Gaza

The bodies whose work is to make this determination have made it. On 16 September 2025 the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, finding that 4 of the 5 acts defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention had been carried out against Palestinians since 7 October 2023. The International Association of Genocide Scholars had resolved 2 weeks earlier that the legal definition was met. Amnesty International reached the same conclusion in December 2024, as did Human Rights Watch and the Israeli organization B'Tselem. This publication uses the word those findings use.

No court has ruled on the merits, and that gap is routinely offered as though it were doubt. South Africa's case under the Genocide Convention has been before the International Court of Justice since December 2023, and the Court has ordered provisional measures since January 2024 on a finding that the risk to Palestinians is plausible. Israel filed its counter-memorial on 12 March 2026. In May 2026 the Court set South Africa's reply for November 2027 and Israel's rejoinder for May 2029. The adjudication is scheduled to run years past the conduct it concerns. An absence of a verdict on that timetable is not an absence of findings.

The daily's own coverage tracks the distance between what is announced and what happens. A roadmap was published that Israel had not agreed to. An agreement was announced on a Friday, and Gaza's health ministry says at least 34 Palestinians were killed in the days after it. The United Nations humanitarian office warned that Gaza remains at risk of crossing into famine classification. Gaza has been formally under a ceasefire since 11 October 2025, and by late September the Gaza Ministry of Health counted 1,145 Palestinians killed since it took effect and a cumulative toll past 74,000. In mid-September a war-damaged building that had sheltered more than 100 people collapsed in Gaza City, killing at least 21, 12 of them children, by Drop Site's count; rescuers lacked heavy machinery, whose entry Israel restricts. United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk said the remains being unearthed raise war crimes concerns, citing Palestinian Civil Defence figures of more than 630 bodies recovered since November 2025 and more than 8,000 people still under rubble.

The institutional record has been the more durable part. Israel routed its objections through Tony Blair. The first Board of Peace construction contract awarded in Gaza was for a military base. The administration approved a $2.8 billion package of 40,000 bombs for Israel in September, most of it paid through United States foreign military financing. A United Nations Commission of Inquiry report in June found Israeli authorities directly involved in settler attacks, and Human Rights Watch finds that settler attacks backed by soldiers have displaced 107 West Bank communities in whole or in part since January 2023. Britain, Canada and France banned goods from Israeli settlements in September; British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said his government agrees there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank perpetrated by settler terrorists, and Israel closed the British consulate in East Jerusalem. In Turmus Ayya, American citizenship did not buy protection. At the end of September the Senate voted 51 to 47 against requiring a State Department report on the killings of 9 American citizens in the West Bank since 2022, among them the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. At Qusra the question the record raises is who enforces. Rights groups say rubble is being cleared in a manner that destroys evidence of war crimes, which is an accusation by those groups and not an adjudicated finding.

The institutions making these findings are themselves under pressure: the administration sanctioned the sitting president of the International Criminal Court along with a senior trial lawyer, and has sanctioned the Palestinian rights groups Al-Haq, Al Mezan and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. Where accounts conflict, the editions publish the conflict. One airstrike produced 3 government accounts that could not all be true, and the entry says so rather than choosing the most quotable one.