Gaza is not Auschwitz.

Palestinians are not the Jews of 1940s Europe.

Israel is not Nazi Germany.

The gas chambers, the trains, the ghettos, the machinery built to annihilate six million Jews belong to a specific history, and that history’s singularity deserves protection.

Fine. Say that plainly, and a harder question is still sitting there afterward: why did the world spend 80 years cataloguing the mechanisms that precede mass atrocity, if noticing those same mechanisms — dehumanization, starvation, forced displacement, the deliberate destruction of the conditions of life — somewhere else is treated as an act of bad faith rather than an act of recognition?

Nobody is asking for an equivalence. What follows is closer to an inventory: what international bodies, Israel’s own human-rights organizations, and scholars who built entire careers studying the Holocaust have independently concluded about Gaza, set alongside the record of who spent two years making sure none of it changed anything.

What the Lawyers Say Coldly

In September 2025, the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israeli authorities had committed four of the five acts defined as genocidal under the 1948 Convention, and that they had done so with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.¹ South Africa’s case at the ICJ, filed in December 2023, has since produced three rounds of binding provisional measures — 26 January, 28 March, 24 May 2024 — with which, Pretoria says, Israel has repeatedly failed to comply; its latest dossier, filed 25 August 2026, puts the toll at over 73,000 killed, and states that a Palestinian child has been killed on average every day since the October 2025 ceasefire.² Amnesty International arrived at the same word in December 2024.³

Then, in July 2025, two Israeli organizations — B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights–Israel — reached it too, independently, for the first time in either group’s history.⁴ The International Association of Genocide Scholars followed a month later.⁵ Israel calls the whole record biased. It does not need Israel’s permission to be true.

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Scenes from Sheikh Radwan clinic after Israeli troops opened fire on Palestinians seeking aid near the Zikim crossing, July 20, 2025. (Abdel Qader Sabbah/Israelpalestinenews.org)

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When the Historians of the Holocaust Start Using the Word

Omer Bartov did not arrive here quickly. The Brown University historian of Nazi mass violence, and a former IDF officer, wrote in November 2023 that the evidence did not yet meet the threshold for genocide.⁶ Then Israel invaded Rafah in May 2024, displacing a million people who had already been displaced, and something in his assessment gave way. By July 2025, writing again in the New York Times, his conclusion had lost all its earlier hedging: genocide.⁷ He is worth reading precisely because he resisted the word for as long as he could — which is exactly why, once he stopped resisting it, the word carries more weight coming from him than from almost anyone shouting it from the outset.

The Gallows, and the Man Standing Before Them

Image: Itamar Ben Gvir

Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, has called for killing “30 to 40” people a night in Gaza — people, he said, who “shouldn’t live.”⁸ In August 2026 he filmed himself in front of a gallows under construction, and promised viewing booths so families could watch the hangings.⁹ Weeks after that, ahead of Israel’s October elections, came an AI-generated campaign video, posted and then quietly deleted: Palestinian prisoners moving down a conveyor belt, fed at one end, emaciated by the other, captioned “we promised — we delivered.”¹⁰ The same weekend he mocked women prisoners who said they had gone three days without washing.¹¹ Nobody made him publish any of it.

Israel’s civilian courts have carried out exactly one execution in the state’s history. Adolf Eichmann, hanged in 1962 — an exception built, deliberately, to remain an exception.¹² Then, on 11 May 2026, the Knesset voted 93 to 0 to create a military tribunal empowered to execute Palestinians tied to 7 October, legislation that Adalah, HaMoked and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel say guarantees no fair trial.¹³ The Palestinians who may eventually hang there are not Eichmann, and each of their cases will have to be judged on its own evidence — that much has to be said plainly, or the comparison collapses into slander instead of argument. But the only man Israel’s courts have ever executed organized a genocide, and the gallows now rising are meant for members of another people whom a state has placed outside the protection of ordinary law. That is not a legal point. It reads more like a confession, built in concrete.

There is no arithmetic that weighs six million murdered Jews against Gaza’s dead, and none is offered here — a Palestinian infant does not need to equal Auschwitz statistically for that death to matter. After 1945, humanity did not draft a convention titled Never Again Auschwitz. It wrote one that protects human groups, as such, wherever they are. That inheritance was never meant to belong to one people’s memory alone.

