The anatomy of incremental genocide

The escalation of violence in the Gaza Strip following the attacks of October 7, 2023, is often described as an anomalous crisis triggered by a traumatic event. The Hamas “unprovoked” attack is widely blamed for the subsequent Israeli operation in the Strip, which, in turn, is described and justified as a necessary military response.  The objective of this essay is to challenge such a reading and to propose a historical-legal deconstruction of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that allows for an analysis of current events from a different perspective. Consequently, this work proposes to identify Israeli violence in recent years not as a mere reaction to Hamas attacks, but rather as the last phase of a long-term structural project: an “incremental genocide”. The genocide of the Palestinian people, therefore, unfolds through a structural project based on an eliminatory logic which is inherent to Zionism and which characterized the State of Israel – a quintessential example of a “settler colonial state” – since the very moment of its foundation. 

The Colonial Roots of the Conflict 

In order to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is necessary to deconstruct the mainstream narrative that attempts to reduce it to a symmetric war between two sides aiming to gain control over the same land. A more accurate historical analysis reveals that the conflict is rooted in a long-term colonial structure, and that the escalation initiated after the October 7 attacks is only the latest and most blatant manifestation of a genocidal project of ethnic cleansing that began in 1948. Indeed, as extensively demonstrated through the analysis, the ideological apparatus supporting and advocating for the foundation of the Jewish State – namely Zionism – has been inherently eliminatory since its inception and, over the decades, has sustained and justified the ethnic cleansing and the genocide of the Palestinian people. The inherently eliminatory nature of Zionism is evident not only from the analysis of statements made by prominent figures within this movement but also, and above all, from the constant and prolonged implementation of genocidal practices. 

As theorized by Patrick Wolfe, settler colonialism relied on a “logic of elimination” of the indigenous population – in this case, the Palestinians – in order to replace it with a new colonial society. Since its foundation, the State of Israel has implemented a plan of territorial expansion achieved through the reduction of Palestinian living space and the expulsion and elimination of the native population. Based on Wolfe’s work – which posits that “invasion is a structure, not an event” – it is then possible to reconceptualize the 1948 Nakba not as a concluded historical episode, but rather as the founding event of a permanent structure of oppression and elimination of the Palestinian people: an Ongoing Nakba. 

Another fundamental contribution to understanding the “logic of elimination” is provided by Dirk Moses, according to whom elimination is expressed through a wide range of strategies that go beyond mere physical extermination and contribute to the erasure of the indigenous population’s very identity. Every phase of the conflict following 1948 – even when not directly characterized by the physical elimination of the Palestinian people – has been guided by the same eliminatory logic in support of a genocidal process that has been ongoing for nearly a century. 

It is precisely within this colonial framework that the failure of the peace processes is situated. Far from constituting a genuine attempt to resolve the conflict, these processes have contributed to the formalization of a profound asymmetry and to the crystallization of “facts on the ground” – particularly the territorial expansion of the Jewish State through illegal settlements – effectively preventing any form, however minimal, of self-determination for the Palestinian people. 

Redefining Genocide: a Return to its Original Conceptual Foundations 

The analysis of the genocidal dimension of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict requires a rigorous anchoring to International Law and Genocide Studies. This investigation, therefore, must begin with an examination of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The drafting of this Convention, prompted by WWII and the horrors of the Holocaust, codified genocide as an autonomous international crime for the first time. Despite the crucial importance of the work of Raphael Lemkin, who first coined the term “genocide”, the final text of the Convention diverged significantly from his original conception, ultimately subordinating the existence of the “crime of crimes” to the convergence of precise constitutive elements: the actus reus – the implementation of specific conducts , including the killing of members of the group and the infliction of serious bodily or mental harm upon them – and the mens rea or dolus specialis, namely the specific intent to destroy a given group, in whole or in part, as such. The drafting process and the departure from Lemkin’s original conception were not only the result of geopolitical compromises in a time still heavily characterized by colonialism, but they also inevitably imposed severe interpretative constraints and structural limitations on the Convention itself. In order to preserve its symbolic status, the crime of genocide was carefully delimited within legal boundaries that restricted the applicability of the Convention and, consequently, its preventive and punitive capacity. These constraints are mainly due to the limitation of the actus reus to specific conducts which, by focusing on immediate episodes of massacre, struggle to fully encapsulate long-term eliminatory dynamics and permanent oppressive structures. Furthermore, another fundamental limitation of the Convention is linked to the excessive rigidity required in proving the dolus specialis, which often acts as an obstacle to the determination of the existence of genocide, thereby rendering  the prevention and punishment of crime nearly impossible. Therefore, after a careful analysis of the structural limitations of the Convention, this study aims to overcome such boundaries by broadening the horizon of the legal paradigm through the retrieval of Raphael Lemkin’s original holistic conception. In his seminal work, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, the Polish jurist did not limit genocide to the mere and instantaneous massacre of a population; rather, he proposed a significantly broader concept, defining genocide as a “coordinated plan of different actions aimed at the destruction of the essential foundations of life of national groups”. According to Lemkin, genocide can be articulated across a plurality of dimensions, including political, social and cultural aspects. It is precisely on the basis of the Lemkinian matrix that this analysis proposed to overcome the mainstream conception of genocide contained in the 1948 Convention, reconceptualizing this crime not as a time-bound event, but rather as a structured and incremental process. Thanks to such a reconceptualization, the extermination of the Palestinian people assumes the legal status of genocide. This international crime, however, does not remain confined to the military escalation following October 7, but can be characterized as an incremental genocide which has been carried – through settler-colonial strategies of dominance aimed at the systematic erosion of the material conditions of survival – at least since 1948. The genocide of the native population of Palestine has thus been realized – and continues to this day – through a prolonged temporal trajectory, where the military violence of recent years is nothing but the climax of a persistent structural system of oppression and physical and cultural elimination.

