Debunking genocide allegations against Israel
On Aug. 31, the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a “Resolution on the Situation in Gaza.” It declared that “Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in Article II of the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948)” and “constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity as defined in international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.”
One reason that it is difficult to trust the International Association of Genocide Scholars’ resolution is that according to IAGS’ own website its members are not all and perhaps even primarily genocide scholars. Rather, they include “academic scholars, human rights activists, students, museum and memorial professionals, policymakers, educators, anthropologists, independent scholars, sociologists, artists, political scientists, economists, historians, international law scholars, psychologists, and literature and film scholars.” If the IAGS cannot be trusted to accurately characterize its membership, why should one trust its assessments of genocide, the gravest charge that can be leveled at a nation?
Nonetheless, one must take seriously the IAGS resolution because it echoes an accusation ricocheting around the globe and amplified by, among others, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, and the Associated Press.
The accusation is old news. The demonizers flung the genocide charge against Israel from the early days of its ground campaign against Iran-backed Hamas in Gaza. On Oct. 7, 2023, the jihadists invaded Israel and perpetrated a gruesome massacre of some 1,200 persons and kidnapped 251, mostly civilians. A few weeks later, the Israel Defense Forces entered Gaza to destroy Hamas’ ability to wage war and govern as well as to rescue the hostages. After almost 23 months, the IDF has severely weakened Hamas and returned 203 hostages, 148 alive; 48, living and dead, remain in Hamas’ hands.
Already by autumn 2023, the accusation of genocide against Israel – advanced by many Palestinians, left-wing intellectuals, and university students – was old news. The accusation had been hurled at the Jewish state for nearly 40 years, since at least the outbreak in 1987 of the First Intifada. At the 2001 UN-backed Durban Conference Against Racism, delegates approved a declaration accusing Israel of “war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing.” In the mid-2000s, some Palestinians and Middle East scholars argued that Israel’s genocidal actions stretched back to 1948, when the newborn country repelled five invading Arab armies that sought to eradicate it. Israel’s three-week Dec. 2008–Jan. 2009 Operation Cast Lead, and its seven-week summer of 2014 Operation Protective Edge also triggered charges of genocide. In December 2023, South Africa brought a case to the International Court of Justice contending that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza; the ICJ’s provisional ruling found South Africa’s contention “plausible.”
Yet during the almost four decades since the First Intifada launched the fashion of decrying Israel for perpetrating genocide against the Palestinians, the total Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza has grown far more rapidly than any major national population in the Western world. In 1987, West Bank and Gaza Palestinians numbered approximately 1.5 million to 1.8 million. Since then, their numbers have about tripled to around 5 million or more.
If Israel’s critics are to be trusted, then – as several commentators have observed – despite possessing the Middle East’s most powerful military, Israel must be history’s most incompetent practitioner of genocide.
Those who condemn Israel for perpetrating genocide, however, should not be trusted.
One compelling reason for distrusting Israel’s accusers is that they ride roughshod over genocide’s legal definition. The 1948 “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Genocide does not mean, as Israel’s vilifiers often imply, killing too many noncombatants. It means killing with a specific intent: the “intent to destroy” a people or a portion of them. Genocide also means killing members of a group “as such” – not because they are noncombatants caught up in the crossfire of war but owing to their membership in a particular group. Israel’s accusers highlight anguished and vengeful statements of Israeli office holders in the hours and days following Hamas’ Oct. 7 barbarism, and inflammatory opinions expressed by government ministers representing the religious ultra-nationalist bloc of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. But the accusers usually don’t even attempt to establish the elements crucial to the charge of genocide, which would involve demonstrating that the IDF’s Gaza rules of engagement aim at destroying the Palestinian people, in whole or in part, because they are Palestinians.
Another reason for distrusting the accusers is that they eschew hard evidence in favor of knee-jerk reactions, heart-rending images, and sophisticated propaganda campaigns. This is an inescapable conclusion of “Debunking the Genocide Allegations: A Reexamination of the Israel-Hamas War from October 7, 2023 to June 1, 2025.” Originally published in Hebrew by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University and recently appearing in English, the BESA report is empirically grounded, historically informed, heavily documented, legally rigorous, and soberly argued.