Smotrich, Netanyahu, and the Map That Answers the Question

Image: Bezalel Smotrich (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

In May 2025, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said Gaza would be “totally destroyed,” its population concentrated and then pushed toward “third countries.”¹⁴ Three months later, unveiling the E1 settlement project that cuts the West Bank in two, his own office described the plan, in writing, as “burying the idea of a Palestinian state.”¹⁵ Netanyahu has said much the same thing more plainly still — as recently as August 2026, that no Palestinian state will exist west of the Jordan for as long as he governs.¹⁶ And while Gaza was being leveled, the West Bank was not standing still: settlers there recorded more than 1,380 attacks in the first seven months of 2026 alone.¹⁷ On 1 September, they tried to set fire to part of the Nur al-Din Zanki Mosque near Nablus and left graffiti taunting the US ambassador for calling their violence terrorism.¹⁸ That same week, former senior Israeli officials told the New York Times that unchecked settler violence now reminded them of Germany in the 1930s.¹⁹ Not their critics said that. They did.

The Architects of Impunity

None of this happened in isolation, and it did not happen because four governments failed to notice. It happened because four governments made sure it could.

Start with Washington, since the numbers there are the largest. The United States has vetoed at least six Security Council resolutions demanding a Gaza ceasefire since October 2023, the only permanent member to block every single one.²⁰ Brown University’s Costs of War project put US military support to Israel at $22.76 billion between October 2023 and September 2024 alone — and that figure does not include the emergency-authority weapons transfers that routinely bypass ordinary congressional review.²¹ This was never a failure to intervene. Financing, arming, and vetoing the one body that could have ordered a halt: that is not passivity, whatever language gets used to describe it afterward.

Germany’s role is smaller in scale but sharper in its particular shame. In April 2024, as Israel’s second-largest arms supplier, it told the ICJ that its exports had sharply declined and that there was no evidence any of it had been used to commit genocide.²² Internal defense ministry documents surfaced later showing Berlin had coordinated that testimony with Israel in advance, and had withheld from the Court data it later admitted existed.²³ Between October 2023 and May 2025, Germany approved €485 million in military exports to Israel — ten times what it had approved before the war began.²⁴ A country that built its entire postwar identity on the vow of “never again” walked into the world’s highest court and gave an account that its own subsequent disclosures have since seriously called into question.

Britain’s contribution took a different shape: not denial, but a loophole drafted in plain sight. Its own Foreign Secretary concluded, in July 2024, that Israel was not complying with international humanitarian law. Five weeks later, London suspended thirty arms licenses — while carving out, explicitly, the F-35 components that keep Israel’s air force flying, on the stated grounds that withholding them would risk “global peace and security.”²⁵ Two separate courts have since declined even to examine whether that carve-out was lawful, ruling it a matter for the executive alone.²⁶ The government found the violation, named who committed it, and then signed the exemption that let the part keep shipping anyway.

France’s version is quieter still, and in some ways the most instructive, because it costs nothing to perform. Paris recognized a Palestinian state in September 2025. In the same period, its own investigative journalists were documenting, month after month, continuing shipments of French-made drone and weapons components to Israeli military suppliers — shipments French ministers denied, on the record, in parliament.²⁷ Recognition is free. A halted export license is not. France reached for the first and left the second untouched.

Four governments, four separate methods, one shared outcome: each could have suspended its own contribution, at some real cost to itself, and each instead found a way to look like it had acted without accepting the full cost of doing so.

What 7 October Does Not Authorize

The massacre of Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023 was a crime. So was the taking of hostages. Nothing converts either into something acceptable, and nothing here is meant to suggest otherwise. But no crime licenses the next one — international law exists for exactly the moments when rage makes people want to believe it should not, or it exists for nothing at all. Self-defense does not suspend the Genocide Convention. It does not suspend the humanity of whoever is being destroyed underneath its name.

What Gaza Asks of the Memory of the Holocaust

Gaza is not Auschwitz. That sentence is where honest thought about this should begin, not where it’s allowed to end. What survives across every case of mass atrocity is a narrower and older question: at what point does a society — and the allies willing to arm it — decide that another group deserves less territory, less food, less protection, and finally less claim to being alive at all. Satellites recorded the buildings falling. Agencies counted the dead. Ministers announced their intentions on camera, repeatedly, without much concern for how it would read later. Foreign ministries signed the export licenses anyway. None of the governments that financed this, armed it, or vetoed its end will be able to say, credibly, that they did not know.

Serious historians warn that hasty analogies to Nazism can flatten an argument rather than sharpen it, and that the Holocaust’s continent-wide, industrial character makes any transposition imprecise; Benny Morris has argued that the Armenian and Assyrian genocides are the closer twentieth-century parallel.²⁸ Israel rejects the genocide finding outright, describing its campaign as self-defense following the deadliest single attack on Jews since 1945.²⁹ Those objections deserve to be heard, and they answer a real question — whether “genocide” and “Nazism” are, technically, the correct words. What they do not answer is whether Gaza meets the threshold the world set for itself in 1948, a question a UN commission, leading Israeli human-rights organizations, and some of the Holocaust’s own historians have already answered, while their governments kept the weapons moving regardless. It may not be the memory of Auschwitz that gets betrayed by asking whether it applies here. It is being betrayed, right now, by everyone holding both the evidence and the leverage, and choosing to use neither.

