No Genocide, but an Awful Lot of Hypocrisy Wrapped up in Double Standards!

Boys transport a cart loaded with water containers past tents and rubble at a camp for people displaced by war in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City, on July 6, 2026. Omar Al-qattaa / AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

The charge of genocide leveled against Israel in Gaza fails every legal and factual test. Genocide, as defined by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, requires specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such.

It is not measured solely by body counts or the inevitable horrors of urban combat. Intent matters. Without it, the accusation collapses into rhetoric designed to delegitimize a state fighting for survival against enemies whose foundational documents and leaders openly call for its elimination.

Israel has demonstrated zero genocidal intent. On the contrary, no modern military has done more to limit civilian casualties while confronting an enemy that deliberately embeds itself among non-combatants.

Military experts, including John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at West Point, have documented Israel’s unprecedented measures that include: millions of text messages and phone calls warning civilians to evacuate specific areas; “roof-knocking” with non-lethal munitions to signal an imminent strike; and the frequent aborting of attacks when drones detect civilians nearby.

These measures have resulted in historically low urban conflict combatant-to-civilian ratios that Israel estimates to be in the range of 1:2 to 1:3 vs. the historical norm of 1:9 or more for un-evacuated cities.

The big downside is that these measures sacrifice the element of surprise and allow terrorist combatants to escape through tunnels or fade into the surrounding population—ceding a massive tactical advantage. Suffice it to say, Western forces in Fallujah or Mosul never matched this level of care.

Demanding that Israel go beyond these already extensive measures would render its military ineffective against an enemy that relies entirely on creating situations that maximize civilian casualties to win the propaganda war, a war they are currently winning due to their de facto partnership with far too many media outlets.

In contrast, Israel’s imperfect but genuine efforts to reduce Gazan civilian casualties show just how different it is from Hamas, whose official policy is genocide combined with total disregard for the safety of its own civilians.

Hamas’s 1988 Covenant declares that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”  While its 2017 revision tried to obscure its genocidal nature, it still rejected Israel’s right to exist.

More recently, Senior Hamas leaders, including Ghazi Hamad, openly promised that  Oct. 7-style attacks would be repeated “a second, a third, a fourth” time until Israel is annihilated.

Hezbollah’s 1985 manifesto and subsequent rhetoric frame the destruction of Israel as a religious and strategic imperative. Iran’s Khomeinist leadership has made the elimination of the “Zionist entity” a core foreign-policy pillar since 1979, repeatedly describing Israel as a “cancerous tumor” to be excised.

Regarding Civilian Deaths in Gaza

The vast majority of Gazan civilian deaths result from Hamas’s deliberate strategy of using civilians. The group embeds command centers, weapons, and rocket launchers in schools, hospitals, mosques, and refugee camps precisely to maximize civilian deaths, treating every dead woman or child as a propaganda victory.

Under international law, this is a war crime, yet major media outlets rarely mention it. Hamas cannot defeat the IDF militarily; its real objective is high civilian body counts that the media will blame solely on Israel.

By heavily relying on Gaza Health Ministry death and casualty tolls, media outlets effectively become part of Hamas’s propaganda campaign.

The 100 percent Hamas-controlled ministry does not distinguish between combatants and civilians, recording every death in a single tally.

A Fifty Global Research Group analysis of more than 1,300 articles from major English-language outlets found that 84–85 percent failed to separate combatant from civilian deaths, 98 percent cited the ministry’s numbers, and nearly 20 percent presented them with no attribution at all.

Even when outlets occasionally add a superficial “Hamas-run” disclaimer (about 22 percent of the time), they still allow a terrorist organization to shape the casualty narrative.

Methodological problems, including unverified “media reports,” family submissions, and the inclusion of natural deaths, further underscore just how irresponsible it is to rely on Hamas-reported casualties.

70,000 Dead as of Early 2026?

As of early 2026, the Hamas Health Ministry claimed roughly 70,000 deaths. Because  Hamas’ victory depends on inflating civilian casualties, these figures cannot be treated as reliable.

While an anonymous Israeli official allegedly estimated a similar total, a single unnamed source of unknown motivation is insufficient to validate numbers produced by a terrorist group.

One potentially flawed study provided estimates of over 70,000 violent deaths, but as explained by a West Point Lieber Institute study, studies that depend on multiple levels of assumption and inference have a very good chance of being wrong.

Still, despite Israel’s historically unprecedented efforts to limit civilian harm, tens of thousands of civilian deaths have almost certainly occurred.

These numbers would be far lower if Hamas did not systematically use civilians as human shields.

Shamefully, the media largely ignores Hamas’ culpability for civilian deaths, instead directing all its outrage at Israel.

Hypocrisy and Double Standards

Just how selective and targeted the media outrage is comes into sharp relief when set against the scale of death elsewhere.

In Sudan, the civil war that erupted in 2023 has produced tens of thousands of direct fatalities and estimates of 150,000 to more than 400,000 total deaths due to starvation and disease. Factions have systematically burnt fields, blocked aid, and used famine as a weapon, and displacement now exceeds 13 million, making it the world’s largest.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, decades of militia warfare have claimed millions of lives, with ongoing civilian massacres and acute food insecurity affecting tens of millions.

Warlords and governments in these theaters pursue wholesale slaughter, yet coverage remains minimal even as the Internet and airwaves are saturated with stories of Israeli atrocities and the suffering of the wholly innocent Gazan people who elected Hamas to be their leaders, rewarding Hamas with even higher levels of support after the Oct. 7 atrocities.

But the media is not alone in operating continuously under a hypocritical double standard.

The U.N. Human Rights Council maintains Agenda Item 7—a permanent, standing item dedicated exclusively to scrutinizing Israel at every session. No other country on Earth faces such scrutiny.

Item 4 covers the rest of the world’s human-rights situations combined.

Resolutions and condemnations pile up against the Jewish state in numbers that dwarf those directed at Syria, North Korea, Iran, or the perpetrators of African massacres.

This is not neutral human-rights advocacy; instead, it has become a forum for anti-Semitism that provides de facto, if not de jure, support to terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah, whose goals are to kill as many Jews as possible.

As has been the case since its inception, Israel continues to face existential threats from actors whose charters and actions aim at its destruction.

In sharp contrast, Israel continues to make a good-faith effort, however imperfect, to balance the incredibly difficult task of reducing civilian casualties while trying to defeat an opponent that deliberately puts civilians in harm’s way.

Meanwhile, the media, many governments, and NGOs effectively collaborate with the vile Oct. 7 terrorists to portray Israeli attacks as callous and indiscriminate—amplifying every Gazan death while largely ignoring far larger, more deliberate African slaughter, as well as Hamas’ role in civilian deaths.

Finally, by downplaying or ignoring anything that runs counter to the narrative that the world’s only Jewish state is a callous killer of women and children, as well as being a world leader in committing war crimes, they slip into a pattern that could be characterized as anti-Semitic.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.