The ubiquitous and outrageous lie that Israel committed a “genocide” in Gaza has been further debunked, inadvertently, by Hamas itself. The Israelis have prosecuted an aggressive yet defensive war after their territory was breached by hordes of bloodthirsty terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023. The barbarian invaders slaughtered nearly 1,200 people during the atrocity, including dozens of Americans, and seized hundreds of hostages. They documented much of it on video, some of it streamed live. They wielded sexual violence as a weapon, which even an investigation by the anti-Israel United Nations has confirmed, to the chagrin of the ghoulish rape denialists.
Hamas started the war with an orgy of violence against civilians, reportedly with an explicit blessing and assistance from the Iranian regime, with an eye toward derailing further peace agreements between the Jewish state and additional Muslim-majority nations in the region.
For years, Hamas repeatedly refused to end the war it initiated by simply releasing the surviving hostages and disarming. Its fanatical intransigence kept the deadly war raging. The group used an elaborate tunnel system it built (by misappropriating international aid) under Gaza to shield itself from Israeli bombs, while denying similar protection to Palestinian civilians, whom it exploited as human shields. Hamas used hospitals (even Doctors Without Borders has admitted this, terribly belatedly), schools, and mosques for terrorist purposes.
This was no coincidence. It was part of a deliberate and long-standing strategy to make it as difficult as possible for Israel to strike Hamas targets without endangering civilians in the process. Unintentional Israeli killings of non-terrorist Palestinians, as well as errant terrorist rocket attacks, were instantly blamed by the terrorists on the Jewish state, often with the enthusiastic complicity of many in the international media. Hamas could not, and did not, win the war it started. But it was determined to win the public relations war and delegitimize and isolate the Jewish state. Many were eager to help Hamas do so, evidently.
The central pillar of this propaganda campaign was to get much of the world to describe Israel’s defensive war as a “genocide” against Palestinians. This lie, minted in service of an explicitly genocidal terrorist organization, started almost immediately after Oct. 7, gaining steam as Israel fought to root out the enemy from its base of operation. Foreign activists repeated the mantra endlessly, with radical-to-feckless politicians piling on. Some in the vaunted “international community” even sought to redefine the term in order to shoehorn it into an indictment of the Jewish State.
This mob, driven by bigotry and ignorance, ignored the objective reality that Israel took historic, extraordinary measures to mitigate and minimize civilian casualties during a war that it neither started nor wanted. Some military experts have marveled at how impressively noncombatant casualties were avoided. This is the opposite of a genocide. Yet, that vile fiction endures in many quarters, which is why it must be consistently rebutted with evidence. Ironically, some of the most compelling evidence to that effect has been furnished … by Hamas.
Announced payments to the widows of married male “martyrs” in Gaza help demonstrate that a striking percentage of those killed in the Hamas-started conflict were, inevitably, terrorists. This is a flawed metric, of course, as some percentage of those killed were certainly noncombatants. That number also doesn’t include the many unmarried Hamas and Islamic terrorists who were killed during the war. Here is a more comprehensive, albeit necessarily imperfect, analysis of the death toll from the organization Honest Reporting, published as part of a February 2026 fact check of more exaggerated claims on Hamas casualties:
“The Hamas-run Ministry of Health has reported over 70,000 deaths in Gaza, including civilians. But closer examination of these numbers displays that it also includes an estimated 22,000-25,000 Hamas fighters, around 11,000 natural deaths, and 4,000 casualties caused by internal fighting amongst Gazans. With 1,000 deaths attributed to reporting errors, this suggests that 25,000 casualties were terrorists, and 36,000 were civilians.”
Again, these estimates are based on Hamas’s own publicly released statistics, which, if anything, should be considered unreliably unfavorable to Israel. Still, that civilian-to-combatant death toll ratio, or anything even the general universe of 1 to 1, represents a remarkable humanitarian achievement by Israel, especially in light of the terrorists’ evil strategy of maximizing the risk of civilian casualties, in order to complicate Israel’s mission and fuel the global “genocide” lies. John Spencer, one of the foremost experts on modern urban warfare, has noted on multiple occasions that the civilian-to-combatant ratio in warfare is typically dramatically higher than what Hamas itself admits has occurred in Gaza. He’s been highlighting this reality for years, writing the following two full years ago, based on the Hamas-supplied numbers at the time:
“[The then-current death toll indicates] a ratio of roughly 1 combatant to 1.5 civilians. Given Hamas’ likely inflation of the death count, the real figure could be closer to 1 to 1. Either way, the number would be historically low for modern urban warfare,” Spencer wrote. “The UN, EU and other sources estimate that civilians usually account for 80 percent to 90 percent of casualties, or a 1:9 ratio, in modern war (though this does mix all types of wars). In the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul, a battle supervised by the U.S. that used the world’s most powerful airpower resources, some 10,000 civilians were killed compared to roughly 4,000 ISIS terrorists. And yet, analysts who should know better are still engaging in condemnation of the IDF based on the level of destruction that’s still occurred — destruction that is unavoidable against an enemy that embeds in a vast tunnel system under civilian sites in dense urban terrain.”
War is hell. The death of innocents is a tragedy. But war is not synonymous with “genocide,” even if one despises one of the belligerents. That’s even more true of a war that is defensive in nature, especially when the side that was initially attacked bends over backward to suppress civilian casualties. Again, what Israel has done is the opposite of a genocide. But because perception can often morph rapidly into “reality,” the “genocide” perception has been pushed very hard.
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There’s no doubt that Israel has taken a reputational hit since nearly 1,200 of its people were murdered by terrorists. Quite a few people who consider themselves enlightened and respectable seem to have unique objections to Jews taking “never again” deadly seriously and acting accordingly. They apply double standards exclusively to the Jewish state, a phenomenon that has a name. The drop in support for Israel in the United States among younger people is especially pronounced. This presents difficult challenges moving forward, no doubt. But since Oct. 7, the Israelis have crushed Hamas, decimated Hezbollah, and dealt thunderous, hugely consequential blows to the head of the snake: the Iranian regime and its nuclear and weapons programs. They’ve done so with the tacit or open support of Arab governments around the region.
As Eli Lake has observed, while Israel has become less popular globally, it has massively degraded the threat matrix aligned against it, and it is less isolated than ever within a volatile and dangerous neighborhood. The Israelis would prefer to be popular and safe, to be sure, but if forced to choose between the two, the Jewish state will always take the latter option.