The Gaza genocide libel: the Big Lie to delegitimise Israel

“Genocide!” was the cry across social media before the IDF had even entered Gaza. Within days it became the protesters’ mantra, plastered on placards from London to Los Angeles, echoed by journalists, academics, NGOs, and even prime ministers. It’s now common parlance, taken as a given. Constant repetition works. The lie is reported as fact.

Words matter. They shape perception and reality. Genocide is perhaps the most emotionally charged word of them all. It does not just accuse. It condemns absolutely. Once uttered, there can be no debate.

The BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen amplified lurid claims time and again. Most notably when the UN's humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, was given airtime to claim that 14,000 babies would die in Gaza in the next “forty-eight hours” if aid did not arrive. It was nonsense, debunked within hours, but not before leading BBC bulletins all day. Fletcher continues to be invited back on air.

The BBC had a field day too, when the United Nations produced a so-called “Special Inquiry” into Gaza that declared Israel guilty of genocide. The panel was chaired by Navi Pillay and joined by Miloon Kothari and Chris Sidoti, each with a documented history of anti-Israel bias. All three resigned amid international condemnation and sanctions, offering no credible explanation for their departures.

The UN’s Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, who has a long record of inflammatory statements, including that “America has been subjugated by the Jewish lobby” (for which she later apologised), has repeatedly accused Israel of “genocidal intent”. She is feted by commentators such as Guardian columnist Owen Jones, who has called Gaza “a textbook case of genocide”. Amnesty International concluded Israel was committing genocide. B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel also piled in, issuing their own proclamations.

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn held a “Gaza Tribunal” to “expose British complicity in genocide”. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez lamented that Spain does not possess nuclear weapons to “stop the genocide in Gaza”, a statement so deranged it borders on genocidal itself.

According to the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, genocide requires intent to destroy a people “in whole or in part.” Not collateral damage, not high civilian casualties, but a deliberate plan to annihilate.

Anti-Israel activists and commentators insist the ICJ and ICC have already “ruled genocide”, when neither court has done so. The ICJ decided that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide, not that the genocide claim itself was plausible. The ICC has not charged anyone with genocide.

Obsessed with demonising Israel, the Irish government went even further, lobbying for the international definition of genocide to be broadened, which is, as close to an admission as you will ever get, that Israel’s actions simply don’t meet the current and long-standing definition.

South Africa’s case at the ICJ has itself raised serious questions, with allegations that the ANC was paid by Iran to bring it to the international court. Pretoria has conspicuously failed to dispel the allegation. Perhaps it was just coincidence that having been near insolvent for years, the ANC announced that its finances had been “stabilised,” just days after South Africa filed its genocide case against Israel.

Israel’s war in Gaza, launched in response to the greatest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, meets none of these criteria. Its stated aim was to return its hostages, destroy Hamas, and end its terror regime. It was never to destroy the Palestinian people.

The IDF has operated with unprecedented restrictions and rules of engagement. Advance warnings to civilians. Designated safe zones. Evacuation routes. Humanitarian pauses. Precision targeting.

According to a report, “Explosive Weapons in Populated Areas – Key Questions and Answers” by the International Network on Explosive Weapons (INEW), which cites UN and OCHA data, “When explosive weapons are used in populated areas, around 90 per cent of the casualties are civilians.”

With a non-combatant to combatant casualty ratio in Gaza of close to 1:1, it is clear that the IDF has gone to extraordinary lengths to mitigate civilian harm, even while fighting in the most complex urban battlefield in history, against an enemy intent on maximising its own civilian casualties.

John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute, wrote that “Israel has created a new standard for urban warfare.” He added: “I have never known an army to take such measures to attend to the enemy’s civilian population… Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history.”

Hamas’s own health ministry, whose figures may be questionable, but which the BBC and Israel’s accusers love to quote verbatim, claims about 70,000 deaths in Gaza since October 7th, 2023.

These figures do not differentiate, but do include roughly 25,000 Hamas operatives and combatants killed in fighting. Natural deaths, which at a rate of 3.5 per thousand per year would equate to over 14,000 in two years, are also likely included. Then there are those killed by Hamas and PIJ’s misfired rockets. Around 20 per cent of rockets fired at Israel fell inside Gaza.

Tragic, yes. But nowhere near genocide.

It would also be the first genocide in history where the perpetrators provided the victims with aid. More than two million tons of food, fuel and medicine have been delivered into Gaza during the war. It would be the first where the alleged perpetrators built field hospitals, opened evacuation corridors, and warned civilians to flee combat zones.

It would be the first genocide where the alleged victims held, starved, and tortured hostages of the alleged perpetrators. It would also be the first genocide in history where the alleged victims could have stopped it at any time. If Hamas had released the hostages and laid down arms, the war would have stopped immediately.

No matter how you twist it, none of this fits the definition of genocide.

If Israel truly intended to annihilate Gaza and commit genocide, this war would have been over in days. The IDF is more than capable of erasing the Strip from the map. But it hasn’t.

