DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israel launched strikes across the Gaza Strip on Monday, killing at least 31 people as it presses ahead with a major offensive in the territory’s largest city, according to health officials. Leading genocide scholars, meanwhile, joined other rights groups in accusing Israel of genocide, allegations it vehemently rejects.

Airstrikes and artillery shelling have echoed through Gaza City since Israel declared it a combat zone last week. On the city’s outskirts and in the Jabaliya refugee camp, residents have observed explosive-laden robots demolishing buildings.

“Another merciless night in Gaza City,” said Saeed Abu Elaish, a Jabaliya-born medic sheltering in the northwestern side of the city.

Hospitals in Gaza said at least 31 people were killed by Israeli fire on Monday, more than half of them women and children. At least 13 people were killed in Gaza City, where Israel has carried out several previous large-scale raids since Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel to ignite the war on Oct. 7, 2023.

Israel says it only targets militants and blames Hamas for civilian casualties because the militant group — now largely reduced to a guerrilla organization — operates in densely-populated areas.

Gaza City residents, many displaced by war multiple times, now face the twin threats of combat and hunger. The world’s leading authority on food crises said last month that it was in the throes of famine — a crisis driven by ongoing fighting and Israel’s blockade, magnified by repeated mass displacement and the collapse of food production.

A total of 63,557 Palestinians have been killed in the war, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which says another 160,660 people have been wounded. The ministry doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants in its count, but says women and children make up around half the dead.

The ministry is part of the Hamas-run government but staffed by medical professionals. U.N. agencies and many independent experts consider its figures to be the most reliable estimate of war casualties. Israel disputes them, but hasn’t provided its own toll.

Hamas-led militants killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in the Oct. 7 attack and took 251 people hostage. Forty-eight hostages are still inside Gaza, around 20 of them believed by Israel to be alive, after most of the rest were released in ceasefires or other deals.

The largest professional organization of scholars studying genocide said Monday that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Israel, which was established in the wake of the Holocaust, in which 6 million European Jews and others were killed, vehemently rejects the allegation. It says it takes every measure to avoid harming civilians and is fighting a war of self-defense after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, which Israel says was itself a genocidal act.

The International Association of Genocide Scholars — which has around 500 members worldwide, including a number of Holocaust experts — joined other major human rights organizations, including two Israeli groups, in applying the term to Israel’s wartime conduct.

“Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide,” as well as crimes against humanity and war crimes, according to the group’s resolution, which was supported by 86% of those who voted. The organization didn’t release the specifics of the voting.

“People who are experts in the study of genocide can see this situation for what it is,” Melanie O’Brien, the organization’s president and a professor of international law at the University of Western Australia, told The Associated Press.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry called it “an embarrassment to the legal profession and to any academic standard.” It said the determination was “entirely based on Hamas’ campaign of lies.”

An activist flotilla headed to Gaza that had departed Barcelona was forced back to port after a storm hit parts of Spain overnight.

The Global Sumud Flotilla, consisting of around 20 boats with participants from 44 countries, chose to return and delay its departure to “prioritize safety,” a statement said Monday. The expedition includes the prominent climate campaigner Greta Thunberg, who took part in a previous flotilla that was intercepted in July.

Organizers said that with winds exceeding 56 kph (35 mph), some of the smaller boats taking part in the mission would have been at risk.

The flotilla is the largest attempt yet to symbolically break Israel’s blockade of Gaza. All previous ones have been intercepted at sea by Israeli forces. Israel says the blockade is needed to prevent Hamas from importing arms and that there are multiple other channels for sending aid to Gaza.

Israel has taken steps to further restrict the delivery of food to northern Gaza as it presses ahead with its latest offensive in Gaza City.

Sam Metz reported from Jerusalem, and Samy Magdy from Cairo. Molly Quell in The Hague, Netherlands, and Renata Brito in Barcelona, Spain, contributed to this report.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The largest professional organization of scholars studying genocide said Monday that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

The determination by the International Association of Genocide Scholars — which has around 500 members worldwide, including a number of Holocaust experts — could serve to further isolate Israel in global public opinion and adds to a growing chorus of organizations that have used the term for Israel’s actions in Gaza. Israel rejects the accusation and called the resolution an “embarrassment to the legal profession.”

“Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide,” according to group’s resolution, which was supported by 86% of those who voted. The organization did not release the specifics of the voting.

“People who are experts in the study of genocide can see this situation for what it is,” Melanie O’Brien, the organization’s president and a professor of international law at the University of Western Australia, told The Associated Press.

