The Genocide Libel

By Andrew Fox

Thursday, October 09, 2025

 

As the Gaza War approaches its second anniversary, the accusation that Israel is pursuing a policy of “genocide” against the Palestinians in the coastal enclave persists. The word has been employed by activists, commentators, human-rights organisations, and even officials of various governments, who characterise Israel’s military campaign and its strategic goals in the most sinister terms. The claim that the Israeli government and military (IDF) seek the destruction of a population is extremely serious, so it deserves careful and fair-minded consideration. With this in mind, a comprehensive new study by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA Center) in Tel Aviv examines the factual record in an attempt to distinguish verifiable facts from politically motivated fiction. It concludes that the genocide accusations are unsupported.

 

The BESA study is written by a team of Israeli military historians and conflict researchers (Danny Orbach, Jonathan Boxman, Yagil Henkin, and Jonathan Braverman), and they approach the issue with academic thoroughness and a clear concern for truth. The authors emphasise that their aim is not to defend every Israeli action, nor to overlook the war’s terrible human cost, but to ensure that any discussion of legality or morality rests on an accurate foundation: “Our focus on factual analysis,” they write, “in no way diminishes or ignores the severe human suffering in Gaza.” By avoiding polemics and focusing on verifiable data, the BESA scholars present a compelling and persuasive counter-narrative to the genocide claim.

 

The stakes in this debate are high: the accusation of “genocide” is not merely a matter of semantics, it shapes international policy, public perception, and possibly even legal actions. It is therefore important to get the facts right.

 

I. Starvation

 

One of the earliest and most emotive accusations made during this conflict was the claim that Israel has imposed a starvation siege on Gaza. Images of emaciated children and warnings of famine spread rapidly in late 2023 and through 2024, as Gaza’s supplies of food, water, and electricity all came under pressure. A number of influential voices argued that Israel was deliberately depriving two million Gazans of basic necessities, effectively using hunger to kill the population or drive it out of the Strip. If true, this would be a heinous crime. However, the BESA study shows that the starvation story was based on incorrect data and an echo chamber of circular reporting, whereby NGOs and media outlets repeated each other’s alarming allegations without investigating the original data.

 

For instance, it was widely reported that, before the conflict, around 500 trucks of supplies entered Gaza every day, so any fewer during the war itself would result in severe food shortages. But the starvation threshold of “500 trucks” is “patently false,” the BESA researchers conclude. Pre-war United Nations OCHA logistics data reveal that, in 2022, an average of only 292 trucks entered Gaza each day, about half of which were carrying construction materials and only about 73 of which were carrying food. Nevertheless, once the figure of 500 trucks became a staple of advocacy narratives, any day fewer than that crossed the border was portrayed as an attempt to impose man-made famine in Gaza.

 

Equally revealing are data on supply flows during the war. Contrary to popular belief, Israel did not hermetically seal Gaza and cut off all provisions for an extended period. In fact, “throughout most of the war more provisions were delivered into Gaza than prior to October 7 [2023], by a margin greater than any credible estimates of loss of Gazan agricultural production,” the study reports. After the initial shock of Hamas’s massacre, Israel imposed a tight blockade on Gaza in an attempt to weaken Hamas and prevent arms smuggling. However, within weeks, controlled humanitarian convoys were restarted through Egypt’s Rafah crossing. Throughout 2024 and early 2025, thousands of tons of food, medicine, and other goods entered Gaza via coordinated efforts, often surpassing the pre-war daily averages. The BESA study notes that these inflows, combined with Gaza’s reduced population in some areas due to displacement, meant that per capita relief often exceeded pre-war levels.

 

The BESA researchers dissect and debunk three core assumptions behind the starvation narrative:

 

1.      An inflated baseline of Gaza’s needs, exemplified by the false “500 trucks” metric, which led observers to believe that any lower number was catastrophically insufficient.

