By Harry Storm
World bodies, politicians, NGOs, media and scholars long hostile to Israel create the illusion of unanimity
Has Israel committed genocide in Gaza? Much of the world seems convinced that it has, and it isn’t hard to see why, given the number of international organizations, well-respected scholars, media and politicians worldwide that have accused the world’s only Jewish state of genocidal intent and actions. The list of organizations – including several UN and UN-affiliated bodies – and individuals is not only impressive, it seems incontestable.
However, a consensus is no substitute for truth, regardless of numbers or even expertise, particularly when the so-called experts have a longstanding history of consistent, often obsessive hostility toward the Jewish state. That being said, just because critics have longstanding hostility to Israel doesn’t automatically mean their claims are invalid. But it does mean that closer examination of their charges is warranted.
To determine the validity of the genocide claim, one must first consider what constitutes a genocide. The term genocide is relatively new, having been originally coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish refugee in the U.S. in late 1943-early 1944. In December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), according to which genocide is defined as:
“Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, such as: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
The genocide charges against Israel combine the above conditions into two key accusations: (1) That the pattern of conduct by Israeli forces (a) caused massive civilian casualties and destruction of infrastructure; (b) resulted in hostile life conditions, such as deliberate starvation, blockade of aid, and destruction of healthcare facilities; and (c) caused massive forced displacement via mass evacuations; and critically (2) that the intent of Israel’s war in Gaza was genocidal.
But does this accurately describe Israel’s conduct and actions in Gaza, or the intent of its leadership, civilian and military, in promulgating the war? It’s difficult to see how, without ignoring mountains of exculpatory evidence that prove otherwise.
Once that evidence is taken into account and closer scrutiny is given to the nature and motivations of those making the genocide claim, the arguments claiming Israel is committing genocide in Gaza are exposed as mere assertions by parties with longstanding hostility to the Jewish state.
Why? Because for acts to constitute genocide, they must be committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. If an act is performed for another reason, it cannot be legally defined as genocide.
In other words, when scrutinized more closely, the charge that Israel intended to commit genocide crumbles, in part because those making it rely on just four things: (1) heated statements by Israeli ministers made in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks; (2) appeals to like-minded (i.e. hostile to Israel) “experts” and organizations that cite each other’s claims and opinions as factual evidence; (3) regurgitating unverified “facts” that support their claims originally provided by the Gaza’s Ministry of Health, a Hamas-run agency, or other agencies or organizations known or suspected of having close ties to Hamas, such as the UN Refugee and Works Agency (UNRWA); and most important, (4) downplaying or ignoring evidence that reveals intentions that are far from genocidal, while dismissing evidence of Hamas’ means of waging war that resulted in the death of their own civilians and in many cases necessitated Israeli actions that were then deemed “genocidal,” such as destroying hospitals, schools, mosques and residences.
Long before Oct. 7, 2023, those now claiming Israel committed genocide ignored Hamas activities almost to the point of invisibility, in order to accuse Israel of occupying, blockading, or invading, based on which made Israel look the worst in any scenario. This incuriosity is the most damning indictment of the entire “Gaza industrial complex” — i.e. the ever-widening grouping of humanitarian agencies, academics, media and others demonising, delegitimising and applying double standards to the Jewish state.
For example, Israel has long been condemned for destroying schools, mosques and hospitals in previous incursions; however, the use of schools, mosques and hospitals as command centres, rocket launching sites and/or weapons depots is ignored. Similarly, Israeli restrictions on Gaza before Oct. 7 and after Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the territory in 2005 are invariably described without even a mention of the reasons for those restrictions: namely, the hostility from the territory following Hamas’ takeover in 2006, which on several occasions (2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021) included firing hundreds or even thousands of rockets indiscriminately into Israel.
But for those now making the genocide charge, it’s as if Israel’s actions occurred in a vacuum; but, to paraphrase Secretary General Antonio Gutteres’ infamous quote after Oct. 7, nothing occurs in a vacuum. Underlying their reliance on such thin gruel is their animus toward the Jewish state, which in many instances borders on obsessional. These critics of Israel’s actions in Gaza since 2023 (and some since Israel’s coming into existence in 1948) have been chomping at the metaphorical bit to accuse Israel of genocide, in the same way that they’ve accused Israel of ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, and apartheid.
The first sign that genocide claimants may have allowed their obsessive hatred of Israel to cloud their judgment is the speed with which such claims were made. As early as Oct. 9, one Dr. Abu Sitta accused Israel of “mass” and “indiscriminate” killing on a platform provided by Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF), one of the NGOs that would subsequently accuse Israel of genocide.
(Ten days later, Sitta was a principal media source for the Al-Ahli “hospital bombing,” claiming 500 people had been killed by an Israeli bomb. Subsequent investigations by media organizations and human rights agencies generally unsympathetic to Israel (Human Rights Watch, for example), revealed that the hospital parking lot had been struck, not the hospital itself, by an errant Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) missile and that far fewer than 500 people had been killed).
Ironically – although perhaps not entirely unexpectedly, given the nature of Israel’s left academia – the first accusation of genocide came from an Israeli professor, Raz Segal, on Oct. 13, just six days after the attacks of Oct. 7 and the same day that Israel began limited ground operations in Gaza, and two weeks before the ground invasion of Gaza began. Yet according to Segal, it was already “a textbook case of genocide,” which also happened to be the headline of his Oct. 13 article in which he made the accusation.
