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To what extent has the State of Israel committed a genocide in Gaza ?
Petrella, Lucrezia
Petrella, Lucrezia
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Abstract
The central question this thesis seeks to answer is whether the actions of Israel in the Gaza Strip constitute genocide‚ as defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention․ This leads to the following three sub-questions: 1․ Under what conditions can blockades and sustained deprivation be legally subsumed under the "conditions of life" clause of the Convention? 2) how do settler-colonial legacies pattern the readings of state violence when compared with security explanations? 3) what documentary‚ demographic‚ geospatial and discursive materials can be engaged in making and sustaining a circumstantial case for dolus specialis (specific intent to destroy‚ in whole or in part)? To answer these questions the study adopts an interdisciplinary convergent mixed-methods approach involving legal doctrinal analysis (jurisprudential thresholds of Akayesu‚ ICJ/ICTR judgments) triangulated with five standalone streams of evidence to provide a multidimensional perspective of the evidence spectrum: (1) documentary and policy evidence‚ (2) demographic and public health time series (excess-mortality and health system indicators)‚ (3) high-resolution satellite and geospatial evidence of infrastructure destruction‚ (4) corpus and discourse evidence from elite and media rhetoric‚ (5) trauma-informed interviews and witness evidence․ Comparative calibration with Rwanda (1994)‚ Myanmar/Rohingya (2016-17) and Xinjiang (2010s-) narrows inferential criteria for mens rea and operationalizes fetters on the "conditions of life" frame․ In addition to process-tracing‚ quasi-experimental techniques such as difference-in-differences and synthetic controls are used where applicable to further strengthen causal inference․ Killing large numbers of people and ensuring that large swathes of the civilian population in Gaza are subjected to decades of blockade and bureaucratic strangulation creates cumulative conditions of life deeply detrimental to survival (UN/OCHA‚ WHO‚ NGO‚ satellite imagery reports)․ Mens rea is evidenced by policies with lethal outcomes foreseen‚ administrative normalization of dispossession and depopulationist rhetoric in parts of the political class․ Dolus specialis․ The public evidence does not disclose the internal‚ chain‐of‐command documentary disclosures which are so far the dominant standard of beyond reasonable doubt required by international tribunals․ Insofar as we are aware of‚ the most serious legal characterizations are war crimes‚ crimes against humanity and possibly apartheid․ Genocide remains a fair‚ but unproven‚ inference that still requires further privileged 2 documentary disclosures․ The thesis ends with practical recommendations for prevention; safe forensic documentation; investigative priorities (eg internal communications; authenticated leaks; geospatial & excess-mortality modeling); and an ethical victim-centered response to pursuing future accountability and minimizing the humanitarian impact of future atrocities․
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Master of Arts in International Affairs -- John Cabot University, Spring 2026.
Date
2026
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Genocide, Gaza Strip, Israel-Hamas War, 2023-
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Petrella, Lucrezia. "To what extent has the State of Israel committed a genocide in Gaza ?". Master's Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy. 2026.
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International