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Loved ones and relatives of Palestinians, who lost their lives in Israeli attacks on Northern Gaza, mourn for their deceased ones at Indonesia Hospital in Gaza City, Gaza on May 16, 2025. [Khames Alrefi – Anadolu Agency]
Israeli bulldozers demolished the northern wall of the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza today, according to RT Arabic’s correspondent in the besieged enclave.
The director-general of the Ministry of Health in Gaza stated that “the occupation targeted the health system by bombing hospitals and patients.” He added that Israeli occupation forces “opened fire on the intensive care unit of the Indonesian Hospital.”
“Occupation aircraft targeted a patient inside the Indonesian Hospital,” he added.
The director-general also expressed hope that aid- including food and medicines – would soon be allowed into Gaza soon.
Earlier today several Palestinians were killed and injured in an Israeli strike on a tent sheltering displaced persons in the Al-Yarmouk area of central Gaza.
Air strikes also targeted the eastern Abasan Al-Kabira, east of Khan Yunis, where the home of the Abu Teir family was struck, resulting in multiple injuries.
Meanwhile, Palestinian media outlets reported that Israeli aircraft struck a house near the Jordanian field hospital west of Khan Yunis.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.
UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.
Saleh Zenati, carries the body of his infant nephew Khalid Zenati killed in an Israeli army airstrike, during his funeral in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, May 18, 2025
AT LEAST 135 people, including children sleeping in tents, were killed over the weekend in relentless bombardment of Gaza, as all public hospitals in the north were rendered out of service.
It came as the Israeli military said that it has begun extensive ground operations throughout northern and southern Gaza as part of its Operation Gideon’s Chariots, which it claims aims to seize territory, displace large segments of the population to Gaza’s south and assert greater control over the distribution of humanitarian aid.
Among the dead were three journalists and 18 children, according to medical sources, after Israeli warplanes struck a tent encampment sheltering displaced Palestinians in al-Mawasi, near Khan Younis in southern Gaza. Verified footage shared by Al Jazeera shows charred bodies lying in the sand, including several children, with some on fire.
Hamas condemned the bombing as a “brutal crime” and accused the United States of complicity for providing political and military backing to Israel.A Civil Defence spokesman said that more than 200 people are missing under rubble, but emergency teams are unable to access the areas due to continued Israeli strikes.
“Hundreds of families have been erased from the civil registry due to the Israeli bombing,” he said. “Those who do not die from Israeli bombing in Gaza die of hunger.”
Israel has repeatedly targeted hospitals in its genocide, claiming Hamas operates within medical facilities.
But human rights organisations and UN experts have accused Israel of systematically dismantling Gaza’s health infrastructure.
UK Labour Party government Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are participants and complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide providing Israel with army and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.
UK Labour Party government Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are participants and complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide providing Israel with army and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.
Relatives mourn the loss of loved ones killed in an Israeli attack as bodies including children are brought to Indonesian Hospital before burial in Jabalia, Gaza on May 14, 2025. (Photo: Abdalhkem Abu Riash/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“Can I name someone whose work I respect who doesn’t consider it genocide?” said one researcher. “No.”
Only a tiny number of progressive Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. have used the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza, and the U.S. public divided, with less than 40% of Americans saying last year that the term described the Israel Defense Forces’ bombing of hospitals, schools, refugee camps, and other civilian infrastructure.
But for seven leading international experts on genocide, the question is not controversial—even for those who previously rejected the label.
The seven experts were interviewed Wednesday by NRC, a newspaper in the Netherlands, and were unequivocal: Not only have they all come to believe—some earlier than others—that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, but the vast majority of their peers in academia concur.
“Can I name someone whose work I respect who doesn’t consider it genocide?” said Raz Segal, an Israeli genocide researcher at Stockton University in New Jersey. “No.”
Uğur Ümit Üngör, a professor at the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, added, “I don’t know them.”
The interview was published the day before Nakba Day, the 77th anniversary of Palestinians’ forced expulsion from their lands when Israel was established, and as the death toll in Gaza reached 53,010. At least 15,000 of those killed have been children, NRC reported.
