The ‘Gaza genocide’ is a hoax

In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.In May of 2025, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Tom Fletcher, went on BBC Radio and told the audience that 14,000 babies in Gaza were going to die “in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them.” Two days? Fourteen thousand babies. According to UNICEF, there are around 20,000 babies in the entirety of Gaza. Which means 70% of all infants were in danger of dying in mere hours. An “utterly chilling” figure, Fletcher stressed.The New York Times, along with numerous other establishment media outlets, relayed Fletcher’s allegation to its credulous audience without any skepticism. The usual experts were summoned to discuss this unfolding famine on cable news. And the antisemites across social media amplified the claim.No matter how far-fetched a story is about Israel — including preposterous evidence-free accusations that it trains dogs to rape Palestinians — papers like the New York Times will spread it to feed the perception that the Jewish state operates as a genocidal entity. And no matter how often the claims are debunked, they keep at it.A couple of months after Fletcher’s pronouncement, for instance, the New York Times ran a front-page story about starvation in Gaza featuring a haunting photograph of an emaciated Palestinian toddler named Mohammed Zakaria al Mutawaq. Unmentioned was that the boy suffered from cerebral palsy and other serious pre-existing medical conditions, and his appearance had nothing to do with hunger.In any event, what U.N. report actually found, and even this contention was questionable, was that 14,000 cases of malnutrition might occur among the 1 million children of Gaza — not babies — if aid did not reach them over the next year. Aid did reach them. Lots and lots of aid. The U.S.–Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation delivered around 187 million meal equivalents, plus produce, and over a million packs of supplementary food for children to Palestinians before the ceasefire. Another report found that, despite Hamas’s tactic of pilfering international aid to control the population, Israel had provided Gaza with triple the food it needed during the ceasefire. Data showed malnutrition was lower than pre-war levels. And a year after U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres claimed that “famine” in Gaza was a “failure of humanity itself,” a UNICEF-led “Nutrition SMART Survey Result” found that not only was there no widespread acute malnutrition in Gaza, but at 0.5%, the strip had one of the lowest rates in the region.To find that number, a person had to delve deep into the footnotes of the study. As of this writing, the New York Times has not bothered to mention it.By the time “clarifications” run, the stories have coagulated in the imaginations of Israel haters. No credible person argues that Palestinians in Gaza do not suffer because of Hamas’s endless nihilistic wars against Israel. But the charge of genocide — along with “famine,” “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid” — has been manufactured by a conglomeration of anti-Israel organizations who’ve been priming the public for decades. It’s Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, or some U.N. body, along with bogus “expert” organizations such as the Association of Genocide Scholars — habitually described by major media outlets as home to “world’s top scholars,” even though any random nonacademic can pay a simple entry fee and become a member.There was no genocide. Not one popularly understood. And not legally. The exculpatory evidence against genocide is overwhelming.The most significant thing to remember about the genocide charge is that international organizations had to change the way they apply the legal definition that has been in place since the 1948 Genocide Convention to smear Israel.In the popular understanding, the term “genocide” is something akin to the mass murder of people. As a legal matter, it is defined as acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. So, for instance, what Turkey perpetrated against the Armenians and Kurds or what the Pakistanis did to the Bengalis would be genocide. The legal case against Israel relies on intent. And if Israel harbors genocidal intentions, why would it deliver more humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip than any army has probably ever delivered to an enemy population during wartime in history? Israel, which gave Gaza autonomy in 2005, not only provided food but also clean water, electricity, and medical aid for decades. If Israel has genocidal intentions, why does it warn civilians with flyers, roof knocking, phone calls, and other mitigation techniques? Israel remains the only nation in the history of Earth that is allegedly intent on genocide to put its own troops in more danger to spare civilians.Why does Israel move the populations of entire cities out of the way when trying to confront Hamas? Israel could, of course, annihilate all of Gaza within minutes if it felt like it.If Israel has genocidal intentions, why does the Gaza war have one of the lowest combat-to-civilian death ratios in the history of modern warfare? This, despite the fact that Hamas urges its own people to become cannon fodder as a means of appealing to friendly Western journalists and intellectuals. Hamas leaders build tunnels under hospitals, schools, and mosques. They fire rockets from civilian areas. They prevent their own people from evacuating combat zones. If Israel had genocidal intentions, there would be a lot more than 70,000 total casualties during the war. That total, it needs to be stressed, includes deaths from illness, old age, executions, murders, natural causes, and pre-existing conditions. Most importantly, it includes Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters — though that fact is barely ever mentioned by the mass media. Of course, Hamas, whose charter explicitly calls for the genocide of Jews, could have surrendered and disarmed at any time, and the Palestinian people would never have to worry about the threat of food insecurity or missiles ever again. Yet, I’ve never witnessed a single pro-Palestinian marcher demanding that Gazans be freed from these theocratic fascists. Of course, Israel itself is home to over 2 million Arab citizens, a fifth of the country, with full legal and voting rights, who serve in the Knesset, practice law and medicine, and attend universities. Arab Israelis have higher living standards, longer life expectancies, and greater political freedom than Arabs in most neighboring countries. If Israel’s goal was ethnic cleansing, the nation is the most spectacularly incompetent operation in human history.DAVID HARSANYI: ISRAEL SHOULD PHASE OUT US AID FOR ITS OWN GOOD These blood libels, which have been spread by anti-Israel progressives for decades before the latest war, are meant to distract from the evil that was perpetrated on Oct. 7, 2023, and strip the memory of the Holocaust from the Jewish people and weaponize it against them. The survival rate of Jews under Nazi control in Europe was roughly 30% — and only because they did not have time to finish the job. The survival rate for Arab civilians during the Gaza war was somewhere around 99%.There is no genocide. And there was no famine. There was a war. And the bad guys lost.