The end to "genocide"? Not quite.

“On 7 October 2023, Israel launched its military offensive in Gaza, which included airstrikes and ground operations.”

That is how the much-vaunted United Nations report accusing Israel of committing genocide begins its story of events since 7 October. There is no mention of what happened earlier that day, or why Israel launched a military offensive in Gaza on 7 October 2023. It is as if this war dropped out of a clear blue sky onto unsuspecting and entirely innocent Gazans, none of whom had done anything to invite such an onslaught. This UN report has put the final nail in the coffin of Israel’s reputation, but it is as shoddy and partisan as every other attempt to pin the genocide label onto the Jewish State.

You could read the entire 72-page UN report and easily miss the fact that there is any sort of military combat in Gaza at all. There is barely a mention of the presence of armed Palestinian combatants in Gaza, no mention of IDF casualties, no discussion of the widely-evidenced use by Hamas and other armed groups of civilian infrastructure for military purposes, fighting from within, and underneath, a civilian population. We are told that “From 7 October 2023 to 31 July 2025, 60,199 Palestinians were killed, of whom 18,430 were children and 9,735 were women”, but not told that any of them - never mind how many - were armed fighters, killed in military combat. The implication is left hanging that they were all civilians, killed for no purpose other than to satisfy Israel’s supposed genocidal mania.

In just one example, the UN report discusses the amount of damage to residential homes and apartment blocks in Gaza, but does not mention either the evidence of Palestinian combatants fighting from residential buildings; or the presence of tunnel entrances and arms stashes in those homes; or that many properties were booby-trapped by Hamas to ambush IDF soldiers. Perhaps this omission is the fault of Israel’s decision not to engage with the Commission at all, but the evidence is easy enough to find if you just go online. By leaving it out, they also leave out any reasonable explanation for why so many residential buildings have been damaged.

Only on page 52 does the report finally mention Israel’s claim that this war was a justified response to the October 7 terror attack, saying that Israeli political and military leaders “repeatedly stated that the attack of 7 October 2023 presented an existential threat to Israel”. But the UN Commission then dismisses this excuse in a single sentence: “The attacks in southern Israel on 7 October 2023 were brutal war crimes but they did not pose an existential threat to the State of Israel.” There is no discussion of how the UN reached this conclusion. As for hostages, the only mention of the word in the report’s summary of the factual situation is, with dark irony, to accuse Israel of aiming “to hold the entire population of the Gaza Strip hostage.” The fact that 251 hostages were taken by Hamas on 7 October, 48 of whom still remain in Gaza, and that returning them home is both a key war aim of the Israeli government and little short of a national obsession for the Israeli public, is entirely absent from the UN’s assessment of Israel’s motivations.

This approach of ignoring the fact there is a war between armed adversaries in Gaza, and selectively describing the impact of Israel’s military operations on the civilian population as if it has no other explanation or context, is mirrored in most of the significant reports and articles accusing Israel of genocide. It was the same in the infamous motion passed by the International Association of Genocide Scholars this summer, which turned out to have been adopted by only a small minority of IAGS members, who didn’t even need to be genocide scholars at all.

When Omer Bartov, one of America’s best-known genocide scholars, wrote in the New York Times that “Israel’s actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population”, he gave the game away with that word, “only”. This is the word on which the whole ‘genocide’ argument rests, because this is a crime defined by intent: if there is a reasonable alternative explanation for Israel’s actions, then you can’t make the case for genocide.

Of course, if you erase the war from the story of what is happening in Gaza, then it is possible to argue that there is no other explanation for why so many Palestinians have been killed and so much infrastructure in Gaza has been destroyed. You can make it look as if Israel acts for no reason other than wilful cruelty and murderous intent. But on the other hand, to try to explain why the IDF is in Gaza at all without mentioning Hamas, hostages, or what happened on 7 October 2023, is in my view both unethical and dishonest.

It is possible for people to argue, rightly or wrongly, that Israeli actions in Gaza have been illegal, immoral and unjustified without that sleight of hand. As with most armed conflicts, you can come up with examples of war crimes in Gaza: but genocide is not the plural of war crimes. In principle, Israel is a state like any other and as such, is not incapable of committing genocide, which remains a crime within the compass of human behaviour. But I am yet to read a report or article that fully acknowledges the facts and meaning of Hamas’s October 7 assault, considers Iran’s wider ‘axis of resistance’ strategy, remembers the fate of Israeli hostages, and discusses the way that Hamas prepared the Gazan terrain for military conflict; and bearing all that in mind, still made a convincing argument that this is a genocide. Without considering that full defence of Israel’s actions in detail what you are left with is not a legal justification but a political argument, whether it bears UN branding or not.

I have written before about the strange desire to prove that there is a genocide occurring in Gaza, even to the point of trying to change the existing legal definition that applies everywhere else on earth, just to make it fit. And now, some of Israel’s most extreme critics, some of whom accused Israel of committing genocide long before October 7, are the ones most disappointed and worried by the prospect that President Trump’s peace plan might work.

If this was a real genocide, then surely any proposal to stop further killing ought to be welcomed. Palestinian writer susan abulhawa complained that Trump’s deal would be “akin to negotiating a ceasefire between Auschwitz or Warsaw and the Nazi regime.” Quite apart from the grotesque comparison, I imagine the prisoners in Auschwitz, facing the daily terror of selection for the gas chambers and with millions of Jews already dead, would have welcomed anything that offered even the possibility of survival.

The UK Palestine Solidarity Campaign have even claimed that Trump’s plan “should be understood as a continuation of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people rather than a plan to end it” - which just goes to show that Israel will be accused of genocide whether it kills or doesn’t kill, bombs or doesn’t bomb. It is as if, when it comes to Palestine, “genocide” has shed its legal meaning and become a political label, whose antithesis is “resistance”. These two terms are treated as the only two options by Western activists convinced that Gaza is the frontline in an existential global struggle against the entire Western capitalist colonial power structure - with “resistance” serving as a value and political identity all of its own. And if “resistance” ends then its opposite value, “genocide”, which is inherent in colonialism, becomes inevitable. That’s the thinking that drives radical anti-Zionism. In reality, though, if Trump’s deal works - and that is far from certain - then hopefully it will mean that Palestinians and Israelis can stop being metaphors for the political fantasies of Western activists and start to rebuild their real lives.

What will stick, though, is the harm to Israel’s reputation, and through that to Jews around the world. Very few people will read the UN report in full or the detail of the IAGS motion. All they see is the headline that the UN and genocide scholars agree that Israel is committing genocide, and the damage is done. This is the basis on which Labour Party conference passed a motion accepting that Israel is committing genocide, and it is why Israel may be thrown out of European football, Eurovision, and probably other international arenas too. Perhaps some of this is self-inflicted, and Israel’s failed strategy of trying to control food supply in Gaza was particularly damaging. But the drive to make Israel a pariah nation was the goal of the genocide narrative all along, and even if Israel has won the military confrontation and succeeds in removing Hamas as the political authority in Gaza, this wider defeat on the international stage and in global public opinion will take years to overturn.

I write this as Yom Kippur approaches, a second year in which this solemn day takes place with deadly war ongoing in Gaza and the remaining hostages still not home with their families. Whether Trump’s deal proves to be the solution or not, my only hope is that, one way or another, the war comes to an end, the hostages are returned, and this terrible suffering amongst Israelis and Palestinians becomes part of the past, not the future.