United Nations investigators on Tuesday accused Israel of committing "genocide" in Gaza in a bid to "destroy the Palestinians", blaming Israel's prime minister and other top officials for incitement.
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI), which does not speak on behalf of the world body and has faced harsh Israeli criticism, found that "genocide is occurring in Gaza and is continuing to occur", commission chief Navi Pillay told AFP.
"The responsibility lies with the State of Israel."
Israel immediately said it "categorically" rejected the report, with the foreign ministry describing it as "distorted and false" and calling "for the immediate abolition of this Commission of Inquiry".
The commission, tasked with investigating the rights situation in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, published its latest report nearly two years after the war erupted in Gaza following Hamas's October 7, 2023, attack inside Israel.
The attack resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures
Israel's retaliatory campaign in Gaza has killed nearly 65,000 people, also mostly civilians, according to figures from the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza that the UN considers reliable.
The vast majority of Gazans have been displaced at least once.
More mass displacement is underway as Israel ramps up efforts to seize control of Gaza City, where the UN has declared a full-blown famine.
The COI concluded that Israeli authorities and forces had since October 2023 committed "four of the five genocidal acts" listed in the 1948 Genocide Convention.
These are "killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group".
'Intent to destroy'
The investigators said explicit statements by Israeli civilian and military authorities along with the pattern of Israeli force conduct "indicated that the genocidal acts were committed with intent to destroy... Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as a group".
The report concluded that Israeli President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant have "incited the commission of genocide and that Israeli authorities have failed to take action against them to punish this incitement".
"The responsibility for these atrocity crimes lies with Israeli authorities at the highest echelons," stated Pillay, 83, a former South African judge who once headed the international tribunal for Rwanda and also served as UN human rights chief.
The commission is not a legal body but its reports can wield diplomatic pressure and serve to gather evidence for later use by courts.
Pillay told AFP the commission was cooperating with the International Criminal Court prosecutor.
"We've shared thousands of pieces of information with them," she said.
'Complicity'
"The international community cannot stay silent on the genocidal campaign launched by Israel against the Palestinian people in Gaza," insisted Pillay, presenting her final report.
"The absence of action to stop it amounts to complicity," she warned.
Israel has since the start of the war faced accusations of committing genocide in Gaza from many NGOs and independent UN experts, and before international courts.
Israeli authorities reject those accusations.
The UN itself has not labelled the situation in Gaza a genocide, although the body's aid chief urged world leaders in May to "act decisively to prevent genocide", while its rights chief last week denounced Israeli "genocidal rhetoric".
In January last year, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel "to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide" in Gaza.
Four months later, the ICC issued international arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Angered by that move, US President Donald Trump's administration last month imposed sanctions on two ICC judges and two prosecutors, including barring them from entering the United States and freezing their assets in the country.
