Genocide has become a product. It comes with its own vocabulary, images, slogans, experts, demonstrations, keffiyeh-wearing students, celebrities, and a designated culprit. The word is no longer the conclusion of an argument. It has become the argument itself. Israel is no longer fighting the organization that massacred its citizens on October 7, 2023; Israel is “committing genocide.” The dead in Gaza are no longer casualties of an urban war fought against an armed organization entrenched in one of the most densely populated territories on earth. They are automatically recast as victims of an extermination campaign. The word goes onto the placards before any court has reached a verdict. Repeated often enough, the verdict begins to look as though it came before the evidence.

As of September 2026, no international court has ruled that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. The case brought by South Africa before the International Court of Justice is still underway. In January 2024, the Court ordered provisional measures, a decision that was quickly turned in parts of the press into a finding of “plausible genocide.” Joan Donoghue, who was president of the Court at the time, later explained what the ruling actually said: the ICJ had found that Palestinians had a plausible right to protection from genocide, not that South Africa’s allegation that Israel was committing genocide had itself been found plausible. The merits of the case have yet to be decided.

In March 2026, the United States formally intervened in the proceedings and rejected the genocide accusation against Israel. The legal issue is not particularly complicated. Genocide does not mean “a great many dead,” “cities destroyed,” or even, automatically, “war crimes.” The Genocide Convention requires the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such. A horrific death toll, by itself, does not establish that intent.

The Magic Number

That is where the magic number enters the story. More than 70,000 Palestinian deaths are now reported for the war. The principal source remains the Gaza Ministry of Health, an administration operating in territory controlled by Hamas. The headline figure is issued without separating civilians from combatants. That is the number that travels through news reports, speeches, rallies, and social media. Behind that undifferentiated total, however, are much more detailed lists published by the same ministry, with names, ages, and sex. They still do not identify who was a fighter, but they do allow us to see who was dying. And that is where the public narrative begins to crack.

For months, messaging out of Gaza stressed that the overwhelming majority of the dead were women and children. Yet when the ministry’s own detailed lists are examined, adult men are plainly overrepresented, especially between the ages of twenty and forty-five. As early as May 2024, analysis of the published names showed that men accounted for 45.6 percent of the identified dead, even though they make up a much smaller share of the population, while children were proportionally underrepresented. The detailed data had been telling a different story from the slogans for quite some time.

“Once people have been told often enough that snow is black, showing them that it is white starts to look suspicious.”

The discrepancy becomes even harder to ignore in demographic analysis based on the ministry’s lists and U.S. Census Bureau population data. Gabriel Epstein found that adult men were heavily overrepresented among the dead. In data extending into 2025, 49.3 percent of recorded fatalities were adult males, and among those aged eighteen to forty-five, men were killed at 2.85 times the rate of women of the same age. The fatality pyramid looks strikingly different from Gaza’s population pyramid: excess mortality is concentrated precisely among men of fighting age. The available data do not yield a precise civilian-to-combatant ratio, but they do make one thing obvious: a substantial portion of the dead belonged to the demographic from which combatants are overwhelmingly drawn.

That is the real effectiveness of propaganda: circulate the simplest, most emotionally useful number, knowing that almost no one will examine what sits underneath it. Hamas and its allies succeeded in establishing the picture before the public ever looked at the data that might test it.

Human Shields and Urban Warfare

It has been demonstrated repeatedly, by observers from very different backgrounds, that Hamas uses civilian infrastructