PARIS: Amnesty International on Tuesday accused Israel of committing a “live-streamed genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza by forcibly displacing most of the population and deliberately creating a humanitarian catastrophe.
In its annual report, Amnesty charged that Israel had acted with “specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, thus committing genocide.”
Israel has rejected accusations of “genocide” from Amnesty, other rights groups and some states in its war in Gaza.
The conflict erupted after the Palestinian militant group Hamas’s deadly October 7, 2023 attacks inside Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Militants also abducted 251 people, 58 of whom are still held in Gaza, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel in response launched a relentless bombardment of the Gaza Strip and a ground operation that according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory has left at least 52,243 dead.
“Since 7 October 2023, when Hamas perpetrated horrific crimes against Israeli citizens and others and captured more than 250 hostages, the world has been made audience to a live-streamed genocide,” Amnesty’s secretary general Agnes Callamard said in the introduction to the report.
“States watched on as if powerless, as Israel killed thousands upon thousands of Palestinians, wiping out entire multigenerational families, destroying homes, livelihoods, hospitals and schools,” she added.
Gaza’s civil defense agency said early Tuesday that four people were killed and others injured in an Israeli air strike on displaced persons’ tents near the Al-Iqleem area in Southern Gaza.
The agency earlier warned fuel shortages meant it had been forced to suspend eight out of 12 emergency vehicles in Southern Gaza, including ambulances.
The lack of fuel “threatens the lives of hundreds of thousands of citizens and displaced persons in shelter centers,” it said in a statement.
Amnesty’s report said the Israeli campaign had left most of the Palestinians of Gaza “displaced, homeless, hungry, at risk of life-threatening diseases and unable to access medical care, power or clean water.”
Amnesty said that throughout 2024 it had “documented multiple war crimes by Israel, including direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects, and indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks.”
It said Israel’s actions forcibly displaced 1.9 million Palestinians, around 90 percent of Gaza’s population, and “deliberately engineered an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe.”
Even as protesters hit the streets in Western capitals, “the world’s governments individually and multilaterally failed repeatedly to take meaningful action to end the atrocities and were slow even in calling for a ceasefire.”
Meanwhile, Amnesty also sounded alarm over Israeli actions in the occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank, and repeated an accusation that Israel was employing a system of “apartheid.”
“Israel’s system of apartheid became increasingly violent in the occupied West Bank, marked by a sharp increase in unlawful killings and state-backed attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinian civilians,” it said.
Heba Morayef, Amnesty director for the Middle East and North Africa region, denounced “the extreme levels of suffering that Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to endure on a daily basis over the past year” as well as “the world’s complete inability or lack of political will to put a stop to it.”

RABAT: A major power outage in Spain and Portugal on Monday disrupted Orange Maroc Internet services in Morocco, the subsidiary of the French telecoms giant announced.
In a statement, the company said “the disruption to our Internet network is due to a widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal.”
It said the blackout had “impacted international connections.”
Other Internet providers such as Maroc Telecom and Inwi have not issued any statements regarding potential disruptions.
Moroccan authorities have also not reported any impacts on the North African country resulting from the blackout.
At 12:30 p.m. (1030 GMT), power went out across Spain and Portugal, causing widespread disruptions to mobile networks, Internet service and railroad operations.
With stoplights knocked out, road traffic was also halted.
Spain said it was working to determine the cause of the blackout, with Portugal saying the entire Iberian peninsula was affected. Southwest France also briefly saw cuts, its high-voltage grid operator said.
Orange Maroc’s statement came hours later, around 1520 GMT.
In neighboring Algeria, the Ministry of Telecommunications also warned of potential Internet service interruptions due to the outage.
At 1330 GMT, it said disruptions could occur “in the upcoming hours,” but none have been reported yet.