arguing that the situation in Gaza meets the legal definition of genocide and that what Gaza is experiencing is a ‘textbook case of genocide‘.
In its September 2025 report, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Enquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory stated that ‘Israel has committed four of the five genocidal acts defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.’
It is important to take note of the fact that South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice and has since been joined by several countries including Belgium, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Egypt, Ireland, Spain, Libya, Maldives, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Turkiye.
Equally important, the International Criminal Court has since issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant on allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
In his address at the 80th UN General Assembly meeting, President Mahama exhorted the world not to shy away from calling the Gaza genocide by its name adding that ‘if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, well then… It must be a duck.’ A genocide it is indeed.
Gamel Nasser Adam, the writer, is a member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign
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