Genocide Lie Enthusiasts Mourn the Collapse of the Genocide Lie

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, December 23, 2025

 

Anti-Israeli activists have never had much use for factual evidence — why start now?

 

For all Israel’s martial acumen — its military-intelligence coups, its inventive methods for executing highly discriminating strikes on individual targets (even individual targets’ pockets), and its “astonishingly low ratio” of civilian-to-combat casualties in a fight against an adversary determined to maximize civilian casualties (according to eminent military historian Sir Andrew Roberts) — the Jewish State is terrible at genocide.

 

That empirical reality has long been a source of cognitive dissonance among those who know Israel is pursuing a genocidal project in the Gaza Strip but are starved for evidence in support of their conviction. While major combat operations inside Gaza were ongoing, the discrepancy was attributed to Israel’s refusal to allow Western journalists into a war zone. Now, however, reporters are surveying the post-war devastation for themselves, and what they’re concluding is not satisfying the activist class.

 

Middle East Eye contributor Hamza Yusuf’s critique of the journalism emerging from Gaza tells the tale. He reviewed the work produced by three British broadcasters, each of whom “obscured the reality” of Israel’s military aims and “upheld the fiction that Gaza represents the site of complex warfare, not meticulously orchestrated mass slaughter.”

 

Take, for example, the Zionist shills at . . . the BBC. Yusuf sneered at correspondent Lucy Williamson’s observation that the Israel Defense Forces continue to execute lethal operations against cease-fire violators — in his view, improperly framing those who violate, for example, the yellow line in Gaza as exclusively members of Hamas. He might be right — they might be Palestinian Islamic Jihad, too. Either way, the BBC allegedly sinned by quoting Israeli officials who insist that leveling buildings was “not the goal.” Rather, the “goal is to combat terrorists,” many of whom use civilian infrastructure as cover.

 

“The BBC’s reporting from Gaza capped off 25 months of distorted coverage,” Yusuf insisted, “painting a wildly inaccurate picture based on predetermined conclusions about Israeli retaliation and ‘self-defense’ while ignoring the raw truth of systematic ethnic cleansing.” Imagine the heartache inside the BBC as they learn their monomaniacal devotion to uncovering supposed Israeli perfidy has failed to satisfy the pro-Palestinian activist community.

 

Among Yusuf’s grudges is the BBC’s failure, in his view, to properly condemn Israel for allegedly violating the October cease-fire. He appears blind to similar violations by Hamas and other affiliated terrorist entities, and he certainly isn’t preoccupied with Hamas’s failure to cede the last hostage body in its custody to Israel — a factor that has (predictably) halted the progress of President Donald Trump’s cease-fire deal. But Sky News is no better.

 

That outlet, too, “contextualized” the war and quoted Israeli officials, each of whom refused to admit that they were dead set on ethnically cleansing the Strip by force. “Israel’s continued occupation of Gaza is illegal under international law,” Yusuf complained, “yet mainstream media are all too eager to repackage it as a military strategy rooted in necessity.” You might think a United Nations Security Council resolution approving Trump’s cease-fire plan, which legitimized the Israeli military footprint inside Gaza, would have rendered that talking point obsolete. But much like the anti-Israel activist clique’s delusions, it persists.

 

Even the U.K.’s ITV — the best of the bunch, in Yusuf’s estimation — still relies on “military jargon” to describe a military operation. It deployed terms like “fought over,” “warfare,” and “military necessity” to describe the conflict Hamas inaugurated on October 7, 2023. Yusuf is genuinely confused, and he has reason to be. ITV declined to press Israeli officials with the accusations of “genocidal intent” that it once broadcast in a documentary about the post-10/7 conflict. But now that its reporters are on the ground, they’re telling a different story. Again, “despite these reporters seeing the reality with their own eyes,” Yusuf is convinced they’re suppressing their own conclusions — not relating them.

 

With the global press now doing its job, the United Nations may be the last redoubt for Israel skeptics who seek to cosset themselves in an evidence-free environment.

 

As Newsweek’s Josh Hammer wrote this week, the U.N.’s Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) recently determined that famine conditions, which are distinct from the terrible hardships that accompany warfare, have at last abated. Indeed, the IPC declared famine “imminent” on several occasions, none of which culminated in observable famine. Throughout the war, the IPC ignored the pallets of food aid rotting on U.N.-run platforms. It turned a blind eye to efforts by the U.N.’s Hamas-affiliated partners in Gaza to hoard (and seize) humanitarian support, compelling Gazans to liberate it by force. The IPC and its U.N. partners waged a ruthless propaganda campaign against the joint U.S.-Israeli charity, Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which tried to break the U.N.’s monopoly on the food and medical aid Hamas uses to keep Gaza’s captive people in line. All the while, the U.N. and its allies in the international press promoted images of children — it was almost exclusively children — who suffered from genetic conditions to substantiate its otherwise unsupportable calumnies against Israel.

 

Now, to justify its contention that the famine it could never prove existed is over, the IPC is relaxing its own standards to preserve the misconceptions of the anti-Israel activist community. In addition to the IPC’s pathological disregard for the millions of tons of humanitarian assistance that Israel shuttled into Gaza throughout the war, Hammer notes, the IPC’s latest report fails to mention Hamas even once.

 

That’s the sort of investigative work that Yusuf came to expect from the anti-Israel obsessives who populate European newsrooms. And why shouldn’t he? After all, gratuitous and tendentious criticism of Israel’s every move — up to and including attributing to the Jewish State the bloody work of its terrorist enemies — is precisely what he’s gotten from them since almost the outset of Israel’s longest defensive war.

 

Yusuf and those who share his preconceptions cannot accept the idea that what they know to be true just isn’t and never was. It must be that those who are relating the evidence of their own eyes have been corrupted by the vast conspiratorial apparatus in Israel’s control.

 

For Yusuf and his anti-Israel compatriots, these are disorienting times. But they need not be. A reasonable observer might have withheld judgment before the facts were in and revised his opinion now that they are. Israel’s critics never had much use for that deliberative process. Why start now?