Extermination and Acts of Genocide: Israel Deliberately Depriving Palestinians in Gaza of Water

On 19 December 2024, Human Rights Watch published Extermination and Acts of Genocide: Israel Deliberately Depriving Palestinians in Gaza of Water, a 179-page report finding that “Israeli authorities have intentionally deprived Palestinian civilians in Gaza of adequate access to water since October 2023, most likely resulting in thousands of deaths and thus committing the crime against humanity of extermination and acts of genocide.” The report documents four mechanisms: cutting and then restricting piped water to Gaza; rendering water and sanitation infrastructure useless by cutting electricity and restricting fuel; deliberately destroying and damaging water and sanitation infrastructure and repair materials; and blocking the entry of critical water supplies.

The research base is set out in the report: interviews with 66 Palestinians from Gaza, 4 employees of Gaza’s Coastal Municipalities Water Utility, 31 healthcare professionals and 15 people working with UN agencies and international aid organisations, together with satellite imagery, photographs and video captured between October 2023 and September 2024. Tirana Hassan, then executive director at Human Rights Watch, stated: “This isn’t just negligence; it is a calculated policy of deprivation that has led to the deaths of thousands from dehydration and disease that is nothing short of the crime against humanity of extermination, and an act of genocide.”

The report’s legal framing is deliberately precise and should be cited precisely. Human Rights Watch concluded that Israeli authorities “have intentionally created conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza in whole or in part” — the third genocidal act under Article II of the Genocide Convention — and that this constitutes the ongoing crime against humanity of extermination. In this December 2024 report the organisation found acts of genocide rather than issuing a full determination that the crime of genocide, with its requirement of specific intent to destroy the group as such, had been established.

Why it matters

• A separate methodology from Amnesty’s, reaching a converging finding on the same Article II act: deliberate inflicting of destructive conditions of life.
• It isolates a single survival resource — water — and traces policy, mechanism and consequence, which makes the finding unusually testable.
• Its careful distinction between “acts of genocide” and the crime of genocide is a model of the precision that makes such findings hard to dismiss.

Key resources

• Report summary and findings (Human Rights Watch, 19 December 2024)