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On May 31, Amnesty International ran a full-page ad in multiple Australian newspapers, including the Sydney Morning Herald, Age, Courier-Mail, West Australian, Canberra Times and Advertiser, demanding that the Australian Government “Not risk being complicit in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza”, among other demands.

This is only the latest in a long series of openly anti-Israel statements, reports and actions by the organisation, which, like many Human Rights NGOs, has developed an obsession with demonising Israel over the last few decades. This long-standing trend had already been getting more intense and extreme well before October 7, 2023 and the onset of the current Gaza war.

“Apartheid” claims

In February 2022, it released a deeply flawed report entitled “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel system of domination and crime against humanity.” The report was roundly criticised at the time (see AIJAC’s compilation of contemporaneous responses to the report here).

In a detailed response, NGO Monitor called the report “fundamentally flawed, using lies, distortions, omissions, and egregious double standards to construct a fraudulent and libelous narrative of Israeli cruelty.”

It went on to say that it “uncovered five categories of faults: Errors, Misrepresentations, Omissions, Double Standards, and Dead Citations. This systematic review conclusively shows, contrary to Amnesty’s claims, that Amnesty’s allegations have no substance or merit.”

A month after the report was released, Amnesty USA Director Paul O’Brien said, “[Israel] shouldn’t exist as a Jewish state… we are opposed to the idea — and this, I think, is an existential part of the debate — that Israel should be preserved as a state for the Jewish people.”

The organisation continued to release severely distorted and biased reports on the “apartheid” slander throughout the following year.

Terrorism support and October 7

Another discrediting incident for Amnesty occurred in mid-2023 when Amnesty failed to discipline or even condemn pro-terrorist and arguably antisemitic posts by Amnesty USA board member Rasha Abdel Latif. As Danielle Haas, the former editor of  Human Rights Watch’s World Report for 13 years, wrote in Sapir:

Leadership confirmed the posts’ authenticity and agreed they could be seen as antisemitic but said there would be no disciplinary action. It also rejected a request to issue a general statement condemning antisemitism, saying that to do so in the context of the tweets would not be in the organization’s best interest. The board member retains her position today.

On October 7, 2023, Amnesty called the brutal massacre and mass kidnapping by Hamas – the worst single-day murder of Jews since the Holocaust, which sparked the ongoing war in Gaza – “an unprecedented operation by [Hamas] fighters into southern Israel.”

It also drew a false equivalence between Israel and Hamas:

Deliberately targeting civilians, carrying out disproportionate attacks, and indiscriminate attacks which kill or injure civilians are war crimes. Israel has a horrific track record of committing war crimes with impunity in previous wars on Gaza. Palestinian armed groups from Gaza, must refrain from targeting civilians and using indiscriminate weapons, as they have done in the past, and most intensively in this event, acts amounting to war crimes.

While it did say, “All civilians held hostage must be released immediately, unconditionally, and unharmed. All those held captive must be treated humanely,” it then implicitly blamed Israel for the attack:

The root causes of these repeated cycles of violence must be addressed as a matter of urgency. This requires… ending Israel’s 16-year-long illegal blockade on Gaza, and all other aspects of Israel’s system of apartheid imposed on all Palestinians. The Israeli government must refrain from inciting violence and tensions in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, especially around religious sites.

Amnesty barely mentioned the hostages thereafter and downplayed the links between Hamas and the UN Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA, including the fact that multiple UNRWA employees participated in the October 7 attack itself.

On Oct. 6, 2024, Amnesty UK tweeted, “It didn’t start one year ago. #CeasefireNow #StopArmingIsrael #EndIsraeliApartheid,” with a video blaming Israel’s creation for October 7, condemning Israel’s actions against Hezbollah and implicitly calling for Israel’s destruction.

“Genocide” claims

On Dec. 5, 2024, Amnesty released a new report, titled “‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza.” Amnesty’s Israel chapter distanced itself from the report, stating that “the Israeli section of Amnesty International does not accept the accusation that Israel is committing genocide.”

In response, Amnesty International suspended its Israel branch for two years, with Amnesty International Board’s interim chair Tiumalu Lauvale Peter Fa’afiu accusing it of “endemic anti-Palestinian racism” and saying:

Its efforts to publicly undermine the findings and recommendations of Amnesty’s 2022 report on Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians and, more recently, Amnesty’s 2024 report on Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, have been deeply prejudicial to Amnesty’s human rights mission, threatening our credibility, integrity and operational coherence.

In the report, Amnesty complained (p. 101):

[International Court of Justice] rulings on inferring intent can be read extremely narrowly, in a manner that would potentially preclude a state from having genocidal intent alongside one or more additional motives or goals in relation to the conduct of its military operations. As outlined below, Amnesty International considers this an overly cramped interpretation of international jurisprudence and one that would effectively preclude a finding of genocide in the context of an armed conflict.

In other words, it knows Israel wouldn’t be found guilty of “genocide” and therefore wishes to change the definition and reject legal precedent solely to indict Israel.

You can read contemporaneous responses to Amnesty’s report here and here. To read more legal responses to other genocide accusations against Israel, including at the International Court of Justice, see UK Lawyers for Israel notes here and here.