Amnesty International delivered an unprecedented indictment on Thursday, formally accusing Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups of committing crimes against humanity—including the specific charge of extermination—during the meticulously planned October 7, 2023 assault on southern Israel and in its aftermath. The exhaustive 173-page investigation concluded that the deliberate mass killing of 1,221 civilians, the majority Israeli nationals, met the legal threshold of “extermination” as a crime against humanity under international law.

The report details a systematic campaign of murder, torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence, unlawful imprisonment, and enforced disappearance orchestrated primarily by Hamas’s Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, with secondary involvement from Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, and unaffiliated Palestinian civilians. Amnesty highlighted that senior Hamas leadership had explicitly articulated the hostage-taking operation as strategic policy, resulting in 251 abductions—of whom 207 were taken alive and 41 subsequently died or were killed while in captivity.

Amnesty further determined that the continued inhumane treatment of hostages and the deliberate withholding of bodies long after October 7 constituted ongoing crimes against humanity. Although the organisation was able to interview only one survivor of sexual violence, preventing a full assessment of scale, it documented sufficient evidence to classify rape and other sexual crimes within the broader systematic attack on the civilian population.

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This marks a significant escalation from Amnesty’s previous findings, which had limited Hamas’s liability to war crimes; the new designation of crimes against humanity reflects the organisation’s conclusion that the attacks were both widespread and systematic, satisfying the higher evidentiary bar that applies even outside active armed conflict.

The dual accusations—Hamas for crimes against humanity and Israel for genocide in Gaza, an allegation Amnesty reiterated despite the October 10 ceasefire—place the respected human rights body at the epicentre of global controversy, as both parties now stand formally accused by the same organisation of the most serious violations known to international law.

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