The "genocidal acts" a United Nations investigation said Thursday that Israel had carried out in Gaza are the most serious crimes recognised by international law, but also the most difficult to prove.
- Nuremberg trial -
The term genocide -- derived from the Greek word "genos", for race or tribe, and "cide" from the Latin for "to kill" -- was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin. A Polish Jew who had fled to the United States, he used it to describe the crimes committed by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust.
It was used for the first time within a legal framework by an international military tribunal at Nuremberg to try Nazi leaders for their crimes in 1945. However, those accused were eventually convicted on charges of crimes against humanity.
- Legal definition -
Genocide is the gravest crime in international humanitarian law -- and also the most difficult to prove.
It has been recognised within international law since 1948, with the advent of the UN Convention.
The Convention defines genocide as any of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group."
These five acts include killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group.
The Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) was created in 1992 to try the perpetrators of genocide.
- Some genocides recognised by international law -
The massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in 1915 was recognised in 1985 as genocide by the UN, as well as by governments and parliaments in many countries, including the US, France and Germany, but fiercely rejected by Turkey.
The Rwandan genocide, in which the UN said some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered in 1994, led to the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, based in Arusha, Tanzania.
The massacre of almost 8,000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces at Srebrenica, in July 1995 during the Bosnian war, was recognised as genocide by the UN's highest judicial organ, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2007.
The Balkans war crimes court, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, has convicted several accused of genocide.
A UN-backed tribunal found two top leaders of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime from 1975-79 guilty of genocide in a landmark ruling in 2018.
Former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir has been on the ICC's wanted list for genocide and crimes against humanity in the western province of Darfur for more than a decade. Arrested by the Sudanese army in 2019, he has still not been handed over.