GazaGenoLIE Campaign Comes Out Swinging

The GazaGenoLIE campaign is a response to the malignant worldwide campaign to falsely accuse Israel of “genocide” in Gaza. It’s late in the day, as that preposterous charge of “genocide” has had plenty of time tospread across the globe, but at long last, Israel and its supporters have organized a counter-offensive, fighting the battle for public opinion, and ripping the charge of “genocide” to shreds. Had this campaign begun on October 8, 2023, it would have been easier to prevail; it is much harder to undo a false belief than to nip it in the bud in the first place. But the GazaGenoLIE campaign is now up and running, starting with a huge billboard in Times Square that announces its existence and provides a link to its online site.

More about that campaign can be found here.

On October 8, 2023, while Israel was still reeling from the Hamas-led massacre of the previous day, accusations that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza were already appearing at demonstrations and on social media.

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Israel was accused of “genocide” even before it had sent a single soldier into Gaza.

For the organizations behind the now viral Gaza GenoLIE campaign, that timing is central to their argument: that the accusation was part of a broader effort to delegitimize Israel—one that has since helped fuel hostility toward the Jewish state and Jews around the world.

The campaign is a joint initiative of over 100 pro-Israel and Jewish organizations from over 20 countries, including the Anti-Defamation League, World Jewish Congress, CAMERA, HonestReporting, the International Legal Forum (ILF), Students Supporting Israel (SSI), the Israeli-American Council (IAC), Christians United for Israel (CUFI), and others. The GenoLIE, whose name combines “genocide” and “lie,” highlights eight aspects of the Gaza genocide accusation, including examining the legal definition of genocide, famine allegations, the alleged “war on journalists,” Hamas’s use of human shields, allegations that Israel deliberately targeted journalists, and Israel’s treatment of civilians.

At the heart of the campaign is a legal distinction: genocide is not simply another word for a war or a conflict that results in significant civilian deaths.

Under international law, genocide requires specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected national, ethnic, racial or religious group. GenoLIE argues that applying the term to Israel’s war against Hamas strips the word of its specific meaning and turns it into a false political accusation….

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The initiative points to Israeli evacuation warnings, humanitarian pauses, and vaccination drives for Gazan civilians as evidence that Israel has taken meaningful measures to reduce civilian harm. GenoLIE argues that these measures demonstrate that Israel’s war is directed at Hamas, not the Palestinian population, and that Hamas’s deliberate use of civilians as human shields demonstrates that civilian casualties are a result of Hamas’s tactics, rather than evidence of an Israeli campaign to destroy Palestinians….

Here is some of what we know about the IDF’s conduct of the war in Gaza. First, it has made a tremendous effort, by dropping millions of leaflets, sending millions of text messages, making millions of robocalls, to warn civilians in Gaza to leave sites about to be targeted. It has also used the “knock-on-the-roof” technique as an additional way to warn Gazans living in a building to quickly get out. That is not “genocide.” Second, the IDF has facilitated the entry into Gaza of 182,000 tons of humanitarian aid — food and medicine. It has also prevented Hamas, whenever it could, from stealing much of that aid and keeping it both for its own members and for resale, at exorbitant prices, to Gazan civilians. That does not suggest “genocide.” Third, the IDF has encouraged, and supplied medicines for, a campaign to vaccinate Gazan children against childhood illnesses. That does not suggest “genocide.” Fourth, the Israelis have transferred Gazan children in need of special medical treatment to hospitals in Jordan. Again, that does not suggest “genocide.”

But the most convincing response that Israel is not engaged in “genocide” are the statistics about deaths in Gaza and their causes. We keep being told about the huge number of deaths, especially of “women and children,”in Gaza. Let’s examine that claim one more time, shall we?

In 1967, when Israel took over Gaza, it had a population of 360,000. Today its population is two million. Is that “genocide”?

And now for some arithmetic:

According to Hamas, 73,500 people have died in Gaza during the war.

According to Israel, about 25,000 Hamas combatants have been killed in Gaza.

That means there were 48,500 non-Hamas deaths. Now we need to calculate how many of these 48,500 deaths were non-combat related.

Before the war, in Gaza an estimated 7,700 to 8,400 total baseline deaths per year resulted from all non-conflict natural causes (such as age-related illnesses, non-communicable diseases, and normal baseline rates of disease or accidents). So, it is reasonable to assume there have continued to be about 8,000 deaths per year, or 667 per month. During the 35 months of the war, from October 2023 to September 2026, 23,345 (667 x 35) people in Gaza died of non-combat related causes.

So of the 48,500 deaths of non-Hamas people in Gaza, 25,515 (48,500 minus 23,345) died as a result of the war.

How do those numbers stack up against other wars?

The UN has calculated that in all the wars fought since World War II, the civilian-to-combatant ratio was on average 9:1. In Afghanistan, the Americans brought that down to 4:1, and in Iraq, to 3:1.

In Gaza, 25,515 civilians died as a result of the war, and 25,000 Hamas combatants also died.

The civilian-to-combatant ratio in the Gaza war, then, is 25,515:25,000, or about 1:1, a figure that no other military In the world has come close to achieving.

Which leads me to ask again — “Genocide? What genocide?”

I hope that the GenoLIE campaign will use the calculations that I have offered above.

The campaign highlights a widely circulated 2025 photograph of an emaciated Gazan child that appeared on the New York Times front page. The newspaper subsequently corrected its presentation of the image after medical records indicated the child suffered from serious pre-existing conditions.

The campaign similarly argues that some Palestinian journalists killed during the war had affiliations with Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and that Hamas deliberately operated from within civilian areas.

In fact, at least 60% of the “journalists” killed in Gaza had proven connections to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Every supporter of the Jewish state knows that Israel came late to this contest, that many negative opinions of Israel, including the infamous charge of “genocide,” have been allowed to harden, and the campaign to undo such malevolent misconceptions will be difficult. But at long last those supporters — more than one hundred major organizations worldwide, both Jewish and non-Jewish — have joined, and are now arriving like the cavalry coming to a besieged Fort Apache, to set the record straight.