In the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that sparked the war, Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted 251. Forty-eight hostages remain in Gaza, around 20 of whom Israel believes are alive.

In Israel’s ensuing offensive, large swaths of Gaza have been leveled and most of the territory’s over 2 million people have been displaced. More than 63,000 Palestinians have died, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not say how many were fighters or civilians but that around half have been women and children.

The ministry is part of the Hamas-run government and staffed by medical professionals. The United Nations and independent experts consider it the most reliable source on war casualties. Israel disputes the figures but has not provided its own.

The scholars’ resolution accused Israel of crimes including “indiscriminate and deliberate attacks against the civilians and civilian infrastructure” in Gaza and called on Israel to “ immediately cease all acts that constitute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza.”

It begins with an acknowledgment that Hamas’ attack “constitutes international crimes.”

Genocide was codified in a 1948 convention drawn up after the horrors of the Holocaust that defines it as acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” The U.N. and many Western countries have said only a court can rule on whether the crime has been committed. A case against Israel is before the U.N.’s highest court.

Israel — founded in part as a refuge in the wake of the Holocaust, when some 6 million European Jews were murdered — vehemently denied it is committing genocide.

“The IAGS has set a historic precedent — for the first time, ‘Genocide Scholars’ accuse the very victim of genocide — despite Hamas’s attempted genocide against the Jewish people,” Israel’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “Disgraceful.”

Israel says Hamas is prolonging the war by not surrendering and releasing the hostages. In recent days, it began the initial stages of a new offensive and declared Gaza City a combat zone.

The scholars group, founded in 1994, has previously held that China’s treatment of the minority Muslim Uyghurs and Myanmar’s crackdown on Rohingya Muslims meet the threshold for genocide.

In 2006, the organization said statements by then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in which he called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” had “genocidal intent.”

In July, two prominent Israeli rights groups — B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel — said their country is committing genocide in Gaza. The organizations do not reflect mainstream thinking in Israel, but it marked the first time that local Jewish-led organizations have made such accusations.

International human rights groups have also leveled the allegation.

Meanwhile, South Africa has accused Israel of breaching the Genocide Convention at the International Court of Justice — an allegation Israel rejects.

The court does not have a police force to implement its ruling, which could take years, but if a nation believes another member has failed to comply with an ICJ order, it can report that to the U.N. Security Council.

The council is able to impose sanctions and even authorize military action, but each of the five permanent members holds a veto, including Israel’s staunchest ally, the United States. U.S. President Donald Trump has said he does not believe genocide is taking place.

Two major Israeli human rights groups released separate reports on Monday concluding that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, joining a growing number of international voices that have made similar accusations against the country that has been destroying the Palestinian territory over the last 22 months.

In their comprehensive reports, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights lay out how Israel, as an occupying power, has used its government and military to systematically obliterate Gaza in a way that both destroys the Palestinian people and renders the territory completely uninhabitable.

“We are seeing a combination of genocidal practices – meaning mass killing, starvation and destruction of civilian infrastructure, and you can add destruction of cultural institutions – and a policy whose aim or declared aim is ethnic cleansing, all combined with statements by many senior Israeli officials throughout the war that the goal is destruction of Gazan society as a group,” genocide researcher Shmuel Lederman said in a B’Tselem video announcing the group’s report, “Our Genocide.”

As with previous allegations of genocide, the Israel Defense Forces said Monday that the reports’ claims are “unfounded” and that the Israeli military is rooting out Hamas while “taking unprecedented measures to prevent harm to civilians.”

Both human rights groups have said that wanting to take down Hamas does not justify the mass starvation and killing of Palestinians.

B’Tselem explains that while decades of Israeli occupation and dehumanization of Palestinians set the stage for the current catastrophe, a genocide requires a trigger or rationale — and for the Israeli government and its Western allies, that was Hamas’ attack that killed more than 1,200 people in Israel and took hostage about 250 more on Oct. 7, 2023.

“The trauma fell on fertile ground for the most extreme right-wing government Israel has ever had. A messianic government that believes this is ‘a miraculous time,’” said Sarit Michaeli, the group’s international advocacy director. “It’s simply their chance to advance an agenda.”

Both reports detail the violence by Israeli soldiers and U.S. bombs that has killed more than 55,000 Palestinians — a Gaza Health Ministry figure believed to be a gross undercount — and led to mass starvation, displacement and disease. The Israeli airstrikes, Gaza’s destroyed health system, Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid and mass arrests that have essentially resulted in torture camps reveal an effort to exterminate the Palestinian people, the groups argue.

