From Occupation to Genocide: Bridging the UN 2025 Gaza Report and the ICJ’s 2024 Advisory Opinion on the Occupied Palestinian Territories

Introduction

The genocide in Gaza, as found by the UN Commission of Inquiry in 2025, cannot be understood in isolation but must be situated within the long-standing illegality of Israel's occupation as determined by the ICJ in its 2024 Advisory Opinion.

The Commission of Inquiry

On 16 September 2025, the UN's independent International Commission of Inquiry (Commission) published a paper Legal analysis of the conduct of Israel in Gaza pursuant to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, wherein it concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. This is the UN's most authoritative pronouncement to date: it does not contemplate 'plausible genocide'; it does not warn of 'risk of genocide'; it unequivocally confirms Israel's commission of genocide.

Over 72 pages, the body of experts finds that Israeli forces committed four out of the five genocidal acts defined in Article II of the Genocide Convention: (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; and (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. It does so by examining detailed evidence of the pattern of conduct by Israeli forces, highlighting that 83% of those killed in Gaza are civilians and almost half of that are women and children (para 21). Moreover, the report documents the deliberate destruction of hospitals, attacks on aid workers, and the use of starvation as a method of warfare, all of which it identifies as calculated acts to bring about the destruction of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. In its conclusion, the Commission finds that the only reasonable inference that could be drawn based on this pattern of conduct is genocidal intent, and that the statements made by the Israeli authorities are direct evidence of genocidal intent (para 220).

The report comes nearly two years after the start of the genocide in Gaza and adds to a growing body of scholarship warning that it is taking place, including the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups, credible international organisations, and countless other experts and scholars.

The Role of the International Court of Justice

The Commission's report comes in the context of the ongoing South Africa v Israel case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). In fact, the report refers to Israel's repeated refusal to comply with the urgent provisional measures ordered by the ICJ as additional proof that the intent of the Israel's leadership is genocidal (para 195). The Commission's report does not engage at length with the ICJ's July 2024 Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, but I argue that the finding of genocide must be situated within the broader context of Israel's illegal occupation of Palestine.

In the Advisory Opinion, the ICJ analyses the unlawful Israeli policies and practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), finding a series of violations of International Humanitarian and Human Rights Law, specifically with regards to Israel's settlement policy, annexation/acquisition of territory by force, Israel's discriminatory legislation, and the denial of the Palestinian peoples' right to self-determination.

One of the most important points in the Advisory Opinion is the Court's move from identifying specific violations of international law to declaring the occupation itself illegal. The Court ultimately frames the occupation, and not just particular practices or conduct, as an unlawful act that must be terminated (para 261). This is a legally significant, though it divided the Court and drew critiques over ambiguities in the reasoning.

Reading the two together: The continuum of occupation, apartheid, and genocide

The differences between the Advisory Opinion and the Commission's report are evident. The temporal scope of the report is limited to events that have taken place after 7 October 2023, and its territorial scope is the Gaza Strip. On the other hand, the Advisory Opinion does not overtly limit itself to a temporal scope, but it specifically does not include conduct by Israel in Gaza following 7 October 2023. Thus we have a clear dividing line as to temporal scope. The territorial scope of the Advisory Opinion also differs from the Commission: the Court's analysis is of the entire OPT as a single territorial unit including Gaza (para 78 but note the has been criticised for its ambiguous approach).

Nevertheless, reading the two landmark findings together reveals a continuum of illegality that ultimately foresaw genocide (or as others called it, incremental genocide). Put simply, the long-standing illegal occupation identified in the Advisory Opinion provided the conditions and mechanisms from which the Commission later found genocide to have emerged.

The Advisory Opinion shows how Israel's prolonged, illegal occupation produced an environment of severe humanitarian law and human rights violations that, left unaddressed, risked further grave breaches of international law. The Opinion depicts the 57 year-long context wherein Israel's military occupation grew into systematic oppression, characterised by discriminatory laws, land expropriation, violent subjugation, and gross human rights abuses. The restrictions on movement, food, and medicine, systemic discrimination, and land grabs, violated the obligations of the occupying power under international law, but moreover created conditions of life that, arguably, threaten the survival of the Palestinian population. These are the same conditions that led UN experts, even before 7 October 2023, to repeatedly call for the end of the 'intentionally acquisitive, segregationist and repressive settler-colonial occupation', considering it is a condition sine qua non for Palestinian right to self‑determination, and more broadly, for the realisation of Palestinian rights altogether. It is within this continuum of violation that the escalation towards genocide happened.

The Court's conceptualisation of apartheid further shows the trajectory of escalation. While the Advisory Opinion itself refrains from explicitly labelling Israel's conduct as apartheid, it does find systemic discrimination and unlawful segregation under Article 3 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Some of the judges' Separate Opinions, however, go further than the majority of the Court did. President Salam declared that Israel's regime of domination over Palestinians is 'tantamount to apartheid,' while Judge Tladi drew explicit parallels with South African apartheid, pointing to the intentional separation and subjugation of Palestinians in nearly all aspects of life. These assessments add to tracing the continuum from prolonged occupation to systemic apartheid and laying the foundations for genocide.

The genocide in Gaza happening today is the final point of Israel's longstanding continuum of international law violations. As the Commission points out, the genocide in Gaza must not be considered in isolation, but as a continuum of dehumanisation and oppression inherent in the settler-colonial logic. In paragraph 178 of the report, the Commission notes: '[T]hese events in Gaza since October 2023 have not occurred in isolation. They were preceded by decades of unlawful occupation and unlawful settlement, with racial segregation or apartheid, under an ideology requiring the removal of the Palestinian population from their lands and their replacement.'

The trajectory from subjugation to eradication connects the illegality of the occupation to the crime of genocide. The Commission recognised the crime of genocide as arising from the policies and practices that the ICJ found to be illegal occupation. The occupation created conditions of permanent dehumanisation and normalised them, slowly increasing in severity, ultimately enabling the destruction of the Palestinian population in Gaza over the past two years. Put differently, the almost six decades of occupation, apartheid, and violations of international law inevitably escalated towards genocide. In the words of Raz Segal, 'Israel's attack on Gaza is […] Israeli settler colonialism taken to its horrific conclusion.'

While the ICJ and the Commission are different bodies with different outputs, they converge on the same issue: any lasting peace will not succeed until the underlying illegal situation of occupation and settler-colonialism is resolved. On the contrary, as established, the ongoing occupation in the OPT breeds potential for other atrocity crimes. Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, explicitly ties these findings together, warning that Israel's 'genocide against Palestinians is being sustained by a system of exploitative occupation.' That system itself, the 'forever occupation', is the root illegality, and as such is inseparable from the genocide.

Contextualising the genocide within Israel's broader pattern of conduct preceding 7 October and beyond Gaza (that is, the West Bank and East Jerusalem), leaves us with a terrifying question: What of the Palestinians in the rest of the OPT? Is the genocidal intent of Israel's authorities limited to eradicating Palestinians as a group 'in part', or does it extend to their eradication 'as a whole'? The danger is there, 'preceded by decades of unlawful occupation and repression under an ideology requiring the removal of the Palestinian population from their lands and its replacement' (Commission, para 251). In this light, the genocide in Gaza cannot be understood as an anomaly, but as the culmination of a wider structure of settler-colonialism and domination. Accordingly, international law must grapple not only with accountability for acts already committed, but with the urgent task of dismantling the root causes if further atrocity crimes are to be averted.

Nina Prusac is a PhD researcher at the University of Cambridge and focuses on international human rights law.

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