No event in recent history better illustrates the adage that “a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on” than the war in Gaza. It began on October 7, 2023, with the attack on southern Israel by Hamas, the Islamic fundamentalist group that effectively governed Gaza at that time. Almost immediately after the attack took place, the charge that Israel was committing genocide began circulating. It has gained such wide acceptance that American public officials and candidates for public office have taken to repeating it as if it were a fact.
It is not a fact. The charge is false. Israel conducted its Gaza campaign with greater fidelity to long-accepted international ethical and legal standards than any other country ever has. True, terrible crimes were committed on October 7 and afterward, but they were committed by Hamas, not by Israel. Accepting and repeating the false charge against Israel lends legitimacy to Hamas’s crimes and thereby encourages similar horrific criminal activity in the future.
Genocide is defined as killing “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such.” It has, that is, two parts: the intent to kill people because they are members of a particular group, and the actual large-scale killing of them, which judicial commentary has emphasized must involve a substantial part of that group. The German Nazis’ murder of six million Jews during World War II fits that definition.
The Israeli war in Gaza does not. It does not come close to fulfilling either condition. The Israeli government made it clear, both by what it said and what it did, that it was fighting Hamas, not the Palestinian people as a whole. The death toll of Palestinians is uncertain, but even accepting the highest plausible estimate it amounts to only a small fraction – about three percent (a large proportion of whom were combatants)– of Gaza’s total population and less than one percent of all Palestinians everywhere, in no small part because Israel went to extraordinary lengths to spare civilians. By comparison, the Nazis killed about two-thirds of Europe’s Jews.
In his indispensable 2026 book Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law, the American federal judge Roy K. Altman compares Israel’s war in Gaza with mass killings widely considered genocidal: the murder of 6 million Jews between 1939 and 1945; the slaughter of 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians by the communist Khmer Rouge government of that country between 1974 and 1979; and the massacre of 900,000 ethnic Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda between April 7 and July 19, 1994. Judge Altman shows that the Gaza war had none of the four distinguishing features of these genocidal episodes: a top-down policy of eliminating the designated group, a dedicated architecture of mass murder, the absence of any legal restraints on killing, and a massive disproportion of civilian to military casualties. None of these was remotely present in Israel’s Gaza war. In fact, and in stark contrast to genuine episodes of genocide, Israel agreed to several ceasefires for the purpose of repatriating, from captivity under inhumane conditions in Gaza, Israeli hostages – the seizure of whom by Hamas happens to be a crime.
Moreover, the people who qualify as Palestinians were not and are not confined to Gaza. In addition to the 2.2 million who live there, about 3.5 million live in the West Bank – the territory between the 1949 ceasefire lines and the Jordan River — whom Israel could, if it had been bent on genocide, have attacked and killed, but did not. The current Israeli government’s policies in the West Bank are controversial, not least among Israelis, but the controversy has nothing to do with the accusation of genocide.
Perhaps the strongest piece of evidence among the multitude of them that refute the charge of genocide is the status of the two million Arabs living within the pre-1967 borders of Israel. They are as fully Palestinian as the Gazans. They are entirely under the control of the Israeli government. What treatment have they received? They are full citizens of the state of Israel, with the right to vote in free and fair elections — making them the only Arabs in the Middle East who enjoy that right. They form political parties, serve in the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) and receive government-funded health care and education, just as Israeli Jews do. This is, to say the least, an odd way to go about committing genocide against them.
Purveyors of the false charge of genocide against Israel sometimes cite allegedly authoritative bodies as the sources for the charge. Here, too, the reality tells a different story. The self-described human rights organization Amnesty International, for example, has accused Israel of genocide by changing the accepted definition. It dropped the requirement of intent, being unable to demonstrate it because it did not exist.
South African lawyers submitted a claim of genocide against Israel to the International Court of Justice, which ruled that Palestinians are entitled to be protected against genocide but has never ruled that Israel actually committed it or even that the claim is plausible. The International Association of Genocide Scholars voted in favor of a resolution charging Israel with genocide; but only about twenty-five percent of the membership supported the resolution and the criterion for membership in the Association is not a track record of rigorous scholarly publication on the subject of genocide but rather the willingness to pay the annual dues. In sum, the purportedly authoritative pronouncements that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza are bogus.
The words and deeds of Hamas, by contrast, do fulfill the first part of the definition of genocide. Its killing of as many Israelis as it could, including women and children, on October 7, the content of its founding Charter, and numerous proclamations by its senior officials before and after that date leave no doubt that it intended, and continues to intend, to destroy the state of Israel and, in furtherance of that goal, to murder as many of its Jewish citizens as possible. It did not succeed in carrying out the second part of the definition – killing a large proportion of the Israeli population – because of the efforts of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which makes the IDF the only successful genocide-prevention organization known to history.
Thus, Israel did not commit genocide in Gaza; but it did wage a war there, and that war, like all wars, is subject to ethical assessment. What does such an assessment reveal about Israel’s Gazan military operations?
A centuries-long legal, religious, and philosophical tradition in the West holds that two ethical norms govern, or ought to govern, warfare. The first, known by the Latin phrase jus ad bellum, involves the goals for which wars are fought. The second, jus in bello, has to do with the way military forces pursue those goals. On both counts, Israel conformed scrupulously to what the laws of war require, arguably more scrupulously than any other country ever has. By contrast, Hamas blatantly, systematically, and deliberately violated both, making it guilty of war crimes.
