GENEVA

The heads of more than 20 major aid organizations working in Gaza called on world leaders to urgently intervene after a UN commission concluded, for the first time, that genocide is being committed in the enclave.

In a joint statement shared by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) International on Wednesday, the groups said: "As world leaders convene next week at the United Nations, we are calling on all member states to act in accordance with the mandate the UN was charged with 80 years ago."

"What we are witnessing in Gaza is not only an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe, but what the UN Commission of Inquiry has now concluded is a genocide," the statement added.

The letter, signed by senior figures including Christopher Lockyear of MSF International, Jan Egeland of the Norwegian Refugee Council, Amitabh Behar of Oxfam International, Inger Ashing of Save the Children International, and Arthur Larok of ActionAid International, warned of dire consequences if governments fail to act.

"Now, as the Israeli government has ordered the mass displacement of Gaza City – home to nearly one million people – we are on the precipice of an even deadlier period in Gaza's story if action is not taken. Gaza has been deliberately made uninhabitable," the statement said.

The aid leaders underlined that about 65,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 20,000 children, while nine in 10 people have been forcibly displaced. Meanwhile, more than half a million are starving, with famine already declared.

"If Member States continue to treat these legal obligations as optional, they are not only complicit but are setting a dangerous precedent for the future. History will undoubtedly judge this moment ... and we are failing," the statement concluded.

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory concluded on Tuesday that Israeli forces committed "four of the five" genocidal acts defined under the 1948 genocide convention: killing members of a group, causing them serious bodily and mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to destroy the group, and preventing births.