 

2.      An overestimation of Gaza’s pre-war local food production and the impact of its loss. For example, an Amnesty International report claimed that Gaza produced 44 percent of its own food consumption, so the destruction of farms and fishing during the war would cause widespread hunger. However, BESA’s review reveals that this 44 percent figure was based on a misinterpretation of Palestinian statistics and did not consider caloric intake. In reality, Gaza’s agriculture and fisheries contributed only a small fraction of daily calories—perhaps around ten to fifteen percent at most. The majority of Gazans’ calories, even before the war, came from staples like grains and oil, which were imported or provided by UN aid, rather than locally produced. While the destruction of the local farming sector was economically damaging, it was unlikely to lead to mass starvation, as Gazans primarily depended on external food sources from the outset.

 

3.      A misunderstanding of the war’s impact on supply lines. In mid-2024, UN agencies claimed that Israeli military operations had reduced the number of trucks entering Gaza by nearly seventy percent, painting a picture of deliberate strangulation. But Israeli records cited by BESA (from COGAT, the IDF’s liaison office for the territories) contradict this claim; in fact, deliveries in the months after the alleged drop were higher than the previous year. In late 2024, the UN quietly corrected its figures to align with the Israeli data, essentially admitting that the seventy percent decline had never actually occurred. Tellingly, this correction received almost no media fanfare, and the image of Gaza being starved into submission persisted in the public mind.

 

None of this suggests that Gaza’s humanitarian situation is good. It is dire and characterised by food insecurity, fuel shortages, and immense human suffering, which I witnessed firsthand during one of my fact-finding trips to Gaza. However, as the BESA study highlights, context and intent matter greatly. There is an important difference between a humanitarian catastrophe caused by wartime chaos or resource-disruption and a deliberate strategy to starve a population. Throughout the war, Israel maintained that its objective was to destroy Hamas’s military capabilities, not to harm Gaza’s civilians. Had genocide by starvation been the aim, we would expect to see sustained efforts to block all food for a prolonged period, without relief corridors, but this did not happen.

 

Gaza’s population did not experience a mass famine die-off in 2024. There were certainly cases of malnutrition and even hunger-related deaths, particularly among vulnerable groups, but nothing on the scale that the words “genocide” or “famine” imply. The BESA researchers note that, as of early March 2025, by which time the conflict had lasted over a year, no reliable evidence of widespread, life-threatening deprivation had emerged. Hyperbolic predictions that “tens of thousands will starve within weeks” (frequently heard in late 2023) never materialised; those claims were based on “unfulfilled predictions and a failure to acknowledge errors, even after false data was debunked.”

 

II. Understanding the Battlefield

 

The human-rights reports and many of the media stories about this conflict leave the impression of a powerful military indiscriminately attacking a defenceless civilian populace. However, the contribution of Hamas and its preferred method of warfare is frequently missing from these reports. The BESA paper identifies this omission as a “central flaw” in many critiques of Israel’s military conduct. As Chapter 2 of the study argues, it is impossible to fairly assess the IDF’s actions in Gaza without understanding the conditions under which they were forced to operate. Modern urban warfare, especially against an embedded non-state actor like Hamas, is notoriously complex and fraught with civilian risk. In Gaza, those challenges were amplified to an unprecedented degree, making it, in the words of the BESA authors, “one of the most complex military challenges ever faced by any Western army.”

 

The battlefield in Gaza was complicated by Hamas’s “fortress” strategy that exploited the crowded urban environment. Gaza City and other towns in the Strip are among the most densely populated places on Earth, where civilians and combatants coexist in a tight maze of buildings, alleyways, and underground structures. Fighting a war in a setting like this carries high risks of collateral damage. In addition to which, Hamas spent decades preparing for this confrontation by constructing what the BESA authors call “the most extensive subterranean tunnel network ever documented in military history”—an estimated 500 kilometres in length with 5,700 access shafts hidden in civilian areas. This labyrinth allowed Hamas militants to move weapons and fighters undetected, to materialise behind Israeli lines, and to use civilian neighbourhoods as cover for military operations. Israeli forces had to clear these tunnels and bunkers one by one, often fighting block-by-block in areas where booby traps and ambushes awaited them in homes, schools, and mosques. In essence, Hamas turned Gaza’s civilian infrastructure into a shielded military platform.