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Laala Bechetoula is an independent Algerian historian, journalist, and geopolitical analyst. He has been writing on Trump, American hegemony, and the collapse of the international order since 2025. His work appears in Countercurrents, Global Research, Réseau International, Le Quotidien d’Oran, Sri Lanka Guardian, and other international platforms. This article integrates and crowns a corpus of analytical work produced between November 2025 and April 13, 2026.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Notes

[1] OHCHR, “Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN Commission finds,” 16 Sept. 2025: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds

[2] ICJ, Application of the Genocide Convention in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), provisional-measures orders of 26 Jan., 28 Mar. and 24 May 2024: https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192; South Africa, Department of International Relations and Cooperation, “South Africa submits dossier to the ICJ on Israel’s non-compliance with Provisional Measures Orders,” 28 Aug. 2026 (dossier submitted 25 Aug. 2026): https://dirco.gov.za/south-africa-submits-dossier-to-the-icj-on-israels-non-compliance-with-provisional-measures-orders/

[3] Amnesty International, “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman,” Dec. 2024.

[4] B’Tselem, “Our Genocide,” 28 July 2025: https://www.btselem.org/press_releases/20250728_our_genocide

[5] International Association of Genocide Scholars resolution, Aug. 2025.

[6] Omer Bartov, New York Times, 10 Nov. 2023.

[7] Omer Bartov, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It,” New York Times, July 2025.

[8] Peter Beaumont, “Israel’s Ben-Gvir posts video of gallows site for hanging Palestinians,” The Guardian, 20 Aug. 2026: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/20/israel-ben-gvir-video-gallows-site-hanging-palestinians

[9] Peter Beaumont, “Israel’s Ben-Gvir posts video of gallows site for hanging Palestinians,” The Guardian, 20 Aug. 2026 (as above).

[10] CNN, “Israel’s crowded far-right grows more extreme as elections near,” 31 Aug. 2026.

[11] Times of Israel, 30 Aug. 2026.

[12] Israel State Archives, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, 1961-1962; Eichmann was executed on 31 May 1962.

[13] Adalah, “Israeli Knesset passed the Tribunal Law, establishing a military tribunal lacking fair trial guarantees empowered to sentence Palestinians to death,” 12 May 2026: https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/11609

[14] Times of Israel, “Smotrich says Gaza to be ‘totally destroyed,'” 6 May 2025.

[15] CNN, “Israel’s West Bank settlement plan could ‘bury’ the prospect of a Palestinian state,” 14 Aug. 2025.

[16] Middle East Monitor, 23 Aug. 2026.

[17] OCHA report, 31 July 2026, cited in Law News, “West Bank Settler Violence Displaces Thousands as Fatalities Rise in 2026.”

[18] AFP, “Israeli settlers try to torch West Bank mosque, Palestinians say,” L’Orient Today, 1 Sept. 2026: https://today.lorientlejour.com/article/1546235/israeli-settlers-try-to-torch-west-bank-mosque-palestinians-say.html

[19] Times of Israel liveblog, 1 Sept. 2026, citing New York Times reporting.

[20] Middle East Eye, “The 49 times the US used veto power against UN resolutions on Israel,” Nov. 2024; Security Council Report and TRT World, Sept. 2025, on the sixth Gaza-ceasefire veto.

[21] Brown University, Costs of War, “United States Spending on Israel’s Military Operations and Related U.S. Operations in the Region, October 7, 2023-September 30, 2024,” 7 Oct. 2024: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2024/USspendingIsrael

[22] ICJ, Summary of the Order of 30 April 2024, Nicaragua v. Germany: https://www.icj-cij.org/node/203998

[23] Dropsite News, “Exclusive: Germany Coordinated ICJ Testimony on Arms Exports With Israel,” Oct. 2025: https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/exclusive-germany-coordinated-icj-testimony-israel-arms-genocide

[24] Reuters/dpa, “Germany approved €485m in arms exports to Israel since October 2023,” 2025.

[25] UK Human Rights Blog, “Challenge to export of military parts that might be used by Israel fails in the High Court,” July 2025; The Political Quarterly, “Why the UK Government was Taken to Court Over Arms Sales to Israel.”

[26] AOAV, “Court of Appeal rejects Al-Haq’s challenge over UK arms exports to Israel,” Nov. 2025.

[27] Disclose.ngo, “Arms sales: delivery of French equipment in Israel imminent,” Oct. 2025; Middle East Eye, “New report accuses France of ‘continuously’ delivering military equipment to Israel,” June 2025.

[28] Benny Morris, review of Omer Bartov, Quillette, 20 July 2026.

[29] Israel Foreign Ministry response to the UN Commission of Inquiry, Sept. 2025.

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