Navi Pillay’s Nobel win highlights genocide in Gaza

“The last thing I did was deliver the report on Gaza, naming what is happening there as genocide,” 2026 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Navi Pillay told a group of journalists and a crowd celebrating her win early Friday in Nuremberg, Germany.

The 85-year-old South African former International Criminal Court judge was referring to her work as head of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which concluded in a 72-page report released in September 2025 that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.

"The last thing I did is the report on Gaza naming what is happening there as genocide. One of the main reactions to that report [was] paying tribute to me for my courage.. why would you need courage to speak the truth?" Navi Pillay upon winning the 2026 Nobel peace prize https://t.co/hYPA94eFLe

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) October 9, 2026

The UN Commission of Inquiry, headed by Pillay, held Israel responsible for committing four of the five acts of genocide defined in the Genocide Convention.

The four acts it identified were killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group's physical destruction, in whole or in part; and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

It seems that choosing a South African of Indian origin former ICC judge and human rights activist made Trump angry again because, for the second time, from his point of view, the committee in Oslo snubbed him despite his stopping a crazy number of wars.

Yet, just a few hours after Pillay was announced as the winner of the prestigious award, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced new sanctions targeting the International Criminal Court, as the Trump administration pursues its stated goal of dismantling an institution whose founding framework the United States had helped shape, despite never becoming a member.

Even without considering her work on Gaza, Navi Pillay’s record speaks for itself.

Her work as a lawyer fighting apartheid in South Africa and her subsequent career make her stand out among many former Nobel Peace Prize laureates, including Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed, who has presided over civil wars in his own country and it seems that he is heading to war to Eretria again; Iran’s Shirin Ebadi, who has supported the US-Israeli war on Iran, despite the devastating toll on Iranian civilians; and Venezuela’s Maria Corina Machado, who backed US intervention in her own country and even offered to give her Nobel Peace Prize to Donald Trump.

Yet, she did not become Venezuela’s president as she had hoped. It seems the Nobel Peace Prize may be trying to repair its own image.

Returning to Pillay’s work on Gaza, it is hardly surprising that her findings have infuriated the Israeli government.

Israeli politicians and pro-government media outlets are attacking the veteran judge and the Nobel Peace Prize itself.

Many people overlook the fact that this is happening at a time when supporters of the man who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, the late Israeli prime minister and Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 1994, hold seats in the Israeli cabinet and have some of the loudest voices in the country’s political discourse and media landscape.

They simply know—and rightly so—that Pillay’s Nobel Peace Prize will prompt people to read and examine her latest work on Gaza and the genocide there.

The thing is that the commission which Pillay chaired was not the only independent commission or organization that said Israel is committing a genocide.

But it is, to date, the most prominent independent UN-mandated commission to conclude, based on its investigations, that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Still, there are other organizations and institutions like the International Association of Genocide Scholars that said it is a genocide.

The (IAGS) stated that Israel’s conduct meets the legal definition of genocide under the UN Genocide Convention in a resolution released in August 2025.

In its three-page resolution, the IAGS lists actions carried out by Israel during the 22-month-long war that it considers to constitute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The IAGS is the world’s largest professional association of genocide scholars and includes Holocaust experts among its members. Of its 500 members, 28 per cent participated in the vote, with 86 per cent of those who voted supporting the resolution.

Summarising Israeli policies and actions, the resolution highlights widespread attacks on personnel and facilities essential for survival, including those in the healthcare, humanitarian aid and education sectors.

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention — named after Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish lawyer who coined the term “genocide” — has issued numerous statements declaring that genocide is taking place in Gaza since December 2023.

Amnesty International, one of the main adversaries of Arab regimes from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf, has also concluded that Israel is committing genocide, according to a report published in December 2024.

Its fellow human rights organisation, Human Rights Watch, which has also faced hostility from Arab regimes, reached a related conclusion in its December 2024 report, a 175-page document examining Israel’s actions in Gaza and concluding that they constituted extermination and acts of genocide.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) described Israeli military actions in Gaza as ethnic cleansing and genocide in a report published in December 2024.

The Elders, an independent group founded by Nelson Mandela whose members include former world leaders and Nobel Peace Prize laureates, explicitly described what was happening in Gaza as a genocide in August 2025.

Forensic Architecture, the world-renowned research group whose findings have been used in investigations concerning Syria and Ukraine, concluded that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza in October 2024. It published an extensive investigation and interactive online platform titled A Cartography of Genocide: Israel’s Conduct in Gaza since October 2023, an 827-page report produced in collaboration with the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq.

The investigation formally documented the group's findings and concluded that Israel’s actions constituted genocide.

Even before using the word “genocide”, Forensic Architecture had described Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s environment as ecocide in an investigation released in October 2024, produced in collaboration with Gaza-based Ain Media.

Forensic Architecture was co-founded by, and is currently headed by, British-Israeli researcher Eyal Weizman.

Last but not least, in July 2025, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights–Israel became the first major Israeli human rights organisations to reach the same conclusion, publishing separate reports that described Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.

The list keeps growing, including Jewish scholars and experts who have concluded that what is happening in Gaza constitutes genocide.

After three years of mass killing and destruction in Gaza, there are still people debating whether what is happening there is genocide.

I do not know what else to call it. With 74,245 people killed and 175,306 injured, the highest number of child amputees recorded in any conflict worldwide, and journalists killed in numbers described as unprecedented since the Second World War, I struggle to find another word for what Gaza has endured: genocide.