The Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) is pleased to announce its seventeenth Annual Genocide Memorial Day, which will take place on Sunday, 18 January 2026.

This year’s theme is Genocide 2026: How did we get here?, focusing on the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

About the GMD 2026 event

The genocide in Gaza is an object lesson in the failure of genocide prevention.
Just like Rwanda, Bosnia and Myanmar before it, it is an agonising reminder of the limitations of the international political order in restraining humanity’s propensity to evil.

It is not that we don’t possess the tools to avert the industrial-scale slaughter of humans: the legal and political architecture to protect people and punish perpetrators has been in place for many decades.

Rather, the wilful abandonment or selective application of anti-genocide principles routinely produces new horrors such as the one we are witnessing in Gaza today.
Gaza has laid bare the hypocrisy of a system that preaches human rights, chief of which is the right to life, but which fails to take the steps necessary to ensure them and worse still, allows nations to violate them with impunity. The global refrain, “Never Again”, has been reduced to a sardonic epitaph etched with blood into the rubbled remains of Gaza.

And even as the roll call of massacred innocents grows, existing memorials such as Holocaust Memorial Day work tirelessly to obfuscate and deny the reality, going as far as to exclude remembrance of the genocide in Gaza. In doing so they expose their moral bankruptcy and complicity, rendering themselves unfit for purpose.
If we fail to recognize Gaza as a site of genocide, we remain silent in the face of profound injustice. Such silence affords Israel moral and political cover to continue committing war crimes.

This is where Genocide Memorial Day comes in. It upholds the sanctity of all human life, irrespective of ethnicity, religion or political conviction. It disavows, unequivocally, the unjustified killing of fellow human beings. All human life has equal value: there is no scale of human suffering by which any one genocide should rank higher than others.
Genocide Memorial Day not only highlights current and past genocides but seeks to stop new ones happening in the future. It was started by IHRC in 2010 to commemorate genocides and to raise awareness about genocide prevention.

This year, Palestine, and Gaza in particular, will form the subject of GMD. How did we get here, to a point where we can allow innocent children to be bombed and starved to oblivion by a genocidal apartheid state? Using the now widely accepted “10 steps to genocide” framework established by genocide scholar Gregory Stanton, an acclaimed line-up of experts, both academics and activists, will show how Gaza’s descent into genocide has been both predictable and preventable.

Genocide Memorial Day event, London

WHEN: Sunday, 18 January 2026
VENUE & TIME: TBC

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS:

Prof Ilan Pappe
Dr Ramzy Baroud
Prof Haim Bresheeth
Prof Ramon Grosfoguel

This event will be streamed LIVE online on YouTube, Facebook and IHRC.TV
Free event. Refreshments will be provided