 

The strategy pursued by Hamas had profound consequences for civilian safety. My own report on the phenomenon has detailed this strategy extensively, and the BESA researchers further demonstrate that Hamas “consistently employs Gazan civilians as ‘human shields’ to deliberately increase casualties and, in turn, amplify international pressure on Israel.” In fact, engineering a higher civilian death toll appears to be a “central component of Hamas’ battlefield strategy,” intended as a political weapon against Israel. Practically, this took many forms: launching rockets from inside residential blocks, storing munitions in apartment basements and under hospitals, commanding fighters to embed within refugee crowds, and urging or even forcing noncombatants to ignore Israeli evacuation warnings. Each civilian death could then be presented as evidence of Israeli “genocide,” bolstering Hamas’s narrative and provoking sympathetic outrage abroad.

 

From Hamas’s cynical and cruel perspective, this strategy is logical: since they cannot match Israel’s firepower, they have used the deaths of Palestinian civilians as a shield and a sword. As legal scholar Adam Klein observed in an analysis for Lawfare, Hamas “cynically keeps or places civilians near military targets and uses civilian objects for military purposes,” thereby ensuring civilian casualties when those targets are struck. The responsibility for those deaths, Klein argues, rests in large part on Hamas’s defiance of the laws of war, which require combatants to separate themselves from civilians. The BESA report echoes this view, essentially arguing that many of the tragic outcomes in Gaza were a function of Hamas’s battlefield choices as much as Israel’s. Any honest appraisal of proportionality or intent must account for this.

 

Consider the fierce battles in Beit Hanoun, Jabaliya, and the al-Shifa hospital complex. In each case, Israel was criticised for the extent of destruction, but in each case, Hamas had prepared strongholds among civilians: tunnel exits in apartment courtyards, anti-tank teams on hospital rooftops, command centres concealed in or beneath civilian facilities (such as Hamas’s main operational HQ, believed to be under al-Shifa hospital). Israeli forces often warned civilians to evacuate before attacking these targets, via leaflets, text messages, and targeted “roof knock” (or warning shot) munitions. Thousands heeded these warnings, but many did not, because Hamas either blocked their evacuation routes or urged them to stay to deter Israel’s assault. The result was civilian casualties.

 

The military ethics of Israel’s conduct must be considered in light of these factors. Did the IDF have alternatives? Aside from abstaining from combat altogether, Israel’s options were limited. The BESA study argues that international critics often fail to recognise this reciprocity of warfare—the way “one party’s actions influence the response of the other, shaping the means employed and the scope of military maneuvers.” By excluding Hamas from their analysis entirely, some reports portrayed any civilian death as automatic evidence of Israeli malice or indiscretion. But war is not fought in isolation. If one side (Hamas) routinely breaches the rule of distinction by blending with civilians, the other side (Israel) is forced into a terrible dilemma: either submit to the illegal use of civilians as deterrence and let the enemy attack with impunity, or respond and kill those innocents the enemy has deliberately placed in danger. Urban combat against guerrilla forces is feared by modern armies because it almost always results in high civilian casualties, even under strict rules of engagement.

 

The BESA researchers conclude that, in many respects, the IDF faced an unprecedented challenge in Gaza: a dense urban environment, “extensive subterranean” defences, and an enemy ruthless enough to maximise its own side’s civilian casualties. The civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio in urban asymmetrical warfare is often high, regardless of the attacker’s intent. In the 2017 Battle of Mosul against ISIS (fought by Iraqi forces with US support), civilian fatality estimates ranged from 9,000 to 11,000 over nine months. Those deaths were also caused by ISIS’s tactics and coalition airstrikes/artillery in a densely populated urban area, but they were not described as “genocide” by the international community who understood the difficulties of fighting under these conditions. In Gaza, acknowledging the difficulties presented by Hamas’s strategy is essential to understanding why the civilian death toll is as high as it is.

 

III. Systematic Massacre and the Law of Armed Conflict

 

One of the most incendiary allegations made about Israeli forces is that they systematically massacre non-combatants as a matter of policy. Early in the war, Hamas and some allied media voices accused Israeli troops of conducting summary executions. Atrocities do occur in war, and the BESA researchers acknowledge that it is plausible (and even likely) that individual Israeli soldiers have committed war crimes during this one. “[I]t is the responsibility of the military,” they write, “to investigate, identify, and hold accountable those responsible in order to minimise such transgressions.”

