AMSTERDAM (Dispatches) – A growing number of the world’s leading genocide scholars believe that the Zionist regime’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide, according to an investigation by Dutch newspaper NRC. 
The paper interviewed seven renowned genocide researchers from six countries - including those in the Israeli-occupied territories - all of whom described the Zionist regime’s campaign in Gaza as genocidal. Many said their peers in the field share this assessment.
“Can I name someone whose work I respect who does not think it is genocide? No, there is no counterargument that takes into account all the evidence,” Israeli researcher Raz Segal told NRC. 
Professor Ugur Umit Ungor of the University of Amsterdam and NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies said that while there are certainly researchers who say it is not genocide, “I don’t know them”.
The Dutch paper reviewed 25 recent academic articles published in the Journal of Genocide Research, the field’s leading journal, and found that “all eight academics from the field of genocide studies see genocide or at least genocidal violence in Gaza”.
“And that is remarkable for a field in which there is no clarity about what genocide itself exactly is,” it noted. 
Leading human rights organizations have also reached the conclusion that Israel is committing genocide. In December 2024, Amnesty International became the first major organization to conclude that the regime had committed genocide during its war on Gaza, while Human Rights Watch more conservatively concluded that “genocidal acts” had been committed.
Francesca Albanese, the UN’s top expert on Palestine, authored two reports last year suggesting that genocide was taking place in Gaza.
Genocide studies as a discipline does not treat the issue as a binary, the NRC report said. Rather than asking whether genocide has happened or not, scholars see it as a gradual process. 
Ungor compares it to a “dimmer switch” rather than an on-off light. 
“Contrary to public opinion, leading genocide researchers are surprisingly unanimous: the Netanyahu regime, they say, is in that process - according to the majority, even in its final stages,” the investigation concluded. “That is why most researchers no longer speak only of ‘genocidal violence’, but of ‘genocide’.”
The report noted that even researchers who had previously hesitated to use the term have since changed their position, such as Shmuel Lederman of the Open University of Israel. It also referred to the opinion of Canadian international law scholar William Schabas that Israel is committing genocide, although he is considered otherwise conservative with genocide labeling.