Segal, a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, has admitted that in the past, he had “written about settler colonialism and Jewish supremacy in Israel, the distortion of the Holocaust to boost the Israeli arms industry, the weaponization of antisemitism accusations to justify Israeli violence against Palestinians, and the racist regime of Israeli apartheid.” So as outlandish as his claim of genocide clearly was just six days after Oct. 7, it wasn’t particularly surprising.
Nor was it surprising when five days later, the Center for Consitutional Rights (CCR), a New York-based “progressive” legal advocacy group, argued in a legal analysis that the U.S. could be complicit in Israeli violations of the Genocide Convention.
The CCR has a long anti-Israel pedigree. Prior to Oct. 7, it supported various Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) initiatives, as well as a so-called “Deadly Exchange” program led by Jewish Voices for Peace, a notorious anti-Zionist group, to protest police exchange programs between the U.S. and Israel. In a working paper written after Oct. 7, the CCR stated that Israel has been committing genocide since 1948, an absurd claim that serves only to reveal its longstanding hostility toward the Jewish state.
Then, on October 28, one day after Israel’s full-scale invasion of Gaza, a human rights official at the United Nations, Craig Mokhiber, claimed he resigned to protest against UN and Western nations’ failure to stop Israel’s “genocide.” Mohkiber too had a long history of virulent anti-Israel statements, and has been quoted as calling Israel a “European, ethno-national, settler colonialist project in Palestine.”
Frustrated by the UN’s weak reaction to Israel’s initial response to Oct. 7, he publicly claimed to have resigned his position to protest the UN’s inaction in response to what he called a “textbook genocide.” (It later emerged that he was due to retire four days later, and the UN High Commission for Human Rights publicly disputed his assertion that he resigned.)
Segal, Mokhiber and the CCR made their genocide accusations before the dust had cleared on the atrocities of Oct. 7. In those early days, however, the only evidence they could point to in order to support their allegations were (a) Israel’s retaliatory bombing campaign, which resulted in civilian deaths, as bombing campaigns, however just, inevitably do; (b) Israel’s order to residents of northern Gaza to evacuate to the south to prevent civilian deaths (which they interpreted as “population transfer,” rather than as a measure to reduce civilian casualties); and most important (c) statements made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, and other ministers and Israeli citizens, all issued in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, when emotions were running high. These statements were to feature prominently in all the subsequent reports accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.
Also notable and striking, though perhaps not unexpected, was that none of these early genocide accusers did more than issue perfunctory references to the onslaught by Hamas on Oct. 7, and even these cursory nods were inevitably followed by noting that the Oct. 7 massacre and Israel’s right of self-defense did not excuse “genocide.” (Mokhiber did not mention Oct. 7 at all in his “resignation” letter; in a later interview, he conceded that “war crimes” were committed on Oct. 7, but immediately pivoted to Israel’s so-called “genocide.”)
For the next two months, the genocide claim was confined to these and a few other anti-Israel individuals or groups. However, on December 29, the genocide charge was turbocharged and began to gain attention worldwide after South Africa accused Israel of genocide and requested provisional measures from the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
South Africa’s Application to the International Court of Justice
South Africa’s “Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa vs Israel)” relied on reports from hostile entities, such as the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, the notorious anti-Israel special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, one-sided news reports citing biased “experts,” and, most significantly, daily reports and flash updates supplied by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Significantly, every daily OCHA update includes a disclaimer stating that “the UN has not been able to produce independent, comprehensive, and verified casualty figures, the current numbers have been provided by the Ministry of Health or Government Media Office in Gaza [i.e. Hamas] … and await further verification.” Unsurprisingly, neither the South African ICJ request for provisional measures nor all the other reports that relied on OCHA reports ever mentioned this disclaimer, and almost always considered the numbers provided by Hamas as definitive.
The ICJ’s interim conclusion on January 26, 2024 did not determine whether or not a genocide had been committed; rather, it stated that the claims by South Africa “plausibly” fall within the purview of the genocide convention. (If the South African claims are later proved to be true, it is “plausible” that they may contravene the genocide convention). This was twisted by Israel-hostile entities, including much of the Western media and academics to mean that the ICJ had ruled that Israel had “plausibly” committed genocide. The then-president of the ICJ, Joan Donoghue has publicly corrected this misreading of the court’s decision. “The court did not decide – and this is something where I’m correcting what’s often said in the media – it did not decide that the claim of genocide was plausible… The shorthand that often appears, that there is a plausible case of genocide, is not what the court decided,” Donaghue said. Unfortunately, her explanation has not put a stop to the persistent repetition of the false claim that a plausible genocide had occurred.
After the ICJ proceedings, the genocide floodgates opened wide, with UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, human rights organizations such as Amnesty International (AI) and the International Association of Genocide Scholars, individual Holocaust and genocide scholars, including Israelis Amos Goldstein and Omer Bartov, as well as Canadian Jewish scholar William Schabas, repeating and solidifying the genocide accusation.