 

However, isolated incidents do not make an orchestrated campaign, coordinated policy, or strategic goals. Following a review of “verified forensic evidence,” the BESA study finds “no evidence to suggest a systematic Israeli policy of targeting or massacring civilians,” a conclusion that aligns with what one would expect from the Israeli command structure (which is tightly controlled and acutely aware of global scrutiny). However, Israel’s accusers smudged this distinction by portraying almost all Palestinian civilian casualties as “entirely unjustified from a military standpoint” and therefore the result of genocidal policy. The BESA researchers find only a “small number of instances” where credible evidence supports allegations of intentional killings of civilians by Israeli troops, and these appear to be aberrations.

 

One such instance occurred in March 2025 in the Tal al-Sultan neighbourhood of Rafah. During intense combat, IDF soldiers allegedly attacked a group of Palestinian paramedics, resulting in multiple deaths. This incident drew international condemnation at the time as a possible war crime. The BESA researchers examine this case in detail, noting that credible forensic evidence later emerged suggesting that an atrocity did indeed take place. (Israeli military authorities, it should be noted, have announced investigations into several instances of possible misconduct during the war, and if soldiers are found guilty, they face serious penalties.)

 

On the other hand, many of the high-profile accusations made by UN agencies and NGOs turn out, upon closer inspection, to be uncorroborated or misleading. In a 232-page report written by Israeli historian Lee Mordechai titled “Bearing Witness—Gaza,” dozens of Israeli “massacres” were alleged. The BESA researchers have examined each of these allegations in turn and found that the context of the incidents is frequently misrepresented or that the claims are based solely on unverified testimonies from Gazan witnesses. For example, there have been allegations that Israeli soldiers executed civilians after clearing buildings, but BESA reports that when forensic teams (and some international journalists) were granted access to the site of this alleged massacre after the ceasefire, they found evidence consistent with a firefight rather than an execution. It is possible that some summary killings occurred in the heat of battle (such things have happened in many wars), but they were not proven in Gaza on a large scale, let alone as a directed policy. Nevertheless, the genocide accusers took the worst cases (where civilian deaths did seem to be unjustified) and portrayed them as representative of Israeli methods.

 

It is also important to remember that, while the civilian death toll in Gaza is high in absolute terms, it is not extraordinary relative to the intensity of combat and the tactics of the enemy. Over roughly a year and a half of fighting, the (disputed) Gaza death toll has climbed into the many thousands. However, if Israel had intended to massacre civilians, the numbers would have been far higher given the IDF’s overwhelming military superiority. A genocidal army would certainly not risk its own soldiers’ lives in door-to-door urban fighting when they could simply level entire neighbourhoods without warning instead. But the IDF repeatedly incurred a higher risk to its own troops to spare civilians.

 

In addition, the IDF routinely sacrificed tactical advantage to warn civilians of an impending attack, and on multiple occasions, senior military commanders vetoed “operations due to concerns over disproportionate collateral damage,” the BESA authors note. Occasionally, the IDF refrained from striking high-value targets because civilians were too close. So extensive were the measures employed to limit collateral damage that urban-warfare experts cited by BESA worry that they “may set unrealistic operational standards for other militaries in the future,” given how much they constrained Israel’s own freedom to achieve surprise in combat. In other words, Israel’s conduct often exceeded the usual requirements for mitigating civilian harm, a fact plainly inconsistent with an accusation of genocidal intent.

 

To strengthen this point, the BESA researchers examine Israel’s adherence to the principle of proportionality in international law. It has been alleged that Israel employs a fixed ratio or quota to determine how many Palestinian deaths are acceptable (for example, that the IDF permits twenty civilian deaths for every militant or 100 for each senior militant). But “this claim,” the BESA researchers report, “has never been substantiated,” and it misrepresents how targeting decisions are actually made. Each military operation involves a dynamic assessment made in real time—commanders balance the expected military advantage of striking a target against the probable collateral damage, under guidelines issued by Israel’s General Staff.

