GENEVA, Switzerland (AFP) — United Nations (UN) investigators on Tuesday accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza in a bid to “destroy the Palestinians”, accusing Israel’s prime minister and other top officials of incitement.

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI), which does not speak on behalf of the world body, found that “genocide is occurring in Gaza”, commission chief Navi Pillay told AFP.

“The responsibility lies with the State of Israel.”

The bombshell report, immediately slammed by Israel, marks the first time a UN-mandated investigative body has concluded the country is committing genocide.

Israel has, since the start of the war in Gaza faced genocide accusations from NGOs and independent UN experts.

The UN itself has not labelled the situation in Gaza a genocide, but Pillay said she believed the facts presented by the commission should prompt “high-level leaders at the United Nations also to call this what it is, the genocide”.

After the report was published, UN rights chief Volker Turk said it was up to the courts to determine whether genocide was taking place, but warned: “We see the evidence mounting.”

Israel “categorically” rejected Tuesday’s report, with the foreign ministry describing it as “distorted and false” and calling “for the immediate abolition of this Commission of Inquiry”.

The commission published its latest report nearly two years after the war erupted in Gaza following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack inside Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.

Israel’s retaliatory campaign has displaced virtually the entire Gaza population and has killed nearly 65,000 people, according to figures from the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza that the UN considers reliable.

The report came as Israel on Tuesday launched a ground assault on Gaza City, where the UN has declared a full-blown famine.

The COI concluded that Israeli authorities and forces had, since October 2023, committed “four of the five genocidal acts” listed in the 1948 Genocide Convention.

These are “killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”.

The investigators said explicit statements by Israeli civilian and military authorities and their patterns of military action “indicated that the genocidal acts were committed with intent to destroy… Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as a group”.

They concluded that Israeli President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant have “incited the commission of genocide and that Israeli authorities have failed to take action against them to punish this incitement”.

“The responsibility for these atrocity crimes lies with Israeli authorities at the highest echelons,” stated Pillay, 83, a South African former judge who once headed the international tribunal for Rwanda and also served as UN human rights chief.

Commissioner Chris Sidoti meanwhile stressed that the people of Israel too “have been betrayed by their government”, whose “genocidal war… has made (their) peace and security… almost impossible for the foreseeable future”.

“Their trauma and their suffering has been ruthlessly manipulated by Netanyahu and his cronies,” he told journalists.

The commission is not a legal body, but its reports wield diplomatic pressure and serve to gather evidence for later use by courts.

Pillay said the commission was cooperating with the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor, and had “shared thousands of pieces of information with them”.

The ICC has already issued international arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.

And the International Court of Justice (ICJ) last year ordered Israel “to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide” in Gaza.

The investigators stressed that it could take years for the court to definitively rule on whether a genocide is taking place — but Pillay insisted member states must “act now”.

“The absence of action to stop it amounts to complicity.”