JERUSALEM: Israel on Tuesday said it “categorically rejects” a probe by UN investigators which determined that Israel has since October 2023 been committing “genocide” in Gaza.

“Israel categorically rejects this distorted and false report and calls for the immediate abolition of this Commission of Inquiry,” a statement from the foreign ministry said.

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI), which does not speak on behalf of the world body, found that “genocide is occurring in Gaza and is continuing to occur,” commission chief Navi Pillay said.

The investigators concluded that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, along with President Isaac Herzog and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, have “incited the commission of genocide” in the Palestinian territory.

The Israeli foreign ministry accused the authors of the report of “serving as Hamas proxies,” saying they were “notorious for their openly antisemitic positions.”

“The report relies entirely on Hamas falsehoods, laundered and repeated by others,” it added.

The Israeli ambassador to the United Nations also categorically rejected the findings of a Commission of Inquiry that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza as a “libelous rant.”

The report, which also found that top Israeli officials including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu incited genocidal acts, is “scandalous” and “fake,” Daniel Meron said in Geneva.

The commission concluded that Israeli authorities and forces had since October 2023 committed “four of the five genocidal acts” listed in the 1948 Genocide Convention.

These are “killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

Nearly 65,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began, according to figures from the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza that the United Nations considers reliable.

The vast majority of Gazans have been displaced at least once, with tens of thousands more fleeing again as Israel ramps up efforts to seize control of Gaza City, where the UN has declared a full-blown famine.

The war was triggered by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.