 

This is precisely how proportionality is supposed to work under the law of armed conflict: it is a judgment call, not a numerical formula, and it can vary depending on circumstances. Importantly, “there is no ‘quota’ or fixed standard that automatically permits execution” of an attack, the study clarifies. Even if a projected strike falls within permissible collateral-damage limits, it still requires command approval and can be cancelled. All of this points to Israeli intent: the strategic goal is to neutralise Hamas, not to kill Gazan civilians, even if many civilians die in the process. The BESA team concludes that Israel is conducting a challenging urban counterinsurgency in a manner largely consistent with other Western democracies facing similar foes, and that civilian deaths, while significant, were not the objective but an unfortunate consequence of Hamas’s illegal conduct and the usual chaos of war.

 

There are, of course, many critics who remain unconvinced by this reasoning. Organisations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented instances that they believe demonstrate recklessness or even deliberate targeting of noncombatants by Israel. For example, strikes on convoys of evacuees or the shelling of areas where civilians were known to be sheltering. But the BESA report challenges many of these claims by providing alternate explanations or highlighting missing context (when convoys are infiltrated by militants or when “shelter” areas are also active combat zones). In a few cases, investigations are ongoing, so definitive judgments are not yet possible.

 

My own view is that while Israeli forces do not target civilians, there have certainly been instances of negligence and error that merit condemnation and legal accountability. But such cases were exceptions, and they do not add up to an intentional program of civilian annihilation.

 

IV. The Casualty Data

 

Central to any genocide allegation is the question of numbers—specifically, the breakdown of who was killed and why. If this war had seen Israeli forces slaughtering civilians en masse, we would expect the death toll to be overwhelmingly civilian in nature, and far beyond what could be explained by collateral damage caused by fighting. In late 2024, it was widely reported that “nearly seventy percent” of those killed in Gaza were women and children. This figure has been repeated in countless news reports and even at the United Nations. The logical implication is that Israel is either recklessly bombing civilian areas or targeting women and children intentionally.

 

The BESA study closely examines these claims and finds them to be deeply misleading. In Chapter 5, the researchers conduct a thorough audit of casualty data reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health (GMOH), and they find evidence of systematic manipulation and misclassification. “[S]ince 2014,” they report, “Gaza authorities have mandated the classification of all fallen combatants as ‘innocent civilians.’” This is unsurprising, since the enclave’s health authorities are directly controlled by Hamas, and it is in their interests to inflate the civilian toll for propaganda. This policy was effectively employed in previous conflicts with Israel and never as successfully as in the current war.

 

How exactly does this manipulation work? BESA outlines several tactics employed by Hamas’s information apparatus, including:

 

·         Concealing natural deaths in the toll.

 

·         Reporting “statistically improbable” daily fatality figures.

 

·         Omitting the names of known Hamas fighters from public casualty lists.

 

If a Hamas combatant is killed in battle, his name might simply never be published on the casualty list (making it harder for outside analysts to identify him as a combatant), or he might be listed without an affiliation so he appears to be just another civilian.

 

During the conflict, Israeli intelligence regularly announced the names of militants (from Hamas and allied groups) killed in strikes. However, when these names were compared to the GMOH’s official tallies, many were conspicuously absent. It is not that those individuals were not dead—they were—but, in the interests of morale and to keep the civilian-victim narrative alive, Hamas did not wish to publicise how many fighters it was losing. Conversely, any woman or child who perished was immediately added to the lists. This asymmetric transparency ensured that militant deaths were concealed and civilian deaths exaggerated, resulting in a lopsided account ratio of combatants to noncombatants.

 

There is also the problem of verification. UN agencies like the OHCHR (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights) try to “verify” deaths, but in Gaza, their verification often means confirming that a person by that name is reported dead. They have to rely on local sources because they cannot independently investigate on the ground in real time. In November 2024, the UN stated that “nearly 70% of the fatalities we have verified are women and children.” And how was this figure verified? By consulting hospital records and local documentation that did not list those individuals as combatants. Naturally, if Hamas is not listing its fighters as such, the UN’s “verified” count will skew civilian.

