A UN special committee has found that Israel’s tactics of starvation and mass civilian slaughter in Gaza are “consistent with genocide,” in one of the strongest worded reports by a UN group yet on the Israeli siege.

The 27-page report documented the first nine months of Israel’s assault and was prepared by a UN committee established in 1968 to investigate Israeli human rights practices in the occupied Palestinian and other Arab territories. The committee finds that Israel is intentionally and consistently killing civilians and depriving Palestinians of the conditions of life in Gaza.

“[T]he policies and practices of Israel during the reporting period are consistent with the characteristics of genocide,” the report says.

“The targeting of Palestinians as a group; the life-threatening conditions imposed on Palestinians in Gaza through warfare and restrictions on humanitarian aid — resulting in physical destruction, increased miscarriages and stillbirths — and the killing of and serious bodily or mental harm caused to Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are violations under international law,” it goes on.

Israel has caused “unprecedented destruction of civilian infrastructure,” the report notes, while forcing civilians to evacuate into smaller and smaller areas of the Gaza Strip “with no regard for their rights to life.”

By the February 2024, Israeli forces had dropped the equivalent power of two nuclear bombs on Gaza, with over 25,000 metric tons of explosives — many provided by the U.S. The committee specifically raised concern about the Israeli military’s use of artificial intelligence to mass-produce Palestinian targets for assassination.

Those not killed by bombings or gunfire, meanwhile, face Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war, the committee noted. Together, these tactics indicate a widespread strategy of collective punishment of Palestinians, the group said.

“Since the beginning of the........

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