Critical observations on the Amnesty International genocide report — Amichai Cohen and Yuval Shany

Amichai Cohen is a professor at Ono Academic College and a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute. Yuval Shany holds the Hersch Lauterpacht Chair in International Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is a senior research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, and is a former member of the UN Human Rights Committee. On 16 December 2024 they published a critical analysis on Just Security of Amnesty International’s determination, issued eleven days earlier, that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Their objection is evidentiary and methodological rather than factual. They do not principally contest Amnesty’s account of what happened in Gaza; they contest whether that record supports the specific legal conclusion drawn from it, arguing that “taking the extra step of claiming based on that available factual record that a genocide has occurred requires a higher standard of proof than the report contains, both with regard to the actus reus and the mens rea.” Their broader charge is that Amnesty’s conclusion holds only if the existing law — the lex lata — on how genocide is proven were to change, particularly the requirement, drawn from the jurisprudence of the international courts, that genocidal intent be the only reasonable inference available from the evidence.

This archive records the disagreement because the disagreement is real and because the case for the documented record does not depend on suppressing it. It should be read against what the bodies that applied that standard concluded: the UN Commission of Inquiry, addressing the same test in September 2025, found “that genocidal intent was the only reasonable inference that could be drawn from the totality of the evidence.” Readers can compare the two arguments directly, which is the point of publishing both.

Why it matters

• The most substantial scholarly objection to the genocide determinations, stated by two senior international lawyers in their own words.
• It isolates precisely where the disagreement lies — the standard of proof for specific intent — rather than disputing the underlying facts.
• Reading it alongside the Commission of Inquiry’s finding on the same legal test lets a reader weigh the question rather than be told the answer.

Key resources

• Amichai Cohen and Yuval Shany, critical observations on the Amnesty report (Just Security, 16 December 2024)
• The Commission of Inquiry’s application of the same standard, A/HRC/60/CRP.3 (16 September 2025)