Our Genocide — B'Tselem's determination on Gaza

On 28 July 2025, B’Tselem published Our Genocide, concluding that “Israel is taking coordinated action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip.” The organisation reached that conclusion from an examination of Israeli policy in Gaza and its outcomes together with the statements of senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the campaign. Physicians for Human Rights Israel published a parallel report the same day addressing the destruction of Gaza’s health system.

The significance is institutional as much as evidentiary. B’Tselem was founded in 1989 by Israeli academics, attorneys, journalists and members of the Knesset, and works in Hebrew, Arabic and English; until this report, Israeli human rights organisations had largely declined to use the word genocide even after international bodies and Israeli genocide scholars had done so. Sarit Michaeli, B’Tselem’s outreach director, said of the findings in a broadcast interview on 29 July 2025: “This is the textbook definition of genocide.”

The report’s title carries the argument. B’Tselem is not describing something done by a foreign state to a distant people; it is an Israeli organisation describing what it holds its own society to be doing, and asking Israelis to look at it. That is the sense in which the possessive in Our Genocide is meant.

Why it matters

• An Israeli organisation’s determination, made in Hebrew for an Israeli readership, on the conduct of its own state.
• Published alongside Physicians for Human Rights Israel, marking the point at which Israel’s two leading human rights institutions converged on the term.
• Grounds its finding partly in the recorded statements of Israeli officials — the same evidentiary category the ICJ and the UN Commission of Inquiry examined.

Key resources

• Our Genocide — full report as archived by the UN Question of Palestine portal
• Interview with Sarit Michaeli of B’Tselem, 29 July 2025