Critics claim Israel has dropped ordnance with a total explosive yield ten times that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. If that’s true and Israeli actions were “indiscriminate”, why has Israel not killed ten times more people than died in Japan? With a combined death toll estimated at 210,000, about 140,000 in Hiroshima and 74,000 in Nagasaki, that would amount to just over two million dead, the entire population of Gaza.

How is it, then, that the IDF has killed far fewer, around half those killed in only Hiroshima? Could it be after all, that Israel used precision targeting and made incredible efforts to avoid civilian casualties where possible?

A genocidal army does not issue warnings before it strikes. It does not risk its soldiers’ lives in house-to-house combat. It does not facilitate humanitarian aid, medical evacuations, or treat enemy civilians in its hospitals. The claim of genocide collapses under its own absurdity.

Meanwhile, while the world howls about Gaza, actual genocides are unfolding, simply ignored by the West. In Sudan and South Sudan, since April 2023, ethnic massacres and engineered famine have killed nearly 400,000 people and displaced over 12 million, half of them children. The recent attack on El-Fasher involved rape, mutilation, and mass slaughter. Blood was so thick on the ground – it could be seen from space.

In Yemen, the United Nations estimates 377,000 deaths since 2015, mostly from starvation, disease, and the collapse of healthcare. The majority are children under five. In Nigeria, Islamist militias and Fulani gunmen have slaughtered more than 7,000 Christians in the first seven months of 2025 alone. Intent on forcing Christians to convert or die, Muslim militias have murdered tens of thousands, with thousands more abducted, raped, and displaced.

No protests. No global outrage. No hashtags.

The hypocrisy is as contemptible as it is breathtaking. The West’s self-appointed justice warriors, the “great humanitarians”, reserve their tears exclusively for Gaza, the Palestinians, and their condemnation exclusively for Israel. The massacres in Sudan do not receive even a fraction of the BBC coverage that Gaza has.

Even in Gaza, outrage is selective. It applies only if Gazans are killed by Israeli actions. When Hamas tortures, disappears, and publicly executes ordinary Gazans, as they have done since the most recent ceasefire, not a peep.

The term genocide once carried the weight of Auschwitz, Rwanda, and Srebrenica. To equate Israel’s war in Gaza with those horrors is not just false, it is obscene. It insults and erases the suffering of true victims. It cheapens the word beyond repair, robs it of all meaning.

The use of the word is no accident. It is a calculated tactic, a linguistic bullet aimed at the heart of Jewish history. To call Israel “genocidal” is to suggest that Jews have become the Nazis.

They steal the language of the Holocaust and use it against its survivors. They even coined the term “genocide denier” to mirror “Holocaust denier”, a smear meant to silence anyone who dares point out the lie. This is not moral outrage. It is grotesque moral vandalism.

Those peddling this myth misquote or misinterpret statements from some Israeli officials or quote extremist remarks from a handful of ultra-right Israeli ministers as “proof of intent.” They conveniently ignore that those same statements are condemned within Israel, rejected by the IDF, and do not reflect policy.

Show me a government without its share of morons. Ignorant, narcissistic ideologues and populists who confuse microphones with intellect. To equate their idiocy with state policy is at best disingenuous, or just pure malice. Meantime, Pedro Sánchez regrets he has no nukes, and no one blinks.

As the fog of war dissipates, and reality on the ground exposes the genocide narrative as fiction, there must be a reckoning.

For UN officials who abuse their mandates. NGOs that cherry pick and manipulate facts into propaganda. Commentators who trumpet the Hamas script and its false narratives. The politicians who exploit their position to lend legitimacy to this fiction.

They demonise Israel as uniquely evil, and incite Jew hatred with dire consequences. Antisemitism is at record highs. Jews are abused, harassed, threatened, intimidated and verbally and physically attacked across the globe. We have seen Jews murdered on the streets of Washington in the US and Manchester in the UK.

The genocide claim is a scurrilous lie, a deliberate, cynical abuse of language designed to delegitimise Israel. It’s moral theatre for the hateful and the depraved, masquerading as virtue.

The lie thrives because Western voices keep feeding it. It fits their warped world view and perverted agenda. They repeat it, amplify it, and pass it off as fact. They are its enablers, its willing partners. Enough! This cannot simply be shrugged off. There must be consequences for such blatant and cynical dishonesty. There must be an end to this evil.

Israel’s war is brutal, yes. All wars are. Civilians die, and that should pain every human being. But defending your country, restoring security, and neutralising a murderous threat to your citizens is not genocide. The savagery of war is not genocide. Tragedy is not genocide.

To call it such is a desecration of language, history, and truth. Genocide is not a metaphor. It is the crime of crimes, a crime of deliberate extermination.

It happened to Jews, to Tutsis, to Bosniaks, to Armenians. It is happening now to Christians in Nigeria, to South Sudanese, and to starving children in Yemen. The term must not be conflated with the ugliness and horror of a defensive war.

The big lie is the inversion of truth, the perversion of morality, and a betrayal of humanity. There is no genocide in Gaza.

Gary Cohen is a writer and filmmaker who was born in Scotland and now lives in Israel. substack.com/@garycohen22