 

In an attempt to independently check the GMOH’s data, the BESA researchers compare the demographic distribution of fatalities in this war to that of a previous Gaza conflict (2014’s Operation Protective Edge). If the IDF had become markedly more indiscriminate or “genocidal” since this would be reflected in the casualty data. Operation Protective Edge in 2014 was bloody—approximately 2,100 Palestinians were killed over fifty days. Later analyses cited by BESA (including analyses by independent researchers) indicated that about half of those casualties were combatants and half were civilians, with the civilian portion including a significant number of men of fighting age whose status was ambiguous.

 

BESA’s analysis of Gaza’s published data finds “no significant difference in the distribution of fatalities” between 2014 and the current war. The age and sex profiles are remarkably similar. This strongly suggests that Israel’s targeting doctrine was not suddenly replaced by indiscriminate killing; the IDF applied similar methods with similar results. “[V]ariance [between 2014 and 2023] would have indicated a shift in Israel’s warfare doctrine, which is not observed,” the study notes.

 

Crucially, the BESA report refutes the “seventy percent women and children” statistic outright. The authors are unequivocal that this frequently cited claim “is incorrect, even according to the GMOH’s own data—and was false from the very start of the war.” Indeed, early in the conflict, when casualty numbers were much lower, GMOH officials were already alleging that seventy percent of the dead were women and children. This was implausible on its face (since many of the initial casualties were militants killed in firefights or in airstrikes on Hamas facilities). As names began to surface, it became evident that a large number of adult men were among the dead.

 

By reconstructing data from available lists and intelligence, the BESA study suggests that a significant portion of the fatalities—likely a majority—were fighting-age males, many of whom were combatants. External analyses support this conclusion: for example, one dataset from late 2024 (when around 12,000 Palestinian fatalities were reported) examined by BESA indicated that roughly 55–60 percent of Gaza’s dead were adult males. While not all adult males are militants, in a conflict like this one that involves general mobilisation, a very high proportion of adult male deaths are probably fighters. Meanwhile, women and minors (combined) accounted for around 40–45 percent of the total, not seventy percent.

 

The persistence of the “seventy percent” claim illustrates how sticky misinformation can be. The figure originated in an over-count that included only “verified” victims (who skewed towards identifiable women and children early on), and from some double counting of children as both women and children in percentages (a statistical confusion). Nevertheless, this damaging falsehood was stamped with the UN’s authority and then became a fixture of critical media coverage and activist agitprop.

 

The casualty data most obviously suggest what the rest of the evidence suggests—that Israel is engaged in a difficult war and not an attempt to liquidate an entire people. Claims of genocide, the BESA authors state, are founded on “empirically false assumptions” and misreporting. Remembering this is vital if we are to learn the correct lessons and prevent civilian harm in future conflicts.

 

V. Reporting and Oversight

 

A critical aspect of the genocide-allegation story involves the role of external observers: international organisations, NGOs, and the media. How did so many people worldwide, including those in respected institutions, come to accept or promote a false narrative of genocide? Part of the answer, as explored in Chapters 6 and 7 of the BESA study, lies in the inherent challenges these actors face when trying to evaluate crises in places like Gaza, combined with their own biases. This section of the report is especially illuminating because it demonstrates that the genocide claim was not just a malicious invention, it was facilitated by systematic weaknesses in information-gathering and a kind of institutional naivety.

 

Operating in “closed or controlled societies” is a major challenge, and although Gaza is not completely sealed, information there is tightly managed by the ruling authority. Journalists operating in Gaza during the war had to embed with Hamas escorts or work under Hamas’s regulations, and Western media organisations had to rely on Palestinian stringers who were either subject to the same limitations or connected to Hamas. UN agencies and humanitarian NGOs are also forced to rely upon local staff and partners. A failure to toe the Hamas line can mean expulsion, arrest, or worse. Under such conditions, the search for truth is extremely difficult.