When it comes to defining the last 19 months in Gaza as a genocide, reported the newspaper, “even cautious voices have changed.”
Israeli scholar Shmuel Lederman of Open University of Israel “opposed the genocide label” until Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government flouted the International Court of Justice’s January 2024 order to prevent genocide by allowing emergency aid into Gaza and halting top officials “incendiary language on Palestinians.” Israeli leaders have called Palestinians “human animals” and “Amalek“—an ancient enemy in the Hebrew Bible who Israelites were commanded to exterminate.
Lederman also began to see his government as genocidal after the Israel Defense Forces seized control of the Rafah crossing last year, cutting off the only humanitarian aid route as international experts warned famine was imminent, and as analysts warned the true death toll in Gaza could ultimately be close to 200,000.
“For me personally, the combination of this and the continued destruction of Gaza made the turn from harsh criticism of the crimes Israel is committing in Gaza and warnings that we are getting close to that place, to the perception that the cumulative effect of what Israel is doing in Gaza is genocidal in every sense,” said Lederman on the social media platform X on Thursday. “I think the second half of 2024 is the point at which a consensus emerged among genocide researchers (as well as the human rights community) that this was genocide. Those who may have still had doubts—I estimate that they have dissipated following Israel’s actions since the cease-fire was broken.”
Since March, when Israel reimposed a total blockade on humanitarian aid and broke a temporary cease-fire, nearly 3,000 Palestinians have been killed in bombings, and nearly 250,000 people are now facing “extreme deprivation of food,” according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification.
Melanie O’Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, told NRC that Israel’s deliberate blockade on “food, water, shelter, and sanitation” convinced her the Netanyahu government was carrying out a genocide, while Segal pointed to “openly genocidal statements” by Israeli leaders.
“But for all it is about the sum of what would apply separately as ‘ordinary’ war crimes,” NRC reported. “The picture as a whole makes it a genocide. That is how the term is meant, says [British professor Martin] Shaw: ‘holistic.'”
“Apart from social debate, genocide is also the subject of science,” reads the article. “And that field of research, genocide studies, does not see it as a yes/no question, but as a process. Not a light switch, but a ‘dimmer,’ in the words of professor of Holocaust and genocide studies Uğur Ümit Üngör.”
NRC noted that the Western media and political debates have been consumed with “misunderstandings and simplifications.”
Those who continue defending Israel’s actions insist that “it is a military war to destroy Hamas, there is no clear eradication plan, not all Gazans have been killed, it does not look like the Holocaust, the judge has not yet ruled.”
As historian Rutger Bregman said on X Thursday, the scholars interviews by NRC make clear: “Genocide is a process, it’s not a binary switch. And it’s not about matching the Holocaust.”
Genocide is not just another war crime. It’s the “crime of crimes” — the deliberate attempt to destroy a people.
That’s what’s happening in Gaza, say the world’s top genocide experts.
Segal, who is Jewish, told NRC that he is “regularly accused of antisemitism” for speaking out against Israel.
“A German authority in the field that wants to remain anonymous calls the subject ‘poisoned’ in his country,” reported NRC. “You are, he says, called directly [antisemitic] if you mention ‘possible genocide.’ If these acts are subjected to a country other than Israel, he says, all Germans would immediately sound the alarm and speak of genocidal violence, as happened with the Russian massacre in the Ukrainian city of Botzja. But now, he says, it remains silent.”
Dirk Moses, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Genocide Research, said that portions of the field of research are “in crisis” if experts don’t “combat the artificial distinction between [genocide] and military targets” and continue to defend Israel’s actions.
“Then parts of the field of research are actually dead,” he said. “Not only conceptually incoherent, but complicit.”
UK Labour Party government Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are participants and complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide providing Israel with army and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.
Saleh Zenati, carries the body of his infant nephew Khalid Zenati killed in an Israeli army airstrike, during his funeral in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, May 18, 2025
