Israeli Human Rights Group Says Israel Is Committing Genocide. Why Did It Take 22 Months?
contact@ifamericansknew.org July 29, 2025 btselem, genocide in Gaza, israeli media, israeli war crimes
Thousands of Palestinians walk along Al-Rashid Street carrying bags of flour after aid trucks entered through the Zikim area in northern Gaza city on June 17, 2025. Nearly every day, aid-seekers are deliberately shot by Israeli forces. ((Yousef Zaanoun /Activestills))
There’s a lot B’Tselem gets right in its report, but some other parts deserve closer scrutiny, Diana Buttu writes.
By Diana Buttu, Reposted from Zeteo, July 28, 2025
Genocide. This is what the Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, has finally determined that Israel is carrying out against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
This determination comes after nearly 22 months in which we have witnessed Israel incessantly bomb the entirety of the Gaza Strip; kill at least 60,000 Palestinians, systematically decimate Palestinian housing and infrastructure, including the Palestinian healthcare, education, water, sewageand electricity systems; launch unprecedented attacks on journalists and first aid responders; and, of course, deliberately and repeatedly forcibly displace and starve the vast majority of Gaza Strip Palestinians, the latter while engaging in deadly target practice against desperate people seeking food. We have seen Palestinian children decapitated; Gaza becoming home to the largest number of child amputees in the world; kindergartens bombed; bodies incinerated. We have heard children’s pleas for help, for their dead parents, and for food. We have heard the statements by Israeli leaders of nearly all political stripes and in virtually all positions of power calling for mass killing and ethnic cleansing.
Yes, this is genocide – one does not need to be a legal scholar to know this. But, to be clear, Palestinian legal scholars and NGOs (like PCHR) have labeled it genocide from the start.
This report is a first for an Israeli organization. For nearly two years, Israelis, including many Israeli ‘human rights’ groups, have shied away from recognizing Israel’s genocide. Indeed, the vast majority of Israelis have not only rejected referring to Israel’s actions as genocide, but have swiftly slapped the (by now rendered meaningless) “antisemitic” label onto anyone who dares to describe the obvious.
So, for Israeli society, this report is a bit of a big deal.
This is not the first time that B’Tselem has been the first Israeli organization to call things out: it was back in 2021, when it labeled Israel an apartheid regime and, before that, in 2016, when it labeled Israel’s military law enforcement system as a “fig leaf” that whitewashes Israel’s occupation and crimes against Palestinians.
But, while B’Tselem has been, and is again, the first Israeli human rights organization to state the obvious, the reports and conclusions often come months – or years – after Palestinian or international organizations already reached and published similar conclusions. For example, Palestinians had analyzed and concluded that Israel is an apartheid regime nearly 20 years before B’Tselem (and then Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International) finally came out and labeled Israel as such. Israeli Apartheid Weekbegan in 2005. As for the Israeli “legal system,” Palestinian rights organization Al-Haq and others have taken the position since the 1970s that this “legal system” is merely an extension of Israel’s military occupation and have never engaged with it, knowing that its purpose is, and that engagement would serve, merely to whitewash and legitimize Israel’s crimes.
A Glaring Credibility Disparity
To be clear, this is not just a question of “firsts.” It is also about who is viewed as having the agency to assess and label what Israel is doing to Palestinians and who should be viewed as credible and heard. For example, anyone who watches the BBC knows that the minute the word “genocide” is uttered by a Palestinian, the BBC presenter swiftly interrupts and shuts down any use of it. Similarly, the New York Times, which finally has come around to opening some small space for the word genocide to be used, confines the debate about it to two Zionist Israel supporters. With B’Tselem now declaring Israel’s actions as genocide, this will open the space for other organizations, including media outlets, to repeat the same, but without this Israeli imprimatur, it likely would forever remain an untouchable taboo.
Here lies the problem: While a near consensus forms around analysis that assesses what Israel is doing amounts to a genocide, it only becomes palatable and permissible for the outside world to say this out loud when it is non-Palestinians saying it. Or, better yet, when this conclusion is expressed by Israelis. Take, for example, the fanfare that surrounded Israeli ex-PM Ehud Olmert’s recent characterization of Israel’s actions as war crimes. It was as if no one recalled that this is the same Ehud Olmert who launched the massive late 2008 bombing campaign against Gaza titled “Cast Lead” – an assault that normalized subsequent and ever more wanton Israeli bombardment against the Gaza Strip, and wherein over 1,400 Palestinians were killed by Israel, crimes for which he has never been tried or held accountable. This is also the same Ehud Olmert who championed Israel’s invasion of Khan Younis in November 2023.
Palestinians have analyzed and assessed Israel’s actions as war crimes and worse for such a long time, yet it is only when an international, or an Israeli, or even a probable war criminal, like Olmert, asserts these claims that such deadly serious crimes are ever deemed as such. This glaring credibility disparity is part and parcel of the continuing process of dehumanizing Palestinians, of course. We are only believed when someone – anyone – other than one of us states these conclusions. In the hierarchy of “to be believed,” the rank usually lies with the war criminals, followed by Israeli soldiers (including probable war crime perpetrators), followed by Israeli human rights organizations, followed by international human rights organizations, followed by (non-Palestinian; non-Arab) international journalists. It is only after that list is exhausted that our words, experiences, analysis, and conclusions are even heard, much less believed, trusted, and validated. Otherwise, we are questioned, scrutinized, downplayed, viewed as suspect, or ignored.
