The UN’s War on Israel — and on the Meaning of “Genocide”

Another week, another headline screaming that Israel is committing “genocide.” This time it comes not from Qatari-operated “journalists” or the latest mob of faddishly clad keffiyeh-wearing campus activists, but from a panel of “independent experts” under the auspices of the United Nations. Their conclusion? That Israel’s war against Hamas — launched in response to the October 7 massacre of 2023, the deadliest single-day intentional slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust — somehow fits the legal definition of genocide.

It’s hard to overstate how reckless, unserious, and corrosive this claim is — not just for Israel, but for the meaning of the word “genocide” and the principle that nations have a right to defend themselves.

A Panel of Partisan Inquisitors

The first and most glaring problem is the UN panel itself. The supposed “independent” investigators include figures with long public records of anti-Israel animus — including one who has spread antisemitic tropes about “Jewish control” and another who has openly declared Israel’s very existence illegitimate. This is not a trivial detail; it goes to the heart of the credibility of their work. As Haviv Rettig Gur noted, the UN seems to have intentionally chosen people whose hostility toward Israel is not merely suspected but proudly proclaimed.

Imagine convening a panel on climate change composed of people who have spent years insisting that climate change is a “hoax” and that carbon emissions are harmless. The result would be a foregone conclusion — and no serious observer would call it an impartial investigation. Any outcome other than “Israel is guilty” was never on this panel’s table.

A Definition That Erases the Concept

Even setting bias aside, the report’s legal reasoning collapses on contact with reality. The authors stretch the Genocide Convention beyond recognition. They argue that alleged high civilian casualties in Gaza (based on Hamas-provided data) — and statements from some Israeli politicians about destroying Hamas — prove genocidal intent. This is a radical distortion of international law.

Genocide is not simply killing a lot of people. If it were, then the dozens of wars in the Middle East and North Africa not involving Israel over the last two decades — which caused over ten times as many civilian deaths as this war — would all qualify. Genocide requires a specific intent to physically destroy an ethnic, racial, national, or religious group as such.

Israel has been explicit — in word and deed — that its aim is to destroy Hamas as a military and governing organization, not to kill Palestinian civilians. Its war planning has been structured around sparing civilians as much as possible while still pursuing its goal to end Hamas’s control of Gaza: dropping warning leaflets, making warning phone calls, designating evacuation zones, opening humanitarian corridors, and pausing fighting to allow aid. Israel has facilitated more aid into enemy territory than any nation in modern warfare — over 94,000 truckloads of food, medicine, and supplies since October 2023. It even paused fighting to vaccinate over a million Gazans against polio. Everyone remembers the Nazis giving Jews life-saving vaccines while trying to annihilate them, right?

None of Israel’s conduct fits the definition of genocide. It fits the profile of an agonizingly careful counterterror campaign in dense urban terrain — against an enemy that violates every rule of war, wears uniforms only for grotesque hostage-release ceremonies, and embeds itself among and under civilians to maximize their deaths.

By This Report’s “Logic,” the U.S.-Led War Against ISIS Was Genocide

The UN report claims that because Israeli forces knew their operations would result in civilian deaths, this proves they “intended to kill as many Palestinians as possible.” That is not just legally wrong — it’s logically absurd. By that standard, virtually every modern urban war would be “genocide.”

The United States-led coalition killed at least 9,000–11,000 civilians in Mosul in 2016–2017; U.S. forces killed 600–800 civilians in just weeks in Fallujah in 2004; coalition airstrikes killed at least 2,000 civilians during the four-month siege of Raqqa in 2017; U.S. and NATO operations caused over 47,000 civilian deaths in Afghanistan; and the final months of the Sri Lanka civil war in 2009 killed at least 40,000 civilians. None of these campaigns were called genocide — because none involved an intent to exterminate an entire people.

By this UN “logic,” the Allies must have committed genocide against the Germans in World War II — after all, they knew that defeating the Nazis would kill German civilians, and it did: over two million, including hundreds of thousands of children. Yet no honest person would call the Allied war to end Nazi control of Germany a genocide. To do so would be a moral absurdity.

Urban warfare is brutally destructive. That is its nature. Buildings collapse, supply chains break, and civilians suffer — especially when the defending force uses them as shields, as Hamas has done in this war with pathological zeal. The UN panel’s analysis erases this distinction. It reduces war itself to genocide, and in doing so, empties the term of meaning.

The Blood Libel Comes Full Circle

This is not just a bad report. It’s the revival of an old libel — that Jews defending themselves are inherently monstrous. As Douglas Murray has noted, Israel is uniquely told it may not do what every other nation is permitted to do: fight for its survival. No one accused the U.S. of genocide when its campaign to end ISIS’s control of Mosul killed thousands of civilians. Yet Israel is accused of genocide for trying to rescue kidnapped civilians and dismantle a jihadist death cult that intentionally burned children alive and filmed their own atrocities — and has promised to keep trying to repeat the horrors of October 7 “again and again” until Israel is destroyed.

The grotesque irony is that Hamas — which openly calls in its charter for the extermination of Jews — is portrayed as the victim of genocide by the very state it attacked. The moral inversion could not be more obscene.

The Real Damage

These UN accusations aren’t just libelous; they are dangerous. They embolden Hamas to keep fighting and endangering its civilian population — just as the Nazis did until the Allies fully conquered Berlin. They delegitimize the principle of self-defense, especially for Jews. And they corrode the world’s ability to confront real genocides — like those in Sudan, Myanmar, and Xinjiang.

Most of all, they threaten to make the word “genocide” itself meaningless. If everything is genocide, then nothing is — which leaves the world unable to identify, let alone stop, actual genocides when they happen. That would be the UN panel’s ultimate, and unforgivable, legacy.