The Albanese Report: genocide prejudged
Francesca Albanese, whose anti-Israel animus stands out even among other UN rapporteurs routinely hostile to the Jewish state, was quickest off the mark. She issued a report stating there were reasonable grounds to believe that Israel had indeed engaged in genocidal actions.
Her March 25, 2024 report could serve as a masterclass in deceptive reporting. After a decidedly one-sided historical summary of events from 1947 to Oct. 7, 2023, she gets to the heart of the matter: that Israel committed genocidal acts in Gaza, as defined by the UN’s 1948 genocide convention, and that Israel’s intent was to commit genocide.
Her argument relates to Israel’s pattern of conduct during the Gaza war (up to March 2024). According to Albanese, the IDF killed 250 people, including 100 children, per day. Albanese’s source for this information was a media release by savethechildren.org, which in turn got the data from the Gaza Ministry of Health (i.e. Hamas).
Furthermore, some people, Albanese claims, were killed in summary executions. Her source for this is a release by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which reads as follows: “On 19 December 2023, between 2000 and 2300 hours, IDF reportedly surrounded and raided Al Awda building, also known as the “Annan building”, in Al Remal neighborhood, Gaza City, where three related families were sheltering in addition to Annan family. According to witness accounts circulated by media sources and EuroMed Human Rights Monitor [another human-rights organization long hostile to Israel, and which also claims Israel has committed genocide], while in control of the building and the civilians sheltering there, the IDF allegedly separated the men from the women and children, and then shot and killed at least 11 of the men, mostly aged in their late 20s and early 30s, in front of their family members. The IDF then allegedly ordered the women and children into a room, and either shot at them or threw a grenade into the room, reportedly seriously injuring some of them, including an infant and a child.”
However, the OHCHR release goes on to say that the “details and circumstances of the killings are still under verification.” In other words, there is no proof the events described occurred at all. For its part, the IDF called the allegations “unfounded and devoid of truth,” noting that there was “no record of any operation, nor incident, in the Al Remal neighborhood in Gaza City that would support any of the allegations”. Not for the first time, Israel accused the UN of publishing unverified information, as per their own press release.
But it’s also noteworthy that the account provided to the UNOHRC and accepted as verified truth by Albanese so closely resembles known actions by Hamas and associates on Oct. 7. Given the propensity by Palestinian apologists to project crimes against Israelis onto the Jewish state, it’s not beyond the realm of imagination to consider that possibility in this instance, though of course this would never occur to Albanese.
Albanese also accepts as unquestionable truth the UNRWA claim that 70% of the dead in Gaza are women and children, a claim that some investigators say would be “statistically impossible,” based on the Gaza Ministry of Health’s own reports of hospital deaths. Nor does she mention that many of those deaths may be teenage boys working as combatants for Hamas or other militant groups. And, as one might expect, the IDF’s record low civilian-to-combatant ratio is ignored entirely.
Instead, what Albanese finds noteworthy is that Israel has “failed to prove” that the remaining 30 percent, i.e. adult males, were active Hamas combatants – a necessary condition for them to be lawfully targeted. She notes that by early December, Israel’s security advisors claimed that 7,000 “terrorists” [her quotation marks] had been killed. Again using unverified figures provided by the Gaza Health Ministry (i.e. Hamas), she claims that fewer than 5,000 adult males in total had been identified among the dead.
This, according to Albanese, implies that all adult males killed were “terrorists.” By this circuitous logic, relying on unverified data, and ignoring the claims that many of the dead identified as children were, in fact, teenage male combatants, as well as claims that individuals who died of natural causes were included in the Hamas numbers, she infers “an intent to indiscriminately target members of the protected group, assimilating them to active fighter status by default.”
After establishing what she considers to be a pattern of genocidal conduct, Albanese then asserts that Israel’s war in Gaza included “genocidal intent.” Her entire claim regarding genocidal intent is based on nothing more than (1) statements by Israeli politicians and others uttered in the days after Oct. 7; and (2) Albanese’s obsession with calling Israel genocidal, which leads her to not only downplay and ignore evidence that would absolve Israel of genocide, but actually invert such evidence into proof of Israeli malfeasance and genocidal intent.
According to Albanese, “direct evidence of genocidal intent is uniquely present.” She asserts it is Israel that has inverted international humanitarian law by effectively designating the entire population of Gaza as human shields, thereby “dehumanizing” them and making them fair game for killing.
In other words, she ignores the mountains of evidence that Hamas has effectively forced its own civilians to become human shields by using hospitals, schools, mosques and residences as military headquarters or command centres, rocket launching sites or weapons depots.
Albanese cites international law which says that civilians may not be targeted but ignored the same international law with regard to Hamas’ use of human shields and failure to protect its own civilians. She ignores Hamas’ extensive tunnel network, which transformed standard urban warfare into something very different, and never mentions that Hamas did not allow Gaza civilians into the tunnels, which would have saved countless lives.
Even more notably, she considers evidence that any unbiased observer would consider as disproving the genocide charge, such as the evacuations, roof knocks, and phone calls by the IDF to warn civilians of incoming fire, as evidence of genocidal intent.
