UN genocide findings on Gaza — summary & primary sources
What the UN Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry and the UN Special Rapporteur report about Gaza, in plain English, with the official documents linked below.
At a glance
- Commission of Inquiry (HRC): finds reasonable grounds that Israeli authorities committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, and documents conduct that amounts to genocidal acts (killing; causing serious bodily or mental harm; deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about a group’s physical destruction).
- Special Rapporteur: concludes there are reasonable grounds that the legal threshold indicating Israel has committed genocide has been met, and sets out states’ duties to prevent, to punish, and to avoid complicity.
- Obligations for states: under the Genocide Convention, all states must use available means to prevent genocide, cease arms transfers that risk enabling it, and pursue accountability.
Why this matters
These are not NGO op-eds; they are UN mandates reporting to the Human Rights Council. Their findings frame a clear legal duty for governments (including Canada) and elected officials to acknowledge, prevent, and stop complicity in genocidal acts.
Primary documents
- Commission of Inquiry report (A/HRC/60/CRP/3) — UN page
- Special Rapporteur report (A/HRC/59/23) — UN page
- Special Rapporteur (advance, “Anatomy of a Genocide”, A/HRC/55) — UN page
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