Four authors with diverse but complementary expertise collaborated to produce the 300-plus-page report: military historian and Hebrew University professor Danny Orbach; quantitative-analysis specialist Dr. Jonathan Boxman; Dr. Yagil Henkin, a military historian at Shalem College and the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security; and international-laws-of-war lawyer Jonathan Braverman. The authors “address the claims that Israel intentionally starved the Gazan population, that IDF ground forces deliberately massacred civilians, and that the Israeli Air Force (IAF) carried out indiscriminate bombings, failing to distinguish between combatants and civilians and conducting disproportionate strikes.” Without minimizing Gaza’s humanitarian crisis, they conclude that these claims are false.
Their extensive investigation yields several key findings.
First, spurious accusations that Israel engaged in the deliberate starvation of Gaza’s civilian population through March 25, 2025, were based on “false assumptions,” “inaccurate information,” and “erroneous data.” According to the authors, “throughout most of the war more provisions were delivered into Gaza than prior to Oct. 7, by a margin greater than any credible estimates of loss of Gazan agricultural production.” Nevertheless, and without minimizing Israel’s military considerations, the authors “strongly criticize” the government’s halting of aid to Gaza from late March to late May 2025.
Second, persistent disregard of Hamas’ aims and tactics wrongly shifts blame for the Gaza carnage from the jihadists to Israel. Yet by its own accounts, Hamas “consistently uses Gazan civilians as ‘human shields’ to deliberately increase casualties and, in turn, amplify international pressure on Israel.” In addition, “Hamas has used civilian homes, hospitals, and schools to store weapons, launch rockets, house combatants, and establish operational positions.” And the jihadists “wear civilian clothing to blend in with the population in areas designated as ‘safer’ or in humanitarian zones.”
Third, there is no credible evidence that Israel adopted a policy of deliberately targeting civilians. The authors’ extensive examination of the claims against Israel did turn up a number of civilian deaths that may involve war crimes – of the sort typical of military conflicts and particularly of comparable warfare in densely populated urban areas.
Fourth, there is no credible evidence that the IDF deliberately bombed civilians and civilian infrastructure. The authors “identify a significant number of tragic cases where innocent civilians were killed, some of which raise concerns about negligence, lack of caution, or even disregard for human life.” However, the IDF “employed numerous protective measures to minimize ‘collateral damage,’” including several that “are unprecedented in global military history and have come at a significant cost to the IDF, particularly in terms of losing military advantages such as the element of surprise.”
Fifth, widely cited casualty data disseminated by Hamas’ Gaza Ministry of Health are inherently defective. The data come from jihadists dedicated to Israel’s annihilation, combine noncombatant and combatant deaths, and use dubious media coverage to exaggerate the deaths of women and children.
Sixth, UN agencies, human-rights organizations, and scholars systematically err about Palestinian casualties and Israeli operations. Impelled by “humanitarian bias,” they embrace “alarmist reports” about Palestinians. They lack the means to accurately distinguish noncombatant and combatant casualties in a society subject to Hamas’ authoritarian rule. And while credulously accepting Palestinian claims, they demand absurdly stringent standards of proof from democratic Israel.
In refuting the allegations that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, the BESA report generally sticks to the facts and avoids policy questions. It makes an exception concerning the abuse of the term genocide.
“If all high-intensity urban military conflicts in the future – despite significant efforts to protect civilian lives – are labeled as acts of genocide simply because of the immense human suffering they cause,” the authors write, “the outcome will be fundamentally contrary to the objectives of International Humanitarian Law.”
That future has arrived. Countering the malicious and meritless genocide charges against Israel is vital not only to ensuring the Jewish state’s right to defend itself but also to preventing genocide’s devaluation in a world in which resurgent authoritarian powers are only too ready to perpetrate the most heinous of atrocities.