Elemental

The question of whether Israel's actions in the Gaza strip constitute a genocide has been hotly debated for nearly as long as the latest fighting between Israel and Hamas has. Now, a pair of Israeli human rights groups have weighed in on the side of calling it genocide.

Genocide has a specific definition in international law: particular acts carried out with intent to destroy a group in whole or in part.

And it's the word "intent" that's really become the stickler. While many people point to statements from Israeli politicians, like the comment from Yoav Gallant that Israel's opponents were "human animals" to explain their positions, the fact remains that the case for whether the government of Israel intends, as a matter of policy, to exterminate or displace the population of Gaza, is, at this point, purely circumstantial. Which doesn't mean that Israel is innocent of the charge, but it does mean that it's difficult, like any charge that requires mens rea, to prove.

The law often uses language differently from the way the public at large, or subsets thereof, tend to use it. Consider anti-abortion activists using the term "murder" to describe the procedure, or people using the term "kidnapping" to describe the arrests of immigrants by ICE agents. In places where and under circumstances when abortion is legal, it is, by definition, not murder, just as when ICE agents are legally allowed to detain someone, their doing so is not kidnapping.

In the case of genocide, the calculus is a bit different; here people tend to judge what is happening based on outcomes, even though international human rights law is based on intent, and if that intent is there, the predicate acts don't have to be particularly horrific, or even effective. They simply need to happen at all.

It's unlikely that there is a formal document, somewhere in an Israeli government office, that spells out a deliberate plan to engage in

... any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

— Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2

And if there is, it hasn't come to light, so people are left to infer the requisite intent. There is a certain degree to which the inferences a given party makes are related to their overall partisanship concerning the issue. Which is what makes the statements from B’Tselem and the Israel branch of Physicians for Human Rights newsworthy; they could be expected (at least by outsiders) to side with the Israeli government and so their inference that the government intends to destroy the Gazan population, in whole or in part, carries weight.

But it doesn't settle the issue. This is, after all, a matter of law, and it's judges, not human rights campaigners, who make the final decisions. Whether they decide that the elements of the crime are all present, or if judges decide at all, remains to be seen.