Albanese notes what she considers ”genocidal” statements by Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who stated that “an entire nation out there…is responsible” for the 7 October attack, and that Israel would “break their backbone”; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who she claims referred to Palestinians as “Amalek” and “monsters”, then-Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant who referred to Palestinians as “human animals”, and announced “full offense” on Gaza, having “released all the restraints”, and that “Gaza will never return to what it was.” Yet none of these statements, made in the days immediately following the Oct. 7 attacks, when emotions were, understandably, running high, say anything specific about destroying the people of Gaza or Palestinians as a whole. At most, an unbiased observer would interpret them as wartime threats.
Albanese also appears purposely oblivious to how war is waged against an entrenched terrorist enemy in a dense urban landscape that has been effectively transformed into a military fortress, complete with a vast subterranean network and the deliberate integration of military infrastructure within densely populated civilian areas.
Albanese notes that “Israeli authorities have characterized churches, mosques, schools, UN facilities, universities, hospitals and ambulances as connected with Hamas,” but interprets that as reinforcing “the perception of a population characterized as broadly ‘complicit’ and therefore killable,” rather than war crimes by Hamas.
According to Albanese, large numbers of Palestinian civilians are defined as human shields simply by being in “proximity to” potential Israeli targets, and in this way “Israel has thus transformed Gaza into a “world without civilians” in which “everything from taking shelter in hospitals to fleeing for safety is declared a form of human shielding.”
She calls the accusation of using human shields a pretext that justifies the killing of civilians under a cloak of purported legality. Even if all of this were true – and it is not – this does not prove genocidal intent, as Albanese claims. Her mindset does not permit noting, let alone acknowledging, that Hamas’ mode of fighting and its transformation of the urban landscape into a massive tunneled fortress is what transformed Gaza and inevitably endangered civilians.
Albanese almost completely ignores how Hamas’ military is integrated with the civilian infrastructure, deliberately embedding its military assets within the civilian environment. Tunnel access points, weapons storage facilities, and rocket launch sites are hidden within or beneath schools, mosques, hospitals, and private residences. Hamas combatants often dress as civilians and use civilian infrastructure to conceal movements and ambushes, aiming to bog down Israeli forces in attritional urban combat and amplify international criticism of Israel’s military response.
Instead, Albanese maintains that Israel considers any object that has allegedly been or might be used militarily as a legitimate target, so that entire neighbourhoods can be razed or demolished under fictions of legality. In Israel’s logic, she claims, civilian objects, such as houses and apartments, become military objectives by proximity. In this way, Israel has thus de facto abolished the distinction between civilian objects and military objectives.
The irony of this statement may have escaped Albanese, but it shouldn’t have. It is Hamas that has de facto abolished the distinction between civilian and military objectives, not Israel. It is Hamas whose tunnel network extends into every neighbourhood, every hospital, every school and every mosque in Gaza. It is Hamas that refused to allow Gaza civilians into its tunnels. And it is Hamas that vowed to repeat Oct. 7 “again and again,” thereby forcing Israel to do whatever it takes to ensure Hamas’ destruction.
Albanese’s delusionary view of the Gaza war becomes even more evident when she described the IDF’s “mass evacuation order of 13 October,” when 1.1 million Palestinians were ordered to evacuate northern Gaza in 24 hours to Israeli-designated “safe zones” in the south. This, she noted, was communicated through “at least 23 different airdropped leaflets, social media postings, text messages and recorded phone messages.”
Albanese does not consider these efforts by Israel as evidence that Israel was trying to save civilian lives. For Albanese, these measures didn’t increase safety for civilians; rather, “the sheer scale of evacuations amidst an intense bombing campaign, and the haphazardly communicated safe zones system, along with extended communications blackouts, increased levels of panic, forced displacement and mass killing.” In other words, according to Albanese, Israel’s effort to save civilian lives was evidence of its genocidal intent.
One is forced to conclude that no argument, no amount of exculpatory evidence can dent Albanese’s obsessional contention that Israel intended to commit genocide.
The Amnesty International Report: exculpatory forest, genocidal trees
An even more egregious example of willful intent to hold Israel responsible for genocide came from Amnesty International (AI), another agency with a long history of hostility to the Jewish state. In December 2024, AI issued a long, detailed report that unsurprisingly accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. As meticulous as AI’s report clearly is, upon reading it, and reading previous statements by AI, it’s hard not to conclude that AI had predetermined Israel’s guilt before the report was written.
As noted, AI’s bias long precedes the issuance of this report and was obvious as early as Oct. 7, the day of the massacre, when the organization released a statement headlined “Civilians on both sides paying the price of unprecedented escalation.”
On both sides? This while the slaughter was ongoing and the bodies of those butchered on the kibbutzim and at the Nova Festival were still warm. But the text of the release is even worse, leading with the following: “Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups must make every effort to protect the lives of civilians in today’s outbreak of fighting in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” AI opted to mention Israeli forces first, this on the day of the biggest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. An oversight? Hardly. The next sentence starts as follows: “We are deeply alarmed by the mounting civilian death tolls in Gaza, Israel and the occupied West Bank.” Even on Oct. 7, concern for Gaza came first.
In the same release, Agnes Callamard, AI’s secretary general, then opines that “Israel has a horrific track record of committing war crimes with impunity in previous wars on Gaza.” The release then goes on to note the supposed casualties in Gaza before the murders in Israel, as reported by the Palestinian Ministry of Health (i.e. Hamas).
