Five Things to Know About Three Years of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

1. Israel has been carrying out a genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023.

Leading human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Israeli groups like B’Tselem, hundreds of genocide and Holocaust scholars, including the International Association of Genocide Scholars and independent UN experts, have all concluded that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

On September 16, 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, concluded that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

The Commission reiterated in June 2026 that Israel was continuing to commit genocide and other atrocity crimes, including through the targeting of Palestinian children.

Now, despite the so-called US-backed ceasefire which took effect in October 2025, Israel continues to attack the Palestinian enclave, kill Palestinians almost every single day and restrict the entry of aid and goods, including food, medicine, tents, housing and construction materials, fuel, and other humanitarian supplies, denying the population many of the basic necessities of life.

The UN said that Israel has forcibly displaced 90 percent of the population of Gaza, about two million people, from their homes, concentrating most of them along the coast where they’re struggling to survive in desperate, overcrowded, unsanitary conditions under ongoing attack from Israeli forces.

At the same time, the Israeli military continues to take over more and more land in violation of the ceasefire deal, confining Palestinians to an increasingly smaller area while occupying more than 60 percent of the enclave.

2. Israel continues to destroy Gaza to make it uninhabitable so Palestinians have no choice but to flee. 

Israel has been systematically bombing, bulldozing and burning Palestinian neighborhoods and cities and destroy civilian infrastructure  to make Gaza unlivable, seriously damaging or destroying almost every home and other structure, forcing Palestinians to choose between leaving or facing death.

This destruction has continued unabated during the supposed ceasefire.

ICC-wanted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials have openly called for the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.

Israel has set up a governmental body, the “emigration directorate” to oversee the process and say they’re waiting for Trump to give them a green light to implement their plans.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz confirmed that Israel is committed to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza through large-scale migration of Palestinians as part of Israel’s long-term plans for the territory.

Katz said the government would implement a plan for large numbers of Palestinians to leave Gaza “at the right time and in the right manner”.

Katz said the Israeli occupation government is prepared to take Gaza “by sea, by air and by any means to do it”.

3. Israel has killed more than 21,000 Palestinian children in Gaza over the past three years.

The Israeli forces have killed at least 21,638 Palestinian children in Gaza since the start of the genocide, including more than 1,000 babies under the age of one, according ton UN reports and the Palestinian Ministry of Health. This amounts to about 2% of all the children in Gaza. Thousands of others are still missing underneath the rubble and presumed dead.

According to a report released in June 2026 by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory

“Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children, resulting in genocide and atrocity crimes in the Gaza Strip and war crimes in the West Bank.”

4. The actual number of Palestinians killed during the genocide is much higher than the official total.

The official death toll from the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, which stands at more than 74,250 as of October 7, 2026, only includes people who hospitals have identified and officially confirmed to have been killed by Israel. It does not include thousands of others who are missing and presumed dead or those who’ve died from malnutrition, disease, medical conditions that went untreated because of Israel’s siege and destruction of the healthcare system, and other indirect ways.

A November 2025 study by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research estimated the total number of Palestinians killed violently by the Israeli military since October 2023 was between 100,000 and 126,000.