“Systemic failure became self-reinforcing: displacement led to overcrowding, overcrowding accelerated disease, and disease spread unchecked amid collapsing sanitation,” PHRI said in its report, “A Health Analysis of the Gaza Genocide.”

“The siege deepened this collapse: medical evacuations were halted, crossings were sealed and the little remaining humanitarian aid dried up entirely,” it continued. “Malnourishment surged – especially among children, whose bodies deteriorated rapidly in the absence of food, water and medical care.”

The reports conclude that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has met at least some of the articles of the U.N.’s 1948 genocide convention, but stress that the world must also recognize the violence as genocide and stop it, even if the International Court of Justice has yet to issue a final ruling on South Africa’s charge that Israel is committing genocide.

PHRI warns that even if Israel stopped its offensive today, the decimation of health care and life-sustaining infrastructure has already ensured the Palestinian people in Gaza won’t recover for years. B’Tselem warns that unless the world immediately puts a stop to Israel’s campaign of violence, the genocide it concludes has been occurring in Gaza will also encompass the Palestinian people in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and in the State of Israel.

“Preventing genocide is not just a moral duty. It is also a legal obligation. So the leaders cooperating with Israel’s policies are accomplices to this crime,” Michaeli said. “People and governments must use every means available under international law to make the Israeli government stop the genocide in Gaza now.”

Warning: This story contains graphic photos below.

Israel’s ongoing and widely acknowledged weaponization of food under the guise of humanitarian aid is deliberately being used to commit genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, according to an Amnesty International report published Thursday.

The human rights report highlighted how Israel has been fueling a campaign of mass starvation in the war-torn territory ― particularly since May, when the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) began setting up its militarized aid distribution system that most of the international community has warned against.

Since launching the secretive GHF, video and witness testimony show Israeli soldiers opening fire nearly every day on hungry Palestinians corralled into lines at the aid sites, a scene that the United Nations has described as a “killing field” and “a murderous free for all.” At least 600 Palestinians have been killed trying to get food at these sites, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

“Israel has continued to use starvation of civilians as a weapon of war against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip and to deliberately impose conditions of life calculated to bring about their physician destruction as part of its ongoing genocide,” Amnesty said in its report, adding that the military has turned aid-seeking “into a booby trap” for desperate families.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry denounced the report, accusing Amnesty of having “joined forces with Hamas and fully adopted all of its propaganda lies.” Israel’s military has previously maintained that it only fires warning shots, and has fervently rejected the increasing accusations of genocide.

“Each time Israeli soldiers kill Palestinians trying to get food, the army issues a statement denying, deflecting and attempting to blame the victims – the fathers, sons, mothers and daughters who were murdered while trying to get a box of flour for their families,” said Hani Almadhoun, co-founder of the Gaza Soup Kitchen and director of philanthropy at UNRWA USA.

“These statements, designed for Western media and audiences, sow confusion and muddle the horrifying truth of what Israel is doing,” he told the Institute for Middle East Understanding on Wednesday.

In addition to GHF, Israel has maintained a near-total blockade of all humanitarian assistance since March, exacerbating the starvation crisis that has disproportionately impacted Palestinian children. At least 66 children have died as a direct result of malnutrition since October 2023, Amnesty said, not including the many more who died of diseases they didn’t have the strength to fight because there was no food.

“In an ideal world, I would recommend the parents to provide the child with nutritious food, rich with protein. I would advise that they maintain a hygienic environment for their children. I would stress the importance of clean water,” said Susan Maarouf, a nutritional expert at the Patient Friend Benevolent Society hospital in Gaza City. “In our situation … any recommendation you give … sometimes you feel like you are rubbing salt into these parents’ wounds.”

Despite the blockade, humanitarian organizations are still trying to bring aid inside Gaza. More than 850 trucks carrying mostly food aid from international groups remained stuck just outside the Gaza border as of June 16, according to the UN. When the World Food Program and some local organizations were finally permitted on June 26 to distribute flour, Amnesty said the “relatively smooth distribution that took place” with no injuries is “a damning indictment of Israel’s militarized GHF scheme.”

Amnesty is one of many groups and public figures calling for states to hold Israel accountable for the deliberate starvation of the Palestinian people, including by suspending all military support to Israel, imposing sanctions and cooperating with the demands of international courts.

“Do you understand the performance of stupidity that we have all been part of for decades? And now it’s the time to stop. If 60,000 people killed do not push us to take in seriously international obligations then we’re really, really beyond the pale,” Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, told the Human Rights Council on Thursday.

“It’s not about asking for a ceasefire. This is not war, this is a genocidal campaign … carried out under the pretense of humanitarian food distribution,” she continued. “This is a death trap.”