“It’s really rare for war criminals to just openly announce their actions,” said John Cox, professor of global studies and history at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, who also directs the Center for Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Studies. That’s what’s “unique about Israel’s bombing in Gaza.”
Cox noted that this month marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the U.N.’s Genocide Convention. “[The war in Gaza] literally does take on genocidal proportions and potential, along with daily humiliations and affronts to human rights that Israel has been engaging in for 75 years,” Cox said.
On October 28, for example, Netanyahu referred to Gazans as Amalek, invoking a Biblical enemy. In 1 Samuel 15:1-35, the prophet Samuel tells the king, Saul, to “attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”