NEW YORK — The United Nations General Assembly convened a plenary session on Monday at UN headquarters in New York to discuss nations' responsibility to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. The meeting follows a September 2025 United Nations fact-finding mission that concluded Israeli actions in Gaza constitute genocide.

Israel launched military operations in Gaza in October 2023. More than 1,100 people were killed in the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel that month, and approximately 240 people were taken into Gaza as captives. A ceasefire came into effect in Gaza in October 2025. Since the truce began, Israeli army violations of the ceasefire have killed over 1,000 people and wounded more than 3,000 others, according to Gaza's Ministry of Health. At least 73,066 Palestinian people have been killed in Gaza since October 2023.

In March 2024, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese stated there were clear indications that Israel was violating three of the five conditions listed under the UN Genocide Convention. Albanese said she had found "reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of … acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has been met." She added, "The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel's assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group." Israel rejected Albanese's report as an "obscene inversion of reality." Albanese has also been sanctioned by the U.S. government.

Navi Pillay, chairwoman of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, said in September 2025 that Israeli leaders' statements and the destruction on the ground provided proof of intent. The term "genocide" was first used by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944 in his book *Axis Rule in Occupied Europe*. The prefix "genos" means "race" or "tribe" in Ancient Greek, and the suffix "cide" is Latin and means "killing."

The UN General Assembly recognized genocide as a crime in 1946. The term was codified as an independent crime in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which came into effect in 1951. The Genocide Convention has been ratified by 196 countries. The UN defines genocide as any act committed "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."

Why It Matters

The United Nations General Assembly's discussion of Israel's military actions in Gaza, based on a 2025 UN fact-finding mission report that concluded genocide is occurring, places international focus on the responsibilities of nations to prevent such crimes. This addresses core principles established by the UN Genocide Convention, which defines genocide and has been ratified by 196 countries. The ongoing plenary session indicates a formal examination of these actions under international law, affecting the international standing and legal obligations of member states involved.