The world’s leading genocide scholars’ association passed a resolution saying that the legal criteria have been met to establish that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, its president announced Monday.

“Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide,” as well as crimes against humanity and war crimes, according to the resolution passed by the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

Eighty-six percent of those who voted among the 500-member association backed the three-page resolution declaring that “Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide” according to the 1948 United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

The organization did not release the specifics of the voting.

The Foreign Ministry rejected the declaration as “disgraceful,” declaiming it as “an embarrassment to the legal profession and to any academic standard.”

“It is entirely based on Hamas’s campaign of lies and the laundering of those lies by others,” the ministry said in a statement, asserting that genocide allegations should instead be leveled against Hamas for its October 7, 2023, attack.

“For the first time, ‘Genocide Scholars’ accuse the very victim of genocide — despite Hamas’s attempted genocide against the Jewish people, murdering 1,200 people, raping women, burning families alive, and declaring its goal of killing every Jew,” said the ministry.

The ministry further accused the organization of not verifying any information it considered before making its designation.

The resolution holds that Israel is carrying out “deliberate attacks against and killing of civilians including children; starvation; deprivation of humanitarian aid, water, fuel, and other items essential to the survival of the population; sexual and reproductive violence; and forced displacement of the population.”

In Gaza, Hamas welcomed the resolution. “This prestigious scholarly stance reinforces the documented evidence and facts presented before international courts,” said Ismail Al-Thawabta, director of the Hamas-run Gaza government media office.

The resolution “places a legal and moral obligation on the international community to take urgent action to stop the crime, protect civilians, and hold the leaders of the occupation accountable,” he added.

Monday’s resolution also leveled criticism against Hamas, though it did not accuse the terror group of genocide, stating that its October 7 massacre, which sparked the ongoing war, constituted “international crimes.”

During the onslaught, Hamas-led terrorists killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted 251. There are 48 hostages who remain in Gaza, around 20 of them believed to be alive.

The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 63,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Hamas has claimed women and children make up about half the dead.

Israel has insisted it makes every effort to avoid harming civilians and blames Hamas for their deaths because the terror group’s fighters operate out of densely populated areas. It says Hamas is prolonging the war by not surrendering and releasing the hostages.

Israel says it had killed over 22,000 combatants in battle as of August and another 1,600 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 onslaught.

The scholars group’s determination that Israel is guilty of genocide could serve to further isolate Israel in global public opinion and adds to a growing chorus of organizations that have used the term for Israel’s actions in Gaza.

“People who are experts in the study of genocide can see this situation for what it is,” Melanie O’Brien, the organization’s president and a professor of international law at the University of Western Australia, told The Associated Press.

In July, two prominent Israeli rights groups, Btselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, came out with statements alleging that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The organizations do not reflect mainstream thinking in Israel, but it marked the first time that Jewish-led Israeli organizations have made such accusations.

In August, Israeli novelist David Grossman claimed that Israel was committing a “genocide” in Gaza, saying in an interview with Italian newspaper La Repubblica that he did so only with “intense pain and a broken heart.”

Genocide was codified in a 1948 convention, drawn up after the horrors of the Holocaust, that defines it as acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

This is not the first time that the scholars group, founded in 1994, has leveled the genocide accusation in recent years. It has previously held that China’s treatment of its Muslim Uighur minority and Myanmar’s brutal crackdown on Rohingya Muslims met the threshold for genocide.

In 2006, the organization said statements by then-Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — in which he called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” — had “genocidal intent” and called for urgent action to be taken.

The United Nations and many Western countries have said only a court can rule on whether the crime has been committed. South Africa has accused Israel of breaching the Genocide Convention at the International Court of Justice — an allegation Israel rejects. A final ruling could take years.