The court’s message came as it announced the genocide verdict after four days of hearings in Turkiye’s Istanbul.
The Gaza Tribunal has announced its final findings, saying that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza and that “Israel’s perpetrators and Western supporters” should not be allowed to escape justice for their crimes.
An informal tribunal set up in London last November issued a “moral judgment” on Sunday after four days of hearings in Turkiye’s Istanbul.
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The effort, led by Richard Falk, the former United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, continues in the tradition of the Russell Tribunal, which heard evidence of U.S. war crimes in Vietnam in 1967.
The year-long Gaza process involved gathering intelligence, interviewing witnesses and survivors, and archiving evidence.
In their verdict, the court’s jury condemned genocide in Gaza and crimes including mass destruction of residential areas, deliberate denial of food to civilians, torture, and targeting of journalists.
Criticism of postwar planning
The tribunal said that Israel’s war in Gaza showed that global governance was not living up to its obligations, before recommending that all “perpetrators, supporters and enablers” be held accountable and that Israel be suspended from international bodies such as the United Nations.
The jury also found Western governments, particularly the United States, to be colluding with Israel through “diplomatic cover, weapons, weapons components, intelligence operations, military aid and training, and continued economic relations.”
In addition to seeking justice, the tribunal criticized two postwar plans put forward by US President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron, suggesting they “ignore the rights of Palestinians under international law” while “doing nothing to restrain the perpetrators of genocide.”
“Palestinians must lead the restoration of Gaza, and Israel and its enablers must bear all reparations responsibility,” the tribunal’s members said in a statement.
Given that the tribunal is not a court of law, the jury said, the tribunal “is not intended to determine the guilt or responsibility of any individual, organization or nation,” but should instead be seen as a civil society response to the war in Gaza.
“We believe that genocide must be named and documented, and that impunity fuels continued violence around the world,” the jury wrote. “The genocide in Gaza concerns all humanity. Civil society can and must speak out even when states are silent.”
Israel faces charges of genocide by South Africa at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Although it is likely to take years for the ICJ to issue a ruling, in a preliminary judgment in January 2024 it found it was “plausible” that Israel had violated the 1948 UN Genocide Convention.
Israel has repeatedly denied accusations that it committed genocide in Gaza.