Given how early this press release was drafted – when it gets around to mentioning Israeli casualties, the death count is only 250, which means it was drafted quite early on the day of the attack – it’s extremely unlikely an accurate death count in Gaza could have been conducted that quickly.
Then the release goes on to address the “root causes” of the events of Oct. 7, as follows; “The root causes of these repeated cycles of violence must be addressed as a matter of urgency. This requires upholding international law and ending Israel’s 16-year-long illegal blockade on Gaza, and all other aspects of Israel’s system of apartheid imposed on all Palestinians.” For Callamard, only root causes that can be attributed to Israel are worthy of mention. Note: The claim that Israel’s blockade of Gaza is illegal has never been established, and the casual reference to Israel’s supposed “system of apartheid” is opinion posing as fact.
AI’s December 2024 report that concluded Israel had committed genocide in Gaza is – like all of AI’s interim reports from Oct. 7 onward – just as much a work of narrative and bias rather than impartial research as its earlier reports, only much longer.
Take, for example, AI’s description of how it arrives at a genocide claim, which it fails to notice applies more appropriately to Hamas’ actions on Oct. 7 than Israel’s subsequent actions. AI notes: “it is widely accepted that genocide may be found to have been committed where the intent is to destroy the group within a geographically limited area. Accordingly, the geographic location of the group and the associated opportunity available to the perpetrator, including the area of the perpetrator’s activity and control, may also be relevant considerations … Importantly, it is not a requirement that the perpetrator actually succeed in destroying the targeted group, either in whole or in part, for genocide to be established.”
The key factor, AI reiterates, is intent. And on this all-important question of intent, AI’s bias and agenda is plain to see. The AI report’s section on intent opens as follows:
“The historical circumstances in which Israel’s actions took place are important context in making this assessment. Israel’s offensive on Gaza occurred in the context of a brutal 57-year-old military occupation of Palestinian territory recently found to be unlawful by the ICJ [note the appeal to an authority hostile to Israel]. It occurred in the context of Israel’s apartheid system, which subjects all Palestinians within Israel and the OPT to an institutionalized regime of oppression and domination. It occurred in the context of a 17-year-old unlawful blockade of Gaza, a key tool through which Israel enforces apartheid in Gaza [curious how Israel’s blockade of Gaza could have “enforced apartheid” in the territory, in which not a single Israeli or jew lived since 2005] and suppresses the population’s human development. All of these demonstrate Israel’s pre-existing animus and attitude towards Palestinians, particularly Palestinians in Gaza.”
The second paragraph telegraphed their bias even more blatantly: “Many Israelis, including government officials and Jewish and other commentators around the world, described the attacks as the bloodiest day against Jewish people since the Holocaust. Others called it “Israel’s Pearl Harbour”, referring to Japan’s surprise attack on a US military base during the Second World War, or “Israel’s 9/11”, comparing the Hamas-led attacks to those perpetrated against the USA on 11 September 2001. Israeli officials would later use such analogies, divorced from the context of apartheid and occupation, [emphasis added to generate international support for their retaliatory military actions and dehumanize Palestinians, presenting the offensive as a fight between “good and evil” and casting Gaza’s population as supporters of Hamas. They repeated slogans evoking the painful memory of the Holocaust, such as “never again” and “never forget”, to justify a response of unprecedented magnitude.
Did Americans consider “the context” of U.S. imperialism in the Muslim world when responding to 9/11 or, for that matter, American imperialism in the Pacific when responding to Pearl Harbor? Was George W. Bush being genocidal when he said “you’re either with us or with the terrorists.” Only narrative-imbued ideologues could imagine leaders of a country speaking otherwise after an attack on the magnitude of Oct. 7.
Yet, like all those who accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza, AI relied on statements by Israeli officials to support its accusations, and, like many of those accusers, referenced the hostile ICJ submission by South Africa that turned statements by Israeli leaders about war aims into calls for genocide.
AI says it “examined evidence of Israeli officials using dehumanizing, racist and derogatory rhetoric against Palestinians prior to 7 October 2023, as well as evidence that such rhetoric escalated significantly following 7 October 2023, bearing in mind the historical and immediate contexts in which they occurred [emphasis added].
If you think AI is referring to the horrors of and reaction to Oct. 7, think again. No, this referred to the mentions of Amalek – a nation that was the enemy of the biblical Israelites – made by Netanyahu, without even a mention of Netanyahu’s claim that Amalek was a reference to Hamas, not to the population of Gaza as a whole.
The failure to prevent calls for genocidal acts by Israeli officials, members of the Knesset and influential public figures, allowed such statements to permeate Israeli society, AI says, and appear to have influenced soldiers in Gaza to echo the words of the Israeli leadership in the aftermath of Oct. 7.
According to AI, an Israeli soldier filmed himself saying on January 30, 2024 that “the Israeli army had killed ‘tens of thousands of the Amalek’, in a reference that clearly did not make any distinction between fighters and civilians.” In their blind adherence to an Israel-hostile narrative, the utterings of a single soldier are worthy of mention as long as it supports the genocide claim.
