JERUSALEM – After an independent United Nations inquiry has concluded for the first time that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, the heads of more than 20 aid agencies have called on world leaders to “urgently intervene” in the war in the devastated territory.

With an estimated 65,000 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks so far in Gaza, including more than 20,000 children, the agencies warned early on Wednesday that almost 1 million more people are now “on the precipice of an even deadlier period in Gaza’s story if action is not taken”.

“The inhumanity of the situation in Gaza is unconscionable,” the groups said in a joint statement, warning that Israel’s latest efforts to forcibly displace Gaza City’s population through a ground occupation are aimed at making the enclave’s largest urban area “deliberately... uninhabitable”.

“As humanitarian leaders, we have borne direct witness to the horrifying deaths and suffering of the people of Gaza. Our warnings have gone unheeded and thousands more lives are still at stake,” the agencies said.

“More than half a million people are starving. Famine has been declared and is spreading. The cumulative impact of hunger and physical deprivation means people are dying every day,” they said.

Despite the well-documented horrors that have unfolded for almost two years under Israel’s siege of the Palestinian territory and enforced starvation of the enclave’s civilian population as they try to survive under military fire, “world leaders fail to act”.

“States must use every available political, economic, and legal tool at their disposal to intervene. Rhetoric and half measures are not enough. This moment demands decisive action,” the aid groups said.

“History will undoubtedly judge this moment as a test of humanity,” they said, adding that UN members must take action, or their “complicity” will set a “dangerous precedent for the future”.

Christopher Lockyear, a signatory to the joint statement and the secretary-general of Doctors Without Borders, known by its French acronym MSF, said on Monday that Israel’s military onslaught in Gaza amounts to “the systematic destruction of a people”.

MSF is clear, Lockyear said: “Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and doing so with absolute impunity.”

“The Israeli military has attacked everything and everyone in Gaza,” he added.

Signatories to the statement also include Islamic Relief Worldwide, ActionAid International, CARE International, Handicap International, Save the Children International, the Norwegian Refugee Council and Médecins du Monde.

In a 72-page report released on Tuesday, the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which was set up by the UN Human Rights Council (HRC), found that Israel has “committed four genocidal acts” in the enclave since October 7, 2023, when Hamas carried out deadly attacks on Israel and Israel launched its military campaign.

These acts include the killing of Palestinians in Gaza, causing Palestinians “serious bodily and mental harm,” “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” and “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group,” the report said.

Navi Pillay, the chairwoman of the commission, said the world body had determined that Israel was carrying out genocide in Gaza. Among those most responsible, based on their own statements, for the genocide were Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant and President Isaac Herzog, Pillay said.

Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs took to social media to call the report’s findings “fake” and accused the authors of “serving as Hamas proxies”.

Next week at the UN General Assembly in New York, the United Kingdom, France, Australia, Canada and others are due to join the majority of UN members by recognising the sovereignty of an independent Palestinian state.

The move will be more than symbolic. It will change the debate about the future of the conflict that began more than a century ago when Zionist Jews from Europe came to settle in Palestine. – Agencies