Nora Cortiñas said that genocide “is the crime of crimes” and, along with Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and other leaders, denounced the massacre of the Palestinian people.
According to the 1948 Genocide Convention, this crime is committed when certain actions are carried out with the intent to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such.” Genocide, then, is not an act; it is a process, and it involves, two interrelated elements:
The first element is actions, including the commission of one or more of these specific acts against a group: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental injury to members of the group; intentionally inflicting on the group conditions of existence likely to result in its physical destruction, in whole or in part; measures designed to prevent births within the group; or forcibly removing children of the group to another group.
The second element is Intent : the intention underlying the commission of one or more of the aforementioned acts, which is to destroy the group in whole or in part. This is what distinguishes genocidal acts from other crimes.
In the case of Israel’s destruction of Gaza, all the constituent elements are present. Israel is a colonialist state. Genocidal intent and practices are integral to the ideology and processes of settler colonialism. The persecution, discrimination, dehumanization of Palestinians, and other preliminary stages prepare the ground for annihilation, the culmination of genocide.
The right to self-determination has been denied, the right of return has been denied: the result has been the segregation and control of Palestinians, including through land confiscation, house demolitions, revocation of residency, and deportation.
Obviously, the reference to civilians being used as “human shields” is nothing more than a false excuse to avoid the responsibility of those who have ordered and carried out the massacre in Gaza. From a legal perspective, such acts of genocide cannot be justified under any circumstances.
That is why we say that Israel has clearly committed acts set out in the Genocide Convention as follows:
1. “Killing members of the group.”
In Palestine, displacing and erasing the population’s presence has been an inevitable part of Israel’s formation as a “Jewish state.” Practices of massive ethnic cleansing have been carried out. Palestinians have been designated as a “security threat” to justify their oppression, and “decivilization” has been used to strip them of their status as protected civilians.
2. “Serious injury to the physical or mental integrity of members of the group.”
Without counting the Palestinians killed or wounded before October 7, 2023 — which Israeli historian Ilan Pappé described as a process of incremental genocide — Israel has murdered more than 60,839 inhabitants of Gaza. Sixty-seven percent of the recorded fatalities are children, women, and the elderly. This number does not include the thousands of Gazans who went missing during the Israeli air force’s constant bombardment or the Palestinians killed in the West Bank during that same period. Officially, the number of seriously wounded stands at 150,000.
Furthermore, the Israeli blockade of Gaza has caused deaths from starvation, especially among children. More than 100 people have died of starvation in Gaza in recent days. There is no doubt that the famine in Gaza is being used as a weapon of genocide by Israel. It is not a famine caused by a natural disaster; it is a military strategy.
The lack of hygiene, medicines, and overcrowding in shelters cause many deaths, and this is also a consequence of the blockade imposed by Israel — with the complicity of the U.S. and other European powers.
3. “Intentional subjection of the group to conditions of existence that are likely to bring about its physical destruction, in whole or in part.”
This act involves conduct that does not directly kill members of the group, but can lead, through various means, to their physical destruction. This situation is clearly evident in Gaza: starving, depriving the protected group of access to water, forcibly displacing the protected group, destroying items essential to their survival, reducing essential medical services, or depriving them of housing, clothing, education, employment, access to hygiene, or prohibiting them from subsistence activities such as fishing.
The relentless Israeli assault on all means of basic survival has jeopardized the ability of Palestinians in Gaza to live on that land. This forced collapse of essential life-supporting infrastructure is consistent with the Israeli authorities’ stated intentions to make Gaza a place “where life is permanently impossible” and where “no human being can exist.”
The ground invasion and aerial bombardment have destroyed agricultural land, farms, crops, animals, and fishing supplies, severely undermining people’s livelihoods, the environment, and agriculture.
4. “Genocidal intent.”
Many of the unlawful acts documented by organizations such as Amnesty International were preceded by statements from authorities urging their implementation. The organization examined 102 statements made by Israeli government officials, military commanders, and other entities between October 7, 2023, and June 30, 2024, in which they dehumanized the Palestinian population and urged or justified the commission of genocidal acts or other crimes against them.
This language often resonated, even among soldiers on the ground, as evidenced by videos showing soldiers calling for the “erasure” of Gaza or its uninhabitability and celebrating the destruction of Palestinian homes, mosques, schools, and universities.
Former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, stated that the war crimes charges against the Israeli leader will prevent him from entering Argentina. “If Netanyahu were to come to Argentina, he would go to jail.”
I cite this to highlight the international dimension of the issue and to expose the Argentine government’s complicity in the ongoing genocide, although I doubt the courage of our country’s judges and prosecutors to confront the far-right criminals that have perpetrated this genocide.
The 1948 Convention claims that it is designed to allow for international law to prevent and to punish the crimes of genocide. But, as we know, international law is controlled by the same powers that support the very state that is perpetrating this genocide, or, in the case of some, have supported the genocide until very recently. That is why international mobilization, as we will do on August 9 in Buenos Aires and in various parts of our country , is so important and urgent.
Actions like those carried out by sectors of the working class that opposed complying with arms shipments to Israel or the boycott of companies that play a clear and direct role in Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people must be multiplied.
Originally published in Spanish on August 4 in La Izquierda Diario
Translated and edited by James Denis Hoff
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