So convinced were the AI report authors by their own narrative that at times they either failed to see or considered irrelevant evidence that the statements they produced as proof of genocidal intent were obviously nothing of the sort, but rather understandable reactions to horrific scenes by officials. For example, when one minister called Gazans who were loudly and proudly celebrating the Oct. 7 attacks “human beasts,” AI called this a prelude to genocide because it “dehumanized” the population.
When another minister vowed to cut water and electricity until Hamas released the 251 hostages it had taken into Gaza, this too was interpreted by AI as a genocidal threat, when it should be interpreted as a human reaction to a horrible crime. But AI, it seems, expected a “business as usual” approach to Gaza after its leadership had orchestrated a massacre the likes of which Israel had never before experienced.
AI also interpreted this statement on Oct. 10 by then Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant as incitement to genocide. Gallant’s exact words: “Attack everything, take off the gloves, kill everyone who fights us, whether it is one terrorist or a hundred. From the air, from the land, with tanks, with bulldozers… all means. No compromises! Gaza will not return to what it was, and Hamas will not exist.” This does not sound like someone planning a genocide; it sounds like a civilian leader discussing war aims against terrorist combatants.
AI also revealed a particular, almost obsessive interest in not only the statements themselves, but how they were made. According to AI, it “reviewed oral statements, including televised speeches, by Israeli officials in their original language, listening to the speaker’s oral delivery and observing the physical gestures accompanying it. It also reviewed the official translations into English wherever they were available. It wanted to examine the different ways in which the intended audience would have interpreted the statements.”
But no such scrutiny was applied to official statements by Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups that AI reviewed, since these were reviewed only “where relevant to its analysis of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, particularly in the context of its investigations into Israeli air strikes.”
Another pertinent example of AI’s bias and enmity toward Israel can be gleaned from its analysis of a speech Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, made shortly after the Oct. 7 attack. Herzog said: “First of all, we have to understand there’s a state, there’s a state, in a way, that has built a machine of evil right at our doorstep. It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’état, murdering their family members who were in Fatah. There’s a short memory in the world. Israel evacuated Gaza unilaterally in order to show that it is willing to make peace. I was a member of that cabinet. We said to our nation: ‘This will be the Hong Kong of the Middle East.’ Well, reality has turned into a tragedy. OK? Therefore, I must say that this situation impacts the entire vision of people as to their ability to adhere to the same old rhetoric. We are working, operating militarily according to rules of international law. Period. Unequivocally. But we’re at war, we are at war… We are defending our homes. We are protecting our homes. That’s the truth. And then when a nation protects its home, it fights. And we will fight until we break their backbone.”
Does the reader see any genocidal intent in that statement? I don’t. But AI clearly does, and even a subsequent statement by Herzog at the same press conference, during which he clarified that he did not say all Palestinians were legitimate targets and that “there are many innocent Palestinians,” didn’t stop AI from concluding that Herzog was generalizing that “civilians were directly involved in launching attacks against Israelis from their homes.” Even if one accepts that this was what Herzog’s statement meant, it hardly constitutes evidence of genocidal intent.
Herzog subsequently explained that he was referring to “the widespread civilian support in Gaza for the crimes and atrocities of October 7” and that Hamas “operates from the heart of the civilian population everywhere.” Both of these statements are true, but according to AI, Herzog had implicated Gaza’s civilian population, and therefore, contributed to the genocidal atmosphere among the Israeli leadership. AI never mentions that Herzog’s contention was correct: Civilians from Gaza had participated in the Oct. 7 attacks, and large portions of the population did subsequently celebrate it.
To establish genocidal intent, AI referenced the ICJ ruling which holds that “in order to infer the existence of dolus specialis [genocidal intent] from a pattern of conduct, it is necessary and sufficient that this is the only inference that could reasonably be drawn from the acts in question”, meaning that “intent to destroy the group, in whole or in part, must be the only reasonable inference which can be drawn from the pattern of conduct.”
Yet the only way this could be ascribed to Israel is by ignoring all the exculpatory evidence, which is precisely what AI and all of Israel’s other accusers have done.
Because of its blatant hostility toward Israel, AI routinely failed to consider other reasons why an action or a statement may have occurred. For AI, the only possible explanation – virtually always – is genocidal intent.
For example, AI’s investigation into four areas in the “buffer zone” – the town of Khuza’a in Khan Younis governorate; Al-Sureij and Abasan al-Kabira villages, also in Khan Younis governorate; Shuja’iya, one of Gaza City’s largest neighbourhoods; and the area around and east of Al-Bureij and Al-Maghazi refugee camps in Deir al-Balah governorate – found that the extensive destruction of property and agricultural land was carried out after Israeli forces had acquired operational control over the areas.
This, according to AI, meant that “it was not caused as part of the hostilities between the Israeli military and Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups. In these parts of Gaza, structures were deliberately and systematically demolished, apparently without imperative military necessity.” AI therefore unsurprisingly concluded that “these actions should be investigated as a grave breach and war crime of wanton destruction,” not considering for a moment that it might have happened because Israel wanted, justifiably, to create a buffer zone and/or destroy tunnels.
