A baby cries in a damaged house at the site of an Israeli strike in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, April 29, 2024. (Photo by Reuters)

Jerusalem, April 29 (RHC)-- A professor of Holocaust history at the Hebrew University in occupied al-Quds says Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.

In an opinion piece published by The Palestine Project on Monday, Amos Goldberg said the scale of death and destruction caused by Israel constitutes a “deliberate crushing of Palestinian existence in Gaza.”

“It’s so difficult and painful to admit it, but despite all that… we can no longer avoid this conclusion. Jewish history will be henceforth stained.”

The Israeli researcher said what is happening in Gaza does not need to resemble the Holocaust to qualify as genocide.  “Israelis mistakenly think that to be viewed as such a genocide needs to look like the Holocaust,” he wrote.

“They imagine trains, gas chambers, crematoria, killing pits, concentration and extermination camps, and the systematic persecution to death of all members of the group of victims to the last one.”

He said although each genocide is different, they are all motivated by “an authentic sense of self-defense”.

The largest Muslim civil rights organization in the United States, CAIR, has denounced Secretary of Defense Austin in that regard.
 
Citing genocides such as the Srebrenica massacre, where 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men were murdered by Bosnian Serb forces, and the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, where 800,000 people were slaughtered by the Hutus, he said “in all these cases, the perpetrators of the genocide felt an existential threat, more or less justified, and the genocide came in response.” 

In January, South Africa lodged a complaint against the Israeli regime with the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing it of carrying out genocide in Gaza.

Authorities in top international organizations like the United Nations have repeatedly stated in recent months that the massive scale of killings committed by Israel in Gaza does not match Operation Al-Aqsa Storm of October 7, 2023 by the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, which led to the death of about 1,200 Israeli settlers and troops.