 

The BESA researchers compare the situation in Gaza to that in Iraq during the 1990s. When UN sanctions were imposed on Iraq following the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, humanitarian organisations published alarming reports stating that as many as 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result. One well-known survey by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, conducted under significant influence from Iraq’s Health Ministry, claimed a fivefold increase in mortality of children under five and a twofold increase in infant mortality during sanctions. This prompted a global outcry and a similar narrative of Western-imposed “genocide.” However, after Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime was deposed in 2003 and researchers were permitted greater freedom in the country, it turned out that these figures were heavily exaggerated or entirely falsified.

 

UN FAO data cited by Sarah Zaidi and Mary C. Smith Fawzi in a letter to the Lancet, Vol. 346, 2 December 1995. These data were later found to be false.

 

There was no such spike in child mortality, and the original researchers even admitted to errors. Yet, the original claim was already embedded in policy debates and the public consciousness, and it was used to lobby for the lifting of sanctions. As usual, the retractions and corrections received little attention compared to the sensational original allegations. The BESA authors describe this pattern as “the humanitarian bias”—humanitarian organisations are more inclined to believe and circulate alarmist figures because they serve as urgent calls to action. When someone challenges these figures, they are often met with moral outrage, as if they are minimising the victims’ plight. Consequently, false data remains uncorrected. In Iraq’s case, even after it was proven that the 500,000 figure was a myth, many activists and officials continued to cite it for years.

 

The Gaza situation reveals a similar pattern. UN officials, possibly driven by genuine concern and a wish to encourage ceasefires, have sometimes repeated Hamas propaganda without independent verification. When evidence is later found that contradicts these claims, the corrections receive much less attention than the initial headlines. But by then, the damage has been done. Even when presented with contrary evidence, some individuals still cling to their preferred narrative.

 

NGOs and UN fact-finders also face methodological issues in conflict zones. Unlike intelligence agencies or militaries, groups like Human Rights Watch or OHCHR cannot deploy spies or high-tech surveillance to verify events on the ground. They generally arrive after the fact—if they arrive at all—to interview witnesses and inspect sites. If they arrive while a conflict is ongoing, their freedom of movement is restricted by the controlling authority (in this case, Hamas). What if the witnesses they interview have been coached or intimidated by Hamas? What if physical evidence has been staged, removed, or otherwise tampered with? These are not hypothetical concerns—they have occurred before.

 

The BESA report emphasises that recent history “disproves the naïve assumption” that local sources in such conflicts are politically neutral. It provides examples of how biased or misleading information, provided by parties like Hamas or the Palestinian Authority, has misled investigators in the past. In 2002, witness testimonies emerged of hundreds of civilians being executed by Israeli forces in Jenin in the West Bank. NGOs and journalists dutifully repeated these claims, all of which turned out to be false. Accounts of what occurred in Jenin were simply propaganda, or at least gross exaggerations that emerged from the confusion and trauma of the Second Intifada.

 

In Gaza, the ferocity and duration of the fighting has meant that real-time independent observation has been nearly absent in the most affected areas. Under these conditions, it’s not surprising that early reports (which later contributed to the genocide accusations) were either incomplete or biased or both. The BESA authors advise that reports from conflict zones should be “cross-referenced with other sources” and not simply accepted because they originate from civil society or local officials presumed to be honest. They criticise what they call the “Burden of Proof Syndrome,” whereby any information from Israeli military sources is dismissed unless independently verified (which is often impossible during wartime), while information from Gaza sources is “assumed by default to be neutral” and therefore readily believed. This double standard means that Israeli claims (eg, “Hamas is using Shifa Hospital as a base”) are met with reflexive scepticism, whereas Hamas claims (“Israel is bombing Gaza indiscriminately”) are uncritically repeated.

 

One can see how this dynamic contributed to the success of the genocide narrative. If the only information people receive in the first critical weeks of a conflict is that thousands of civilians are being killed and aid is being blocked, then the situation is going to sound like genocide, especially if no mention is made of militants or their actions. Complexity is usually an early casualty of war reporting. Distorted simplicity, on the other hand, spreads more quickly. During the 2006 Lebanon War, for example, Human Rights Watch released a study that claimed nearly all the casualties were Lebanese civilians. This was later contradicted by Hezbollah’s own admission that far more of its combatants had been killed (they had concealed many of their losses), and HRW had over-counted some non-combatant groups as civilians. A similar pattern repeated in the 2008–09 and 2014 Gaza wars. Frustratingly, international institutions did not draw the appropriate lessons from these failures.