As one reads the report, it becomes more and more clear that the only way AI can reach its conclusions about genocide having been intended and committed is by effectively ignoring the fact that there’s a war going on. For example, AI complains that “even during the temporary pause [which began on November 24 and ended on Dec. 1, 2023], the number of trucks entering Gaza remained far below the pre-7 October 2023 baseline. Meanwhile, Gaza’s economy was grinding to a halt, its domestic food production was collapsing, and its water, sanitation and health systems were being devastated. Consequently, Gaza’s need for imports of essential goods and supplies was far greater than it had been before 7 October 2023.” In other words, AI expected life in Gaza to be routine and normal after Oct. 7 and the justified Israeli invasion it provoked.
AI’s hostility toward Israel also manifests itself through what can only be described as a mocking tone when describing Israeli actions. Perhaps the best example of this is AI’s use of quotation marks around the word evacuation. Israel frequently evacuated civilians in Gaza from areas where fighting or bombing was to occur. The word evacuation occurs in the report more than 140 times. In more than 90 of those times, AI felt compelled to put quotation marks around the term, as if to question whether these actions had actually occurred or to question the motives underlying them.
The AI report chastises the IDF for failing to take all feasible precautions ahead of the attacks, including not giving Palestinian civilians effective prior warnings – “in some cases they did not warn civilians at all and in others they issued inadequate warnings,” AI claims. Yet AI also considers that, given the lack of any guarantees of safety, the repeated “evacuation” orders violate the prohibition of mass forcible transfer. One wonders how AI can square “inadequate” evacuation orders with its charge that the evacuations amounted to mass transfer of civilians.
But AI wasn’t done with its wide-ranging evacuation critiques. The report also claims the Israeli authorities actively endangered the lives of civilians by ordering them to move from one location to another – “like pawns in a chess game” – disregarding the unavailability of the required infrastructure to support them or the inability of humanitarian agencies in Gaza to arrange a meaningful response to every new wave of displacement.
Even if any of these charges – lack of warning, population transfer, and inadequate infrastructure for refugees – contradictory though they may be, prove to be accurate in some cases, it’s still difficult to see how they could be construed as evidence of genocidal intent.
In the report, AI repeatedly uses evidence to charge Israel with genocidal intent that any neutral observer would plainly see is actually exculpatory. For example, the report notes that “the first ‘evacuation’ orders documented by AI were issued through a series of videos published by the Israeli military’s Arabic social media pages ‘instructing’ residents of certain areas to flee ‘for their safety.’ Already on 8 October, the Israeli military was ‘instructing’ residents of certain areas across Gaza to relocate ahead of attacks.”
AI spins these IDF actions negatively to support the genocide narrative – including by the use of mocking quotation marks – when it’s clear that, regardless of the chaotic way these evacuations were handled (this occurred on Oct. 8, let’s remember) these actions actually prove there was no genocidal intent.
AI mocks Israeli “evacuations” and bemoans that they weren’t publicized well enough. One has to wonder how the AI report’s authors convinced themselves of this, when they go on to note that the means of delivery of evacuation notices “included posts by COGAT and the Israeli military’s spokesperson for Arabic media on social media platforms such as X and Facebook, text messages, flyers and airdropped leaflets, as well as an interactive map, accessible through a QR code.”
Missing the exculpatory forest because it was so focused on the genocidal trees, AI identified “59 distinct orders from COGAT that covered a new area or changed the boundaries of an area previously subjected to an ‘evacuation’ order, or that, on several occasions, COGAT failed to issue ‘evacuation’ orders on its Facebook page even though they were posted on the Facebook or X account of the Israeli military’s spokesperson for Arabic media, thus making them inaccessible to a proportion of Gaza’s population.” For AI, factors such as these “contributed to confusion and panic amongst Palestinian civilians in Gaza.” The fact that these orders, imperfect though they may have been, entirely negate the notion of genocidal intent never seems to have even occurred to the authors of the report.
AI also focused on minor issues while ignoring whether factors other than genocidal intent could have motivated actions by the IDF. For example, on October 21, 2023, the Israeli military dropped leaflets on northern Gaza, which warned that “anyone who chooses not to leave the north of the [Gaza] Strip to south of Wadi Gaza may be determined an accomplice in a terrorist organization.” As the news spread, causing a public outcry on social media, the Israeli military clarified on its official account on X that it had “no intention of considering those who have yet to evacuate as a member of a terrorist group.”
AI said that the IDF falsely stated that the translation of the warning from Arabic “was imprecise”. But even if the English translation of the warning from Arabic was correct, it’s difficult to see how genocidal intent can be discerned from a call for evacuation before a strike.
Other extraneous actions – like the IDF’s naming of the Netzarim corridor, the name Israel uses to refer to a linear military zone established by the IDF from the east of the Gaza Strip to the sea coast, are explained as follows: “It is named after Netzarim, one of the unlawful Israeli settlements that existed in Gaza before the Israeli ‘disengagement’ in 2005.”
There was no reason to provide background to the name Netzarim, other than as a reminder about Israel’s occupation, which ended in 2005. More egregiously, the use of the quotation marks around disengagement tells us that AI believes that because of the Israeli blockade instituted as an effort to keep weapons from entering Gaza after Hamas’ election in 2006, the Israeli exit from Gaza wasn’t really a disengagement at all, when in fact, Israel removed all settlements and even cemeteries from Gaza. Presumably, for AI to believe Israel had truly disengaged, it would have had to have an open border with an entity sworn to its destruction.
