Introduction
As the death toll mounts in the Gaza Strip, rigorous analysis of Israel's genocidal war in Gaza, using additional tools to the classic methods of conflict analysis, grows more urgent by the day. As of mid-May 2024, over 15,500 children had been confirmed killed,[1] and by June 2024 the total death toll was already likely to have reached or surpassed 186,000 direct and indirect deaths.[2]
Most mainstream English and German language media has tended to portray, overall, the current situation in Gaza as simply an asymmetric war, with a professional army fighting a terror group. This war is generally reported to have, expectedly yet unwillingly, generated a large and growing number of victims – as though there was an inescapable but indispensable mechanism of asymmetric fighting that inevitably produced such large numbers of victims.[3] In contrast, Arabic language media and much of the global social media fora have been more critical of Israel's behaviour (and of unconditional US support),[4] documenting the gap between the Israeli army's proclaimed care for civilians and the growing number of war crimes it has been committing since October 2023.[5] This more critical media stance against Israeli practices has been both building upon and supporting a rapidly growing body of legal studies that have documented numerous Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity since 7 October, and demonstrated that these acts are driven by the special intent of genocide.[6]
In this paper, I will refer to the crime of genocide as it was defined in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide's Article II....
Read the full strategic paper Here