As a Palestinian, watching the way Israel has metastasized its genocidal violence to southern Lebanon and Iran, like a cancer spreading its violent pathology to any area where life flourishes, it is hard not to be retraumatized and reminded of all the ways Palestinians were maimed, hunted, torn, crushed, and evaporated. Seeing hundreds of thousands displaced, thousands murdered, hospitals and schools and homes bombed, I am reminded of the early days of the genocide in Gaza when I once thought the world might act, might say or do something, might stop my people from being animals gathered in a slaughterhouse. But at this moment, it is just as important to recognize genocide as genocide. How can we recognize what is happening in Iran and Lebanon if we do not acknowledge its roots: the genocide of Palestinians, from Haifa and Nablus to Khalil and Gaza, from 1948 to 2026. Genocide has been happening for eight decades. It is happening in the West Bank. It might not be from bombs or the mass murders we see in the news, although both have happened before. It is genocide nonetheless. If we are to stop genocide in all of its manifestations, we must address the cancer at its source.

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It might be hard to imagine genocide happening in the West Bank when we consider the scale of Israeli violence and their appetite for torturous violence over the last few years. Israel has created a system of continual violence and destruction and siege which has maintained its ethnic cleansing through physical bombardment and mass starvation. These are the facts, clearly established through the work of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN Commission of Inquiry, the countries that joined the 2024 ICJ complaint, and the thousands, if not millions, of documented images and videos from our martyrs and survivors in Gaza. Genocide is not at the same scale in the West Bank. But it is happening, slowly and methodically. But, it is still legally and concretely genocide.

When I came to start this piece, I was not sure how to describe the way genocide reverberates through Palestine over the decades, in what way does justice to the land and martyrs whose deaths were the price paid for the world’s indifference and dehumanization of Palestinians. There are the daily murders of civilians and children like Saddam Hussein Rajab in 2025, Nasrallah Abu Siyam in 2026, Amer Rabee in 2025, Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022, Mohammed al-Durrah in 2000, Mohammed Murra in 2026, and the thousands like them. There is the poisoning of our wells, theft and killings of livestock, the burning of thousands of olive trees, many older than the state of Israel itself. There are the ever-growing settlements that suffocate Palestinians in our own cities, illegal settlers which act as a paramilitary force committing pogroms like in Huwara in 2023 and murdering Palestinians at will. There were, there are, and there will continue to be attempts to end the Palestinians as a people, wherever and however we exist: genocide.

Article II of the Genocide Convention defines genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. The acts include killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to bring about physical destruction, imposing measures to prevent births, and forcibly transferring children. The Convention does not require gas chambers nor does it require a minimum body count. The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY’s) Krstić Appeals Chamber, in 2004, established that destruction of a “substantial part” of a group constitutes genocide even when geographically limited or numerically small, if the part destroyed is qualitatively significant. The Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica were 2.9 percent of all Bosnian Muslims. The court found them a substantial part because of their symbolic significance and the intent that the community would never reconstitute itself.

The ICT for Rwanda (ICTR) Akayesu judgment described that genocidal intent can be inferred from “the general context” and “the perpetration of other culpable acts systematically directed against that same group.” The September 2025 UN Commission of Inquiry applied this standard and concluded that genocidal intent was “the only reasonable inference” from the totality of evidence. The Commission raised “serious concern that the specific intent to destroy the Palestinians as a whole has extended to the rest of the occupied Palestinian territory…and to the period before October 7, 2023.”

The intent has been clear since before the state was established. David Ben-Gurion wrote in 1937 that “We [Zionist] must expel Arabs and take their places.” Between 1940 and 1947, the Zionist movement compiled the Village Files, detailed dossiers on every Arab village. Plan Dalet in March 1948 authorized “destruction of villages” and forced expulsion. The massacres that followed at Deir Yassin, Tantura, Lydda, al-Dawayima killed approximately 15,000 Palestinians, displaced 750,000 (over 50% of then then population), and destroyed over 500 villages.

The denial of our existence as a people is itself evidence of intent to destroy us “as such.” Golda Meir in 1969 said “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people.”; Moshe Dayan told the early settlers that “You [illegal settlers] do not even know the names of these villages.” When you deny that a people exist, their elimination is not elimination at all. Israel spent decades denying the Nakba happened, passed a law in 2011 making it illegal to acknowledge, then in 2023 Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter bragged: “We are rolling out a Gaza Nakba.” The denial and the repetition are part of the same mechanism of destruction.

“As such” the killing have never stopped. Article II(a) prohibits “killing members of the group.” During the First Intifada from 1987 to 1993, Israeli forces killed over 1,000 Palestinians including hundreds of children. The Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005 saw over 3,000 Palestinians killed. Since October 7, 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have killed 1,054 Palestinians in the West Bank, a quarter of them children.

On January 21, 2025, two days after the Gaza ceasefire, Israel launched Operation Iron Wall, the largest military operation in the West Bank since the Second Intifada. Over 40,000 Palestinians were displaced from Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nur Shams camps. As of February 2026, 32,000 cannot return. At least 55 were killed. B’Tselem documented 69 airstrikes between October 2023 and March 2025 killing 261 people. B’Tselem calls this the “Gazafication” of the West Bank, a term that captures how the same eliminatory logic, once expressed through mass bombardment, is now expressed through displacement, airstrikes, and siege, adapted to a different terrain but animated by the same intent.

