Amnesty International accused Israel on Tuesday of committing a "live-streamed genocide" against Palestinians by forcibly displacing Gazans and creating a humanitarian catastrophe in the besieged territory, claims Israel dismissed as "blatant lies".
Echoing global concern after more than 18 months of war, the United Nations' rights chief Volker Turk meanwhile called on the international community to launch "concerted efforts" to end Israel's total aid blockade on the Gaza Strip, in effect since early March.
Rights group Amnesty, in its annual report, said Israel was acting with "specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, thus committing genocide".
"Since October 7, 2023, when Hamas perpetrated horrific crimes against Israeli citizens and others and captured more than 250 hostages, the world has been made audience to a live-streamed genocide," Amnesty's secretary-general Agnes Callamard said.
"States watched on as if powerless, as Israel killed thousands upon thousands of Palestinians, wiping out entire multigenerational families, destroying homes, livelihoods, hospitals and schools."
Israel rejected the accusations in Amnesty's report, accusing the group of spreading Hamas propaganda and insisting that the military did not target civilians.
On the ground, Gaza's civil defence agency said Israeli strikes on Tuesday killed at least seven people, four of whom in a tent encampment for displaced Palestinians in the territory's south. Amnesty said it had "documented multiple war crimes by Israel" including attacks on civilians, and that Israel had "deliberately engineered an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe".
The London-based rights group said 1.9 million people -- about 90 percent of Gaza's population -- had been forcibly displaced during the war. The UN has cited similar figures.
Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Oren Marmorstein rejected the accusations, saying that "the radical anti-Israel organisation Amnesty has once again chosen to publish baseless lies against Israel."
"Israel is targeting only terrorists and never civilians," he told AFP.
Marmorstein charged that Hamas "deliberately targets Israeli civilians and hides behind Palestinian civilians".
Amnesty said the war represented a collective failure by the international community.
Heba Morayef, Amnesty's regional director, said Palestinians had endured "extreme levels of suffering" while the world showed a "complete inability or lack of political will to put a stop to it".
Turk, the UN rights chief, said the "humanitarian catastrophe" in Gaza must be stopped.
"There must be concerted international efforts to stop this humanitarian catastrophe from reaching a new unseen level," he said in a statement.
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