The most clearly legitimate reason for going to war, one that finds universal acceptance, is self-defense. That is a basic principle – perhaps the basic principle – of international law. Beginning on October 7, Israel fought to defend itself. It had terminated completely its presence in Gaza in 2006, removing its troops, its settlements, and even its graves. Hamas took control there and eleven years later launched its October 7 attack. Without it, there would have been no war. By any reading of international law, Israel had the right to defend itself by force against Hamas.
If Israel’s actions unambiguously conformed to the requirement of jus ad bellum, those of Hamas clearly violated it. The Palestinian group engaged in cross-border aggression, which the Western ethical tradition prohibits. In international legal terms, Hamas did to Israel on October 7, 2023, what Nazi Germany did to Poland on September 1, 1939, and what Vladimir Putin’s Russia did to Ukraine on February 24, 2022: it invaded a neighboring country with the intent to destroy it. That is a war crime, one of which several Nazi officials were found guilty after World War II and for which they were then executed.
Still, even a country engaged in legal and legitimate self-defense, as Israel was, must, according to the traditional ethical rules of war, defend itself in proper ways. Or, more accurately, it must avoid defending itself in improper ways. Here again, in the Gaza war Israel passed the test of jus in bello while Hamas conspicuously and indeed intentionally failed it.
The major rule governing the conduct of war is the avoidance, as far as possible, of civilian casualties. The Gaza war presented Israel with two challenges in abiding by this norm. First, the fighting took place in crowded urban areas. Wherever and whenever such wars have been waged, they have taken a heavy toll in civilian noncombatants. Second, Hamas placed military equipment and fighters in or beneath civilian facilities – houses, schools, mosques, hospitals – in order to maximize the number of civilian deaths and injuries, which counts as another war crime.
Israel took the opposite approach. It adopted measures to minimize harm to non-Hamas Gazans. When about to attack a civilian area in which Hamas military forces were present, the Israeli government warned the people in the area – through tens of millions of emails, leaflets, social media posts, and telephone calls – that an attack was coming. Israel designated safe areas to which civilians could go to avoid forthcoming military operations. The IDF also embedded with its forces legal experts who vetted proposed targets in real time and sometimes called off planned attacks because of the danger they posed to noncombatant Gazans.
By forfeiting the military advantage of surprise through such advance notification, as well as by canceling what would have been militarily effective attacks in order to spare civilians, Israel put its own soldiers at higher risk than they would otherwise have been. History offers few if any other examples of countries at war ready to sacrifice the lives of their own troops in order to comply with international law. The Israeli government also ensured food shipments to Gazans — press reports of famine there were fabricated, although Hamas did steal a good deal of the aid – and even interrupted the war to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza against polio.
Civilians did die in Gaza, but perhaps half of all Arabs killed there were not civilians but rather active Hamas combatants, although they ordinarily did not wear uniforms so as to blend in with the civilian population. Israel was clearly targeting Hamas but was not able, because of the location of the war as well as because of Hamas’s efforts, to avoid all noncombatants. Given this fact, an assessment of Israel’s compliance with the demands of jus in bello depends on the ratio of civilian to military deaths. In Gaza, the best estimates put it at between 1 and 1.5 to 1. In other, comparable conflicts the ratios were far higher. American military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq are estimated to have cost 4 or 5 civilian deaths for every combatant killed. Other, similar conflicts reached ratios as high as 9 or 10 to 1. According to Major John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, in Gaza “Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history – above and beyond what international law requires and more than the United States did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Hamas, for its part, bears ultimate responsibility for all deaths, civilian and military, on October 7 and thereafter because it began the war. During the fighting, it violated the basic norm of noncombatant immunity that governs the conduct of war in two ways. It murdered Israeli civilians; and it caused the deaths of Gazan non-combatants by making them military targets through its policy of surrounding them with military infrastructure. In addition, Hamas built, at great cost, several hundred miles of underground tunnels in Gaza, beneath hospitals, schools, and residential blocks, which it used to shelter its personnel and its weaponry. Had Gazan civilians been able to take shelter in them, they, too, would have enjoyed some protection from the war; but Hamas prevented Arab noncombatants from doing so. Deliberately causing the death of civilians is a war crime, and Hamas committed this crime on a large scale.
It did so for the purpose of falsely blaming Israel for civilian deaths and thus contributing to the demonization of the Jewish state in the West. In this it has succeeded, the mark of its success being the wide dissemination of the myth that Israeli is responsible for genocide. Those propagating it are, wittingly or not, validating Hamas’s pernicious tactics and thereby acting as its allies and accomplices. This will have consequences. It will encourage Hamas to persist in its campaign to destroy Israel by employing the tactics it used on October 7 and thereafter. It may also encourage other, similar groups to make use of these tactics.
Albert Camus, the French Nobel laureate in literature, once said: “False ideas always end in bloodshed, but it is always other people’s blood. That is why some of our intellectuals feel free to say just about anything.” Substitute for intellectuals (in French philosophes) the Westerners who propagate the charge of genocide against Israel and his words apply to the present case. The false charge – or, to call it by its proper name, the lie – that Israel committed crimes in Gaza, including the worst crime of all, genocide, supports the perpetuation of the criminal project that Hamas exists to carry out: the slaughter of innocent Jews and Arabs.
