October 20, 2026
Israel is not and never was committing genocide in Gaza, and labeling its military campaign and actions “genocide” is inaccurate, misleading, and dangerous.
After Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups murdered more than 1,200 Israelis and abducted 251 hostages on October 7, 2023, Israel launched a military campaign aimed at dismantling Hamas, securing the release of the hostages, and removing the terrorist threat from Gaza. As the war unfolded, devastating images of suffering in Gaza spread around the world. So did the accusation that Israel was committing genocide.
The suffering of Gaza’s civilians is tragic and deserves serious attention. But “genocide” is a specific legal term. It requires intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such. Civilian deaths, even on a terrible scale, do not by themselves establish genocide.
Israel’s military objective is to dismantle Hamas and remove the terrorist threat from Gaza—not to destroy the Palestinian people. It has also taken steps to reduce civilian harm and facilitate humanitarian aid while fighting an enemy that operates from within densely populated civilian areas.
The genocide accusation also risks obscuring Hamas’ role in the suffering of Gaza’s civilians. Its October 7 attack triggered the war, and its practice of embedding military infrastructure among civilians has made the conflict especially dangerous for Gaza’s population.
The accusation carries particular weight for Jews, whose people endured the Holocaust—the systematic murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. But this debate must ultimately rest on evidence, not historical analogy or political rhetoric.
Facts at a Glance
Five quick facts: why calling Israel’s actions in Gaza “genocide” is wrong.
- Genocide requires intent to destroy a people. Israel’s objective is to dismantle Hamas and remove the terrorist threat from Gaza—not to destroy the Palestinian people.
- Israel has taken steps to limit civilian harm. Its efforts to warn civilians, facilitate evacuations, and provide humanitarian assistance do not reconcile with an intent to destroy Gaza’s population.
- Hamas has deliberately put Palestinian civilians in harm’s way. By operating from homes, schools, hospitals, and other civilian areas, the terror group has made civilian harm far more likely during Israeli military operations, despite Israel’s best efforts to prevent civilian casualties.
- Civilian deaths in a war do not automatically constitute genocide. International law permits military operations against legitimate targets even when civilian casualties are expected, provided the anticipated harm is not clearly excessive in relation to the military advantage. While tragic, civilian deaths are often a reality of war.
- No international court has ruled that Israel committed genocide. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is still considering South Africa’s case and has not yet made a final decision on the allegation.
Go deeper: Here’s the evidence and context behind each of these arguments.
1. “Genocide” refers to the physical destruction of an entire group in whole or in part that has been targeted on the basis of its identity. This was not Israel’s objective in Gaza.
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent, introduced the term genocide in 1944 to refer to events including the Nazis’ systematic extermination of Jews.
Lemkin explained the need for a new legal term to describe this horror, saying: “there has been no serious endeavor hitherto to prevent and punish the murder and destruction of millions.... there was not even an adequate name for such a phenomenon.”
The United Nations General Assembly recognized genocide as a crime under international law in 1946, and it was codified in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948.
The Convention defines genocide as the commission of grave harm against members of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group - such as by killing, causing serious physical or mental harm, inflicting conditions that bring about physical destruction, imposing measures to prevent births, or forcibly taking away children - with the intent to destroy the group as such.
Genocide means targeting members of a group because of their group identity and not something they are individually thought to have done.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ), a body created by the UN Charter that has formal responsibility for resolving disputes between States about the Genocide Convention, has determined in past cases that in order to establish that an actor inflicted harm with genocidal intent, this must be the “only reasonable inference” that can be drawn from the circumstances. The fact that a civilian population has experienced substantial harm does not necessarily mean that genocide has occurred; to satisfy the very high threshold of genocidal intent, it must be shown that actions resulting in harm were not undertaken for other reasons, including self-defense.
2. Israel’s actions in Gaza reflected a desire to limit incidental harm to Palestinian civilians, not to deliberately harm them
Following the October 7 attacks, Israeli officials with responsibility for military planning stressed that Israel’s war was against Hamas terrorists, not the Palestinian people, nor the Palestinian population of Gaza, which would be required in order to correctly apply the term “genocide.” The IDF’s subsequent practices also disprove claims of genocidal intent.
Throughout the war, the Israeli military repeatedly relocated Palestinian civilians within Gaza in an effort to limit their exposure to harm as it undertook its legitimate campaign to destroy Hamas’s extensive terrorist infrastructure.
At the start of the war, Israel called for the temporary evacuation of the local population in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, and delayed its ground operation in Gaza for weeks to allow civilians time to heed Israel’s warnings. It went to great lengths to designate safe routes for Palestinian civilians to relocate from northern Gaza.
As the conflict progressed, even as Hamas continued to pressure civilians to ignore Israel’s warnings and used hospitals, schools, and other civilian infrastructure as cover for its operations, the IDF continued to endeavor to warn and allow Gazan civilians to evacuate prior to attacks on Hamas targets in many instances.
Even the most controversial of practices reportedly employed by the IDF to identify targets and assess the potential that civilians in close proximity to military targets might be harmed demonstrate that the IDF’s intention was precisely to distinguish between fighters and civilians rather than to indiscriminately target Palestinians as such.
During the conflict, Israeli authorities at times suspended or reduced the entry of humanitarian aid to Gaza to prevent Hamas from diverting aid or controlling its distribution to reinforce its authority. Certain policies affecting aid delivery came under intense international criticism, and some actors made controversial claims about the extent of malnutrition and deaths from starvation that occurred in parts of Gaza during the war, which suffer from serious evidentiary flaws. Israel repeatedly altered its approach to aid delivery and eased restrictions, both prior to Hamas’ agreement to a ceasefire and the return of all Israeli hostages and after. Israel’s continued facilitation of humanitarian assistance during an active military campaign is inconsistent with the claim that its objective was to destroy Gaza’s Palestinian population.
