UN’s genocide finding in Gaza seen hampered by ‘serious weakness’ in Security Council

An independent United Nations inquiry commission has concluded Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, but a “serious weakness” in the U.N.’s Security Council could prevent taking action in accord with the Genocide Convention, said Father Elias D. Mallon, special assistant to the president of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association-Pontifical Mission.

Founded in 1926 by Pope Pius XI, CNEWA  — which serves the church in the Middle East, India, North Africa and Eastern Europe — has seen its mission expanded by successive popes to include assistance to all vulnerable peoples throughout the Middle East.

On Sept. 16, the U.N.’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, announced in a press release that its new report found “Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces committed four of the five genocidal acts defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”

In a Sept. 16 statement, Israel’s foreign ministry said that the nation “categorically rejects the distorted and false report,” which it said “relies entirely on Hamas falsehoods,” and called for the “immediate abolition” of the commission.

Citing the convention, the commission said those specific acts were “killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the Palestinians in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births.”

The fifth act named in the convention, “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group,” was not invoked, since the commission said in its report there was “no evidence” of such “at this time.” 

The commission, established in May 2021, based its legal conclusion primarily on findings from reports it has published since the start of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas forces invaded Israel, killing some 1,200 Israelis and abducting 251 hostages. To date, more than 62,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry. 

“The Commission finds that Israel is responsible for the commission of genocide in Gaza,” said commission chair Navi Pillay in the Sept. 16 press release. “It is clear that there is an intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza through acts that meet the criteria set forth in the Genocide Convention.”

The commission also said that “the events in Gaza since 7 October 2023 have not occurred in isolation,” but were “were preceded by decades of unlawful occupation and repression under an ideology requiring the removal of the Palestinian population from their lands and its replacement.” 

But while “there is no question” that the Genocide Convention is “crucial in the world today,” its “practical impact” remains “limited by one of the major weaknesses — if not the major weakness — of the United Nations in general: its inability to enforce,” Father Mallon, a Franciscan Friar of the Atonement, said in an analysis posted Sept. 17 to CNEWA’s website.

He noted that the term “genocide” had been coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin — a Polish Jewish jurist who lost 49 members of his own family in the Shoah (the preferred Hebrew term for the Holocaust) — to describe what had previously been, as the U.K.’s World War II Prime Minister Winston Churchill said, “a crime without a name.”

Lemkin’s creation of the legal term, along with the United Nations’ 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide — which 153 nations, including the U.S., have so far ratified — “came at a point in human history where technology has made genocide easier and more murderously effective than ever before,” said Father Mallon.

“Weapons of mass destruction and modern technology make mass killings easier and less costly for the perpetrators,” he wrote. “If we are honest, the difference between a ‘surgical strike’ and genocide is at times little more than the size of the group the attacker wants ‘excised.'”

Father Mallon also underscored that the convention, as its name denotes, “stresses prevention and punishment,” as “a clear indication the convention does not go into effect only after the crime of genocide has been committed.”

In fact, he pointed out, Article III of the convention lists as punishable acts not only the actual commission of genocide, but the very attempt to do so, as well as conspiracy to commit genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, and complicity in genocide. 

Yet while “signatories to the convention are obliged to prosecute and punish genocide that is clearly defined in international law and treaty obligations,” said Father Mallon, “since the publication of the convention, there have, nevertheless, been egregious examples of what would be considered genocide, such as the Khmer Rouge in southeast Asia, multiple examples in Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East, including a growing consensus in the international community that what is happening in Gaza constitutes genocide.”

In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” Samantha Power — former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and former administrator of the now-shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development — said such post-convention atrocities have largely and historically met with collective apathy on the part of the U.S., since “no U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence.” 

In his analysis, Father Mallon quoted the Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who said Sept. 11 that several European priests and bishops who had signed a document describing the Gaza situation as genocide “probably found, in what is happening, elements to apply that definition.” 

“We — for the moment — have not done so yet,” said the cardinal, adding, “This remains to be seen. It is necessary to study; the conditions must be exactly met in order to make such a statement.”

Still, said Father Mallon, the 15-member U.N. Security Council — which is “the only U.N. body that can legally use coercive force against a member state” — is hobbled by a “serious weakness” among its five permanent members (China, France, Russia, the U.K. and the U.S.), each of whom have “the total and absolute right of veto.”

“There is no mechanism to override such a veto,” said Father Mallon. “It is not unheard of for a 14-1 resolution being stopped in its tracks by such a veto.”

He warned, “With the advances of artificial intelligence and modern weaponry, the real test of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide is how to implement an effective and enforceable policy inhibiting one party from extinguishing another.”

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