LONDON (Dispatches) -- The world’s leading genocide scholars’ association says Israel has met the legal criteria for the crime during its ongoing onslaught in Gaza.
The president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) said on Monday that his organization had passed a resolution that Israel had “engaged in systematic and widespread crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide”.
Eighty-six percent of those who voted among the 500-member International Association of Genocide Scholars backed the resolution, which calls on Israel to “immediately cease all acts that constitute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza”.
There was no immediate response from Israel, which is fighting a case at the International Court of Justice in the Hague that accuses it of genocide.
More than 63,557 Palestinians have been martyred and 160,660 wounded in Gaza since October 2023, when Israel launched its war on Gaza, driving the population into a catastrophic humanitarian crisis.
At least 34 Palestinians were martyred by Israeli forces since dawn on Monday, Al Jazeera Arabic reported. The number included 19 in Gaza City and seven aid seekers. 
Earlier, eight Palestinians were reported killed as Israel conducted airstrikes on homes in Al-Nafaq area and Al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City. 
Last month, famine was officially declared in Gaza following months of severe Israel-enforced food shortages. 
At least 340 people, including 124 children, have died from malnutrition during the genocide, according to the Palestinian health ministry. 
The IAGS resolution said the “deliberate destruction of agricultural fields, food warehouses, and bakeries and other violence that prevents food production, in conjunction with denial and restriction of humanitarian aid, indicate the intentional infliction of unlivable conditions resulting in starvation of Palestinians in Gaza”.
They added that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu endorsed a plan by U.S. President Donald Trump to forcibly expel all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, with no right of return, “in what Navi Pillay, head of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, has said amounts to ethnic cleansing”.