3. Israel’s military campaign in Gaza was in response to a genocidal attack by Hamas
On October 7, 2023, the terrorist organization Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups carried out an unprecedented and brutal massacre against Israel’s people, its targets including infants, children, elderly, and disabled people. As confirmed by the UN Secretary-General in a 2025 report, Hamas used sexual violence as a tactical weapon of war during and after the October 7 attack, across geographic locations, and against hostages in captivity.
Substantial evidence gathered in the aftermath of the October 7 terror attack indicates that Hamas intended for and instructed its operatives to use extreme brutality against all Israelis, soldiers and civilians alike. This includes evidence that Hamas commanders shared dehumanizing claims and edicts by extremist religious scholars calling for the killing of Jews with the perpetrators of the attack against Israel, including documents reportedly describing Jews as a “disease without a cure” that must be exterminated and justifying the killing of Jewish civilians. This is the sort of evidence that is indicative of genocidal intent.
Although some Hamas leaders subsequently denied that Israeli civilians were intended targets of the attack, they also reiterated their intention to launch "a second, a third, a fourth" attack until Israel is "annihilated.”
Even today, while Israel has significantly degraded Hamas’ capacity to threaten Israelis, the group still retains control over roughly 47 percent of Gaza. This is despite Hamas’ agreement to disarm and relinquish governance in Gaza, which it has yet to do.
4. Hamas’ actions were designed to cause harm to Palestinian civilians and blame Israel
In the months that followed the October 7 attacks, Hamas fired thousands of missiles on Israeli towns and cities. Those missiles were fired from civilian neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip, and from inside, next to, and underneath nominally civilian areas in Gaza like residential buildings, schools, mosques, and hospitals. For example, Hamas has used Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, as a terror command center and to hold hostages.
Hamas’ actions transformed what were once protected civilian sites into legitimate military targets that Israeli forces were justified in working to dismantle and deliberately placed Palestinian civilians directly in the path of the IDF’s targets. Throughout the conflict, Hamas repeatedly called on Palestinian civilians to ignore Israel’s warnings about impending strikes and reportedly forced civilians to remain in the vicinity of military objectives, using them, like its hostages from Israel, as human shields.
Hamas’ actions were not only aimed at protecting its leaders, weapons, and property but also at vying for leverage in the public opinion war by inflating the number of civilian casualties.
Through its actions in Gaza, Hamas greatly increased the likelihood that military actions by Israel would result in some harm to civilians. However, international law does not prohibit parties to armed conflict from undertaking legitimate actions that will likely result in civilian harm unless the expected civilian harm will clearly exceed the anticipated military advantage from the attack.
While Israel took many steps to minimize civilian harm resulting from its attacks against Hamas targets, in the exceptionally difficult circumstances created by Hamas’ tactics, incidental harm to civilians was a likely result. This is a tragic outcome of war, and one that was exponentially enhanced by Hamas’ tactics, but it is not genocide.
5. The facts of the genocide charge don’t add up
Those who claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza not only misunderstand the legal definition of genocide and what the laws of war permit; they also base the charge on unsubstantiated claims.
In the months that followed the October 7 attacks, the genocide charge against Israel became the subject of a spurious accusation filed by South Africa at the International Court of Justice, permeated scholarly discourse, social media, and anti-Israel protests, was repeated in reports by UN-appointed independent ‘experts’ and numerous NGOs, and was echoed by an independent Commission of Inquiry (COI) established by the United Nations Human Rights Council.
Unfortunately, each of these purportedly serious examinations of Israel’s conduct in Gaza suffers from serious flaws. One of the most pervasive is that they assume Israel deliberately targeted civilians and civilian structures in countless situations in which such damage occurred, when it is undisputed that Hamas controlled the information environment in Gaza and created conditions in which it is not possible for independent assessments to determine whether the IDF had a military justification - for example, whether a Hamas leader, tunnel, and/or weapons cache was present - at the site of any specific attack in Gaza. In many situations where Israel has provided evidence, it has been discounted.
The same “independent” analysts that readily assume that all civilians killed in Gaza were deliberately targeted by the IDF are often also willing to uncritically accept information on the identity and role played by those killed in the conflict by the Ministry of Health in Gaza, an entity that is under the control of and susceptible to influence by Hamas, and does not separate innocent civilians from fighters in its announced death tolls.
A key example of the risks inherent in trusting such data is the explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, which the U.S. and other governments determined was caused by a failed rocket fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad and not, as Hamas, the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health in Gaza, and many other sources claimed, by the IDF.
To date, notwithstanding claims to the contrary by activists and politicians, no actor with the legal authority to make such a determination has weighed in on the genocide accusation against Israel. The ICJ has formal authority to determine if Israel is violating the Genocide Convention, even though its judgments are not beyond criticism. In contrast, the function of independent UN ‘experts’ like those appointed to the COI is purely advisory; they do not speak on behalf of the United Nations or its Secretariat.
The ICJ’s proceedings are complex and lengthy. Although it has issued several preliminary decisions in response to requests for “provisional measures” (akin to restraining orders) made by South Africa in 2024 and 2025, it will not reach a decision on the merits of the genocide claim against Israel until 2029 at the earliest.
While some of those who claim Israel is engaged in genocide in Gaza are doing so for malign purposes - for example, to justify Hamas' October 7 massacre by claiming Israel is ‘worse,’ many others have been deliberately misled. Their goal of ending the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza would be far better advanced by acknowledging Hamas’ role and interest in enhancing that suffering, and supporting efforts to ensure it is fully disarmed and unable to exercise control in Gaza ever again.