Given such blatant blindness driven by hostility, it isn’t surprising that AI mentions “four large-scale Israeli offensives between 2008 and 2021,’ but failed to note that these so-called “offensives” were in fact reactions to unprovoked hostilities initiated by Hamas or other Gazan armed groups in the form of indiscriminate rocket bombardments of Israeli towns and cities.
The AI report also demonstrates a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” attitude toward the IDF and the Israeli government. For example, AI also manages to blame Israel for the looting of food aid by Hamas and others in Gaza. The report states that “Humanitarian workers who spoke with AI also acknowledged aid diversion and looting as two of the multiple obstacles they faced while attempting to deliver supplies and services inside Gaza. They described ‘self-distribution,’ referring to instances of hungry and desperate people in Gaza stopping aid trucks, removing their contents, and handing the aid out among themselves. They explained that the minimal, inconsistent and unpredictable volume of aid that entered and moved around Gaza increased people’s desperation. Humanitarian officials distinguished ‘self-distribution’ from attacks on aid convoys by organized gangs, which became a major impediment to their ability to bring aid into Gaza.”
Aside from the fact that many of the humanitarian workers who become UN sources are never investigated further to determine if they’ve been compromised by or work for Hamas, it’s more evidence that AI refuses to consider “the fog of war,” for anything that goes wrong, preferring instead to blame Israeli genocidal intent, even for actions like “self-distribution” and attacks on aid convoys by Gaza civilians, armed gangs, or Hamas itself.
The AI report also is found wanting in terms of its sourcing. While its footnoting appears impressive at first glance – with more than 1000 footnotes supporting its claims – upon closer examination many of the footnotes reference previous AI reports that suffer from the same bias and hostility toward Israel. In some cases, AI uses its own earlier conclusions as references.
For example, AI noted that “while Israel claimed that its sanctions were aimed at the ‘Hamas regime,’ and that ‘humanitarian aspects relevant to the Gaza Strip’ would be taken into consideration in order to ‘avoid a humanitarian crisis,’ they were, in fact, collectively punishing Gaza’s entire civilian population in what amounts to a war crime,” a conclusion AI reached in an earlier report and now uses as a reference for its claims.
AI also relies heavily on biased media news reports and data from agencies just as hostile to Israel as AI, and often uses the conclusions from those reports as evidence of Israeli genocidal intent. For example, using Israeli air strikes on 7 October 2023 (7 October!) and 20 April 2024, AI notes that the cases demonstrate a broader pattern of violations of international humanitarian law “as illustrated by the conclusions of other human rights organizations.”
AI also relies heavily on media reports; statements, reports and datasets published by UN agencies, including OCHA, whose daily reports clearly state that the figures provided “cannot be verified,” as they come from the “Palestinian Ministry of Health” (i.e. Hamas); the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA, whose infiltration by Hamas has been well documented); the World Health Organization (WHO) and humanitarian organizations operating in Gaza; as well as Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups,” most if not all of whom share the same anti-Israel bias as AI (including some Israeli human rights groups, such as B’tselem).
In addition to using unverified data and conclusions from other biased or unreliable sources, AI makes inferences that don’t exist in the very source materials they reference. For example, in their Dec. 5 investigation of five IDF attacks, AI labelled the attacks “unlawful,” without citing any adjudication that would indicate whether the attacks were lawful or not. Instead, AI relied on “eyewitness accounts” from “trusted fieldworkers based in Gaza to identify or locate survivors, victims and other witnesses among the Palestinian population in Gaza, document preliminary information, collect and analyze photographic evidence and make observations during field visits.”
In other words, AI took the word of individuals from Gaza as the source of much of its information, without noting whether or not these individuals had ties to Hamas. Even if these reports were accurate, which is questionable, the sources are in no position to determine whether an action is lawful or not.
AI also cites advisory opinions by hostile bodies to support its contentions. For example, the authors of the report “examined publicly available material relating to South Africa’s case against Israel at the ICJ,” which noted that Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip has not entirely released it of its “obligations under the law of occupation. Israel’s obligations have remained commensurate with the degree of its effective control over the Gaza Strip.” This is not evidence of anything. It’s simply an assertion being supported by another assertion from a similarly hostile actor.
Throughout the report, AI is very inventive in terms of new ways to blame Israel for whatever it can. For example, the AI report cites an Oxfam report – another example of the self-referential nature of evidence shared by HR organizations – which notes that food aid was entering Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing, but that this food was “often sold at inflated prices that people cannot afford”. Oxfam is duly cited in the footnote, but neither Oxfam nor AI seems particularly interested in finding out who was actually selling the food (it’s unlikely it was the IDF).
Finally, throughout the report, the implication is always that Israel should cease hostilities, not Hamas. It’s as though Hamas is invisible, as no responsibility for anything is ever assigned to the organization that initiated the war, that does nothing to protect its citizens, and at the time the report was issued, was holding more than 100 Israeli and other hostages.
AI’s report was swiftly followed by a similar report from Human Rights Watch, another organization long hostile to Israel. But more damage that would be cited by Israel’s enemies was provided a few months later by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, which issued a statement labelling Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide, and then by a UN Commission of Inquiry, which found the same.