Article II(b) prohibits “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.” Since 1967, over 750,000 Palestinians have passed through Israeli prisons — two out of every five Palestinian men. As of late 2025, about 10,000 Palestinians remain imprisoned, including 4,000 considered “administrative” detainees held without charge and 350 children. What Israel has built is purposefully a network of torture camps. Detainees describe cigarettes extinguished against their skin, hydrochloric acid poured on their backs, eyes lost to burns. Between October 2023 and January 2026, at least 84 to 98 prisoners died from torture, starvation, and deliberate medical neglect. Walid Ahmad was seventeen when he died of starvation at Megiddo Prison in March 2025, returned to his family with almost no muscle or fat remaining – this is Israeli detention.

But the harm inflicted extends beyond beatings and starvation into something the international community has struggled to name directly. In March 2025, the UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that sexual and gender-based violence is used by Israel as a method of war, carried out under explicit orders or with implicit encouragement from Israel’s top civilian and military leadership. Female detainees have been raped. Male detainees have been raped. A fifteen-year-old boy from the West Bank was tortured and raped at the Al-Mascobiyya detention facility. Sami al-Saei, a journalist held for sixteen months without charge under administrative detention, described being sexually assaulted by prison guards at Megiddo Prison, raped with multiple objects while guards laughed, an assault other prisoners told him was called the “reception party” inflicted upon arrival. UNICEF has found the ill-treatment of detained children widespread, systematic, and institutionalized. Israel remains the only country in the world that automatically prosecutes children in military courts. Since 2000, approximately 13,000 children have been detained, interrogated, and imprisoned, with a conviction rate exceeding 99 percent. The physical harm also does not shed light to the mental anguish done to Palestinians through generations of apartheid and occupation that treats them as less than humans. During this year’s Ramadan, Israel has prohibited ALL Palestinians from praying at Al-Aqsa mosque, this, to many, is torture. When a state detains two out of every five of a people’s men, tortures them as policy, rapes them as a method of war, and returns the ones who survive to their communities permanently broken that is part of the deliberate destruction of a people through their own bodies and minds.

Article II(c) prohibits “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Israel seized all West Bank water resources under Military Order No. 158, which classifies rainwater itself as Israeli state property. Since October 2023, over 100 water facilities have been demolished and 81 wells destroyed or sealed. Israel has simultaneously dismantled the agricultural base that allowed Palestinians to feed themselves. Since October 2023, settlers tripled their attacks on West Bank olive farmers, destroying over 52,300 trees, many of them centuries old. Israeli settlements discharge untreated wastewater and sewage onto Palestinian agricultural land, contaminating fields and knocking entire crops permanently out of use. Permits to farm one’s own land are denied or conditioned on Israeli approval. If we look at the conduct, Israel destroys the wells, burns the crops, contaminates the soil, denies the permits, and watch a people become entirely dependent on their occupier for the water they drink and the food they eat. This is a condition engineered to make indigenous life on indigenous land impossible. Beyond that, Israel continues to demolition Palestinian homes while approving new settlements, 40+ new settlements approved over the last two years. In 2025, settlers drove out 13 rural Palestinian communities entirely. In January 2026, the entire community of Ras Ein al-Auja was expelled after settlers cut their water, stole and poisoned their livestock, and seized their land.

Patrick Wolfe termed this elimination logic when he described settler colonialism as operating through the continuous removal of the indigenous population. The goal is the elimination of Palestinians as a distinct people capable of collective existence. When you destroy social infrastructure, when you prevent cultural, economic, and political reproduction on the land, when you shatter the family as the basic unit of a people’s continuity, you destroy the group itself. The violence is often described as gradual, but the word concedes too much, as though there were pauses, as though there were time. What is unfolding is autonomic: a continuous system of killing, displacement, legal disenfranchisement, agricultural destruction, sexual terror, and cultural erasure operating simultaneously and across generations.

What is occurring is not “the Gaza genocide” but the genocide of the Palestinian people. Every element of Article II is evidenced in the West Bank and Historic Palestine since the Nakba. And, we must recognize that when the people say the “Gaza genocide,” they erase that Gazans are Palestinians. They fragment a people who are being destroyed as a people. The crime is not against Gazans. It is against Palestinians. Everywhere we exist as a reminder of Israel’s settler colonial and non-indigenous roots.

Treating Gaza as isolated genocide allows the grinding destruction in the West Bank to continue below international alarm. The legal and historical record shows one process targeting one people across one homeland for nearly eight decades. The Nakba did not end in 1948. It continues through near daily murders, expulsions, poisoned wells, demolished homes, settler pogroms, and the bureaucratic machinery that makes Palestinian life on Palestinian land impossible.

Today, less than ten percent of historic Palestine remains under complete Palestinian control. I do not know what to do with that number except to say that I have watched it shrink my entire life, and my parents watched it shrink before me, and their parents before them. I wrote at the beginning of this piece that watching Lebanon and Iran burn retraumatized me, reminded me of my people being maimed and hunted and evaporated. What I did not say is that the retraumatization is not only from the violence, but watching same impunity. The same world finding new excuses to avoid the word it has already defined and enshrined and promised would never again go unanswered. Genocide has a legal definition. Palestinians meet every element of it, not since 2023, not since the siege of Gaza in 2007, but since 1948, across every inch of the land, in the West Bank as in Gaza, in the prisoner as in the displaced, in the poisoned well as in the demolished home. To call what happened in Gaza a genocide while the West Bank burns slowly is to fragment a people who are being destroyed as a people. The world has always found it easier to mourn Palestinians in pieces than to reckon with what is being done to us whole. We are one people being destroyed as one people.

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