Solomon2
Elite Member
The 'Gaza Genocide' Is a Hoax
David Harsanyi | 10:57 PM on September 02, 2026
AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana
In May 2025, Tom Fletcher, the United Nations under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, went on BBC Radio and told the audience that 14,000 babies in Gaza were going to die "in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them."
According to UNICEF, there are around 20,000 babies in the entirety of Gaza. Which means 70% of all infants were in danger of dying in mere hours. An "utterly chilling" figure, Fletcher stressed.
The New York Times, along with numerous other establishment media outlets, relayed Fletcher's allegation to its credulous audience without any skepticism. The usual experts were summoned to discuss this unfolding famine on cable news. And the antisemites across social media amplified the claim.
No matter how far-fetched a story is about Israel, including preposterous evidence-free accusations that it trains dogs to rape Palestinians, papers such as The New York Times will spread it to feed the perception that the Jewish state operates as a genocidal entity. And no matter how often the claims are debunked, they keep at it.
A couple of months after Fletcher's pronouncement, for instance, The New York Times ran a front-page story about starvation in Gaza featuring a haunting photograph of an emaciated Palestinian toddler named Mohammed Zakaria al Mutawaq. Unmentioned was that the boy suffered from cerebral palsy and other serious preexisting medical conditions, and his appearance had nothing to do with hunger.
In any event, what the U.N. report actually found was that 14,000 cases of malnutrition might occur among the 1 million children of Gaza, not babies, if aid did not reach them over the next year.
Aid did reach them. Lots and lots of aid. The U.S.-Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation delivered around 187 million meal equivalents, plus produce, and over 1 million packs of supplementary food for children to Palestinians before the ceasefire.
And a year after U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres claimed that "famine" in Gaza was a "failure of humanity itself," a UNICEF-led "Nutrition SMART Survey Result" found that not only was there no widespread acute malnutrition in Gaza, but at 0.5%, the strip had one of the lowest rates in the region.
Related: A Primer on What Genocide Is — and Isn't
By the time "clarifications" run, the stories have coagulated in the imaginations of Israel haters.
No credible person argues that Palestinians in Gaza do not suffer because of Hamas' endless nihilistic wars against Israel. But there was no genocide. Not one popularly understood. And not legally. The exculpatory evidence against genocide is overwhelming.
The most significant thing to remember about the genocide charge is that international organizations had to change the way they apply the legal definition that has been in place since the 1948 Genocide Convention to smear Israel.
In the popular understanding, the term "genocide" is something akin to the mass murder of people. As a legal matter, it is defined as acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
The legal case against Israel relies on intent.
If Israel harbors genocidal intentions, why would it deliver more humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip than any army has probably ever delivered to an enemy population during wartime in history? Israel, which gave Gaza autonomy in 2005, not only provided food but also clean water, electricity and medical aid for decades.
If Israel has genocidal intentions, why does it warn civilians with flyers, roof knocking, phone calls and other mitigation techniques? Israel remains the only nation in the history of Earth that is allegedly intent on genocide to put its own troops in more danger to spare civilians.
Why does Israel move the populations of entire cities out of the way when trying to confront Hamas? Israel could, of course, annihilate all of Gaza within minutes if it felt like it.
If Israel has genocidal intentions, why does the Gaza war have one of the lowest combat-to-civilian death ratios in the history of modern warfare? This, despite the fact that Hamas urges its own people to become cannon fodder as a means of appealing to friendly Western journalists and intellectuals. Hamas leaders build tunnels under hospitals, schools and mosques. They fire rockets from civilian areas. They prevent their own people from evacuating combat zones.
If Israel had genocidal intentions, there would be a lot more than 70,000 total casualties during the war. That total, it needs to be stressed, includes deaths from illness, old age, executions, murders, natural causes and preexisting conditions. Most importantly, it includes Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters — though that fact is barely ever mentioned by the mass media.
Of course, Israel itself is home to over 2 million Arab citizens, a fifth of the country, with full legal and voting rights, who serve in the Knesset, practice law and medicine, and attend universities. Arab Israelis have higher living standards, longer life expectancies and greater political freedom than Arabs in most neighboring countries.
If Israel's goal was ethnic cleansing, the nation is the most spectacularly incompetent operation in human history.
There is no genocide. And there was no famine. There was a war. And the bad guys lost.
******
David Harsanyi is a senior writer at National Review and author of Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent.
Solomon2 note: I post this in response to an article by a Pakistani law student in which he bemoaned the fact that people didn't know what the legal defintion of genocide was. But he couldn't actually bring himself to express the truth in the article - I suppose that's because doing so wasn't permitted.