With that unfortunate air cleared, what B’Tselem has determined bears close scrutiny.
Why Did It Take 22 Months?
First, what the report gets right: B’Tselem acknowledges that based on both the statements and actions of the Israeli government, genocide is underway: “An examination of Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. In other words: Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
B’Tselem, unlike others, also warns that there is a distinct potential for Israel to expand its onslaught into the West Bank and against Palestinian citizens of Israel: “We warn of the clear and present danger that the genocide will not remain confined to the Gaza Strip, and that the actions and underlying mindset driving it may be extended to other areas as well.”
While both of these findings are clear and important, there are also significant problematic issues. First, why has it taken nearly two years for an Israeli organization whose core mission is to track Israeli human rights violations to come out with this report? A lack of evidence? What more was needed? Was there a magic number of murdered kids that they were waiting for? A number of hospitals needed to be bombed before the determination could be made? Is it fear of reprisals from the Israeli public? Students across campuses around the world have bravely stood and labeled Israel’s actions early on. One would expect a human rights organization to be on the vanguard, leading public opinion and not following it after the news media and others have adopted these safe positions.
Second, it would be exceedingly naive to somehow believe that the letter and spirit of what Israel and Israelis continue to perpetrate against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip has not been part of the ethos of Israel from the time before the 1948 establishment of the state. While this report acknowledges this history, what Palestinians know as the Nakba (disaster), B’Tselem’s summary of the context does not sufficiently describe, nor draw the obvious conclusions from, the history of how Israel was founded on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from our homeland. Indeed, for decades, Palestinians have endured Nakba denial, Nakba apologists (‘we, the Jews needed a state in the aftermath of the Holocaust’), the fatuous denial of our identity (‘there is no such thing as Palestinian’) and to the downplaying of each and every Israeli action (‘X Israeli Prime Minister needs to (fill in the blank) steal Palestinian land, destroy Palestinian homes, kill Palestinians, imprison children…to maintain his governing coalition’). The obvious reality is that Israel’s very existence is premised upon our erasure.
Third, the report quite incredibly points to a “catalyst” for Israel’s genocide – namely, October 7:
“Often, a violent event that creates a sense of existential threat among the perpetrating group is the catalyst for the ruling system to carry out genocide. The attack by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups on 7 October 2023 was a catalyst of this kind. The atrocious attack, aimed mostly at civilians, included many war crimes and likely also crimes against humanity. It took the lives of 1,218 Israelis and foreign nationals, 882 of them civilians, involved extensive and severe acts of violence, including sexual violence, and resulted in tens of thousands of people wounded and the abduction of 252 people to the Gaza Strip – most of them civilians, including women, elderly people and children. The youngest child abducted was a nine-month-old baby who was killed, along with his three-year-old brother and their mother, while held in Gaza. For Israelis, the very fact of the attack, its scope and its outcomes, generated anxiety and a feeling of existential threat to a degree that led to profound social and political changes in Israeli society. These instigated a shift in Israeli policy toward Palestinians in the Gaza Strip: from repression and control to destruction and annihilation.”
This “catalyst” construct, however, amounts to blatant victim blaming, which amounts to yet another, and arguably the most sinister, form of the dehumanization of Palestinians.
This victim blaming, somehow normalized in the West, explains why Palestinians are continually asked whether we condemn Hamas, for the only way that they can see the crimes that Israel is committing is if we make ourselves palatable to the West by resetting the history clock or by empathizing with a state that seeks our erasure. Yet can one even conjure a world in which any other genocide, including the Holocaust, begins by focusing on a so-called “catalyst”? Why, when it comes to Palestinians, is this proffering of a somehow justifying or explanatory “catalyst” presented as the very premise for the genocide? Is it possible to view this construct as anything but a backhanded rationalization for the actions of those perpetrating the ongoing genocide? Imagine, for a moment, that Oct. 7 never happened. By B’Tselem’s logic, Israelis would have continued with their existing policies towards Gaza. But those policies were also killing Palestinians, with those killings normalized within Israeli society.
I understand how the events of October 7 affected Israelis: they were sold (and believed) the lie that they would never pay a price for denying millions of Palestinians their freedom; they were led to believe that their lives could, and should, be normal while Palestinians, and notably in the Gaza Strip lived in exile, blockaded, routinely bombed – frequently within eyeshot of the very homes and communities from which three quarters of a million Palestinians had been ethnically cleansed. But to construct the events of October 7 as a “catalyst” for genocide is to ignore the structural cause of genocide, which is precisely what B’Tselem aims to point out in earlier pages of its report. In other words, genocide is not the result of an event; it is the result of a structural system that has fostered genocide over many years. Hereby focusing on an event, B’Tselem largely ignores Israel’s history, and Israeli society’s sense of identity – and entitlement – and more alarmingly, ignores why, for more than 22 months, we have seen Israeli society relish in carrying out this genocide.
Yes, Israel is committing genocide. It is carried out by a state and a society that has spent eight decades focusing on supremacy and superiority, and ignoring just how they have destroyed Palestinian lives.
Find B’Tselem’s summarized report here.
Diana Buttu is a Haifa-based lawyer and analyst who was a legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team in the early 2000s and is a frequent commentator and writer on Palestinian and Israeli issues. She writes Zeteo’s ‘A Diary from a Palestinian in Israel.’
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