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| Accountability is essential – not for revenge, but because there’s no reckoning without responsibility.’ Photograph: Haseeb Alwazeer/Reuters |
Yuli Novak is executive director of Breaking the Silence, which allows Israeli soldiers to talk about the occupied territories. She served as an officer in the Israeli air force from 2000 to 2005.
Genocide is a process, not an event. When genocide happens, its roots, and the conditions that allowed it, often become visible only in retrospect. If those conditions remain unchanged and there is no accountability, there’s every reason to believe the violence will return, perhaps even worse, especially if it was never fully halted. This is exactly what we are seeing in the case of Gaza. Demanding accountability from Israeli leaders isn’t just about the past, it’s the only way to challenge a system designed to repeat such violence.
A strange kind of calm has settled over Israel in the weeks since the Gaza ceasefire was declared. The sirens stopped. The hostages who survived the 7 October attack and nearly two years in captivity came home. But this calm – which has not been extended to Gaza, where more than 200 civilians have been killed since the ceasefire supposedly went into effect is built around an unclear plan by Donald Trump that does not address the root causes of the violence, and is merely a mirage. Nothing has changed in the violent political system that Palestinians and Israelis live under. The machinery behind the violence remains intact. The logic of domination still rules.
For nearly two years, Israel waged a campaign in Gaza that meets the clearest definition of genocide: a systematic, often openly declared attempt to destroy a group of people, the Palestinians in Gaza, through killing, starvation, forced displacement, and the destruction of life-sustaining conditions. Genocide is not a metaphor here. It is the only term that fits.
Our organization, B’Tselem, published a report last July titled Our Genocide. We chose this name because we are not observers but part of this horrific story. Israeli and Palestinian researchers, investigators and fieldworkers worked together to document events in Gaza, the West Bank and within Israel. Our conclusion confirms what Palestinians and international experts have long said: this is genocide – a direct assault on a population aiming to destroy the group.
Palestinians in Gaza were bombed, then forcibly displaced, then deliberately starved. More than 68,000 people were killed, a third of them children and women. This number might be much higher, with tens of thousands more who are still missing. Hundreds of thousands were injured. Hospitals and journalists were systematically targeted. Children buried alive under rubble. Entire familial lines erased. Infrastructure demolished. Israeli officials openly stated the goal: to destroy Gaza and make it uninhabitable.... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/18/israel-accountability-gaza-genocide