US State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said on Thursday that the US President's administration does not agree with the use of the term "genocide" as Amnesty International said in its report on Wednesday regarding what Israel has been doing in Gaza since it launched its war on the besieged Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023.

In response to a question from the Al-Quds correspondent about whether the US administration agrees with Amnesty International in this regard, spokesman Patel said that his country's government opposes this description now, as it opposed it in the past.

"I have seen the report, and I will leave it to Amnesty International to speak on the details of it. As you have heard us say before, we do not agree with the conclusions of such a report. We have said before and continue to find the allegations of genocide to be baseless," Patel said.

"But there is still a vital role for civil society organisations such as Amnesty International, human rights groups and NGOs to play in providing information and analysis regarding Gaza and what is happening," Patel said.

“But again, as I have said before, we do not agree with the previous findings regarding genocide. That does not change the ongoing concern that we have regarding the humanitarian situation in Gaza. It does not change the ongoing concern that we have regarding the impact of this conflict on civilians and civilian casualties. We continue to emphasize at every turn that there is a moral and strategic priority for Israel to comply with international humanitarian law, and that is something that we will continue to raise with partners in the region and directly with Israel,” the spokesman continued.

The Jerusalem correspondent pointed out that Amnesty International concluded that, and before it, Human Rights Watch. And all the UN organizations, and all the human rights organizations around the world, and the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem, and every other organization says that Israel is committing genocide, and "genocide depends largely on intent, and Amnesty International said that it based its conclusions on repeated statements by Israeli leaders, Israeli officials, and even the president of Israel, certainly, and many other people who said that they are committing genocide... I mean we see that Israel in its war on Gaza has killed at least 44,000 people, including 17,000 children... and deprives them of food and uses deliberate starvation (against citizens and children in Gaza), and deprives them of medicine; anesthesia that is brought in to them, as Schicke CNN reported yesterday that Israel has prevented anesthesia from entering Gaza to treat children with amputated limbs."

The Jerusalem correspondent continued with a question about what the United States of America needs, which truly claims the high moral position in dealing with these issues, and human rights issues, in order for you to say that what is happening is genocide? Because what we see today, and what we are witnessing in northern Gaza, is basically deliberate starvation.

“People, organizations, groups have the right to draw their own conclusions,” Patel responded. “The conclusion that the United States has reached is that these allegations of genocide are unfounded. There are and continue to be a number of avenues within the U.S. government through which we look at what is happening on the ground, and those assessments are ongoing. But I don’t have any update to provide on that.”

In its 296-page report, “You Feel Subhuman”: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza, Amnesty International found through its research and legal analysis “sufficient basis to conclude that during the nine-month period under review, Israel committed acts prohibited under Articles II (a), (b) and (c) of the Genocide Convention, namely murder, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part.”

The Israeli government strongly rejected the findings of the report.

“The hateful and fanatical Amnesty International has once again issued a completely false and fabricated report based on lies,” the Israeli Foreign Ministry said in a post on the X platform, commenting on the report. “The terrorist organization Hamas carried out the genocidal massacre on October 7, 2023 against Israeli citizens. Since then, Israeli citizens have been subjected to daily attacks from seven different fronts. Israel defends itself against these attacks in full accordance with international law.”

In a statement, the Israeli branch of the organization — which was reportedly not involved in funding, researching or writing the report — said that “the scale of killing and destruction carried out by Israel in Gaza has reached horrific proportions and must be stopped immediately,” according to The Times of Israel. However, the groups do not believe the events “meet the definition of genocide as set out precisely in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”

For a conflict to be considered genocide under international law, there must be evidence of specific criminal acts—such as killing members of a particular group—as well as “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

In its report, Amnesty International concluded that “these acts were committed with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.”