 

Breaking this cycle is crucial if more accurate assessments are to be made in the future. In Chapter 8 of their report, the BESA researchers suggest some methodological improvements. They emphasise the importance of critically evaluating stories to check that they do not all originate from the same biased or flawed source (an “inverse information funnel”). They also warn that testimony from within Gaza’s closed society—even from doctors or other professionals usually presumed to be neutral in the West—must be carefully examined and corroborated, as these individuals may be subject to unseen pressures or compromised by their own affiliations. None of this implies that Israel’s account is automatically accurate. Every side has a narrative. It simply means that every claim should be met with healthy scepticism and a demand for evidence.

 

These recommendations are sound. As an international observer during the conflict, I saw how swiftly social media and even major news outlets reported atrocity stories that later proved to be dubious or false. The al-Ahli Hospital explosion serves as one example: initial claims of an Israeli airstrike killing 500 civilians at a hospital sparked worldwide protests. Days later, evidence—including blast analysis and intercepted communications—indicated a Palestinian rocket malfunction was the cause. Independent investigators estimated the death toll to be in the dozens, not hundreds. But the rush to get the story out quickly overshadowed the caution that such dramatic claims require. And when the retraction was eventually reported, it was merely a footnote.

 

Hamas knows that it benefits when Western publics believe Israel is committing atrocities and it has become adept at fighting the information war. Its operatives have every incentive to craft a false narrative of the conflict that serves these ends, and outside parties, unless they are alert, can inadvertently become amplifiers of propaganda. The BESA study’s frank criticism of UN agencies and human-rights groups is not intended to undermine their humanitarian aims but to emphasise the importance of improving their methods. If humanitarian organisations do not adapt by learning to sift propaganda from fact and verify information independently, they risk manipulation in future conflicts, which ultimately damages their credibility and the very people they seek to help.

 

VI. A Vital Corrective

 

By providing this meticulous analysis, the BESA Centre study offers a vital corrective to a damaging and widely embraced falsehood. But as the BESA researchers point out, a finding that there is no genocide in Gaza does not mean that all of Israel’s actions were beyond reproach or that Palestinians have not suffered. A humanitarian catastrophe is occurring. Thousands of civilians, including many children, have been killed or maimed; infrastructure is in ruins; and hundreds of thousands are displaced within their own small territory.

 

These realities demand empathy and accountability, and when the war is over, Israel will need to confront the moral and strategic questions about the conduct of its campaign. Were there points at which different tactical choices could have preserved more lives without compromising strategic or tactical objectives? Could evacuation orders have been better executed to safeguard civilians? Questions like these remain crucial, and raising them is not equivalent to accusing Israel of genocide. Civilian deaths may be tragic, and even wrongful in some cases, but that does not justify false allegations of genocide.

 

Similarly, recognising that Hamas’s tactics are a major cause of civilian harm should not be mistaken for blaming Gazans for their own suffering. The civilian population of Gaza was effectively held hostage by Hamas’s strategy. They had little control over whether Hamas stored rockets under their homes or fired them from their rooftops. Gazans were, in many ways, victims of both Hamas and the crossfire. True moral clarity involves acknowledging Hamas’s responsibility for endangering their people, while also insisting that Israel try to minimise harm in such challenging circumstances.

 

The BESA study commendably avoids polemics. In doing so, it provides a platform for more informed ethical and legal debate. By dispelling some falsehoods, it has served the pursuit of truth, and, by extension, peace, since lasting peace can only be built on honest understanding. Orbach, Boxman, Henkin, and Braverman have provided an exemplary case study in thorough conflict analysis, examining primary sources, verifying claims, applying statistical review, and comparing the Gaza conflict with historical examples. They remind us that even in the era of instant information (and disinformation), the tools of scholars and investigators remain essential: verify, compare, question, and remain sceptical of grand narratives that arise from the fog of war.