The Engineering of Annihilation

The launch of the military operation Iron Swords in the immediate aftermath of October 7, 2023, triggered an unprecedented escalation of violence. Although the oppression and progressive elimination of the Palestinian population have been underway for decades, the scale and magnitude of Israeli violence following October 7 have been unprecedented, removing any doubt regarding the illegitimacy of the Israeli government's actions. Even though the State of Israel invoked the right to self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter to justify its military operation in the Gaza Strip, the intensity of the bombings, the systemic disproportion in the use of force, and the deliberate and systematic failure to distinguish between civil and military objectives completely delegitimized the Israeli attacks, placing them beyond the boundaries of International Humanitarian Law. The conduct of the Israeli military (IDF) responds instead to the eliminatory logic of settler colonialism that has underpinned the entire history of the Jewish State. The practices of the Israeli army precisely reflect at least four of the five prohibited acts listed in Article II of the Convention, namely: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. For the purposes of this study, and specifically to demonstrate the existence of an incremental genocide, a thorough analysis of Israeli practices compatible with paragraph (c) of Article II of the Convention was conducted. In particular, the analysis focused on two strategic directions of the Israeli military's practices: the Weaponization of Infrastructure and the Weaponization of Hunger. Regarding the weaponization of infrastructure, through the systematic application of the Dahiya Doctrine—a military strategy that theorizes the intentional use of asymmetric and disproportionate force against civilian infrastructure and inhabitants to punish the population and inflict a heavy blow as a form of deterrence—the IDF has aimed at destroying the essential foundations of Palestinian survival. A clear example of the adoption of such a strategy is the systematic and deliberate attack on the healthcare system of the Gaza Strip. Indeed, Israeli forces have not only deliberately arrested, killed, and tortured Palestinian medical personnel, but have also systematically bombed all hospitals in the Strip and the vast majority of other healthcare facilities. The destruction of these purely civilian targets, which are fundamental for the survival of the Palestinian people, did not respond to military necessities relative to the neutralization of enemy positions; rather, it once again responded to the eliminatory logic which characterizes the Jewish State and the theo-political apparatus supporting it. As for the weaponization of hunger, Israel has inflicted an engineered starvation on the civilian population through the imposition of a "total siege" and the near-total elimination of humanitarian aid. The combination of the weaponization of infrastructure and the weaponization of hunger has also contributed to the spread of infectious diseases, integrating a deliberate method of slow extermination. This – among many other things – proves that the real objective of Operation Iron Sword is not the destruction of Hamas, but rather the geographical eradication and the physical and cultural elimination of the Palestinian population.

The Anatomy of Intent

Once the existence of the actus reus has been established, the diriment element from a legal perspective to determine the occurrence of the crime of genocide lies in proving the mens rea, namely the specific intent to destroy the Palestinian people. While the proof of intent can be inferred from the systematic nature of the attacks against the civilian population, the exceptionality of the case examined here lies in the explicit, public, and reiterated nature of Israeli institutional rhetoric. Indeed, the statements made by Israeli political and military authorities are constitutive of a manifest genocidal State policy. The genocidal intent can thus be deduced from the systematic dehumanization of the Palestinian people and the systematic invocation of total destruction , also through the biblical archetype of Amalek—the divine command to exterminate every member of the enemy population. Far from being an isolated metaphor, this archetype is repeatedly evoked, ultimately constituting a precise operational as well as ideological code. The sacralization of extermination does not remain a rhetorical matter; it is received by Israeli forces, internalized, and used to justify genocidal practices. The convergence of eliminatory practices against the civilian population and an overtly genocidal rhetoric provides the legal elements necessary to determine the existence of a genocide against the Palestinian population. Furthermore, as these eliminatory practices do not constitute an aberration of recent years but have unfolded for decades—albeit with a different scale and magnitude—and given that the same genocidal rhetoric has been intrinsic to the Zionist movement and the authorities of the Jewish State since its foundation, the current crisis inevitably configures itself as the most dramatic manifestation of a structural process of incremental genocide.

Moreover, it is imperative to underscore the absolute lack of accountability and the widespread international political cover that Israel has historically enjoyed and which enabled the undisturbed execution of this decades-long genocidal project. Until the root causes of the conflict will not be addressed – namely until Israel will not be held accountable for the international crimes which it has been committing since its foundation – there will be no peace in the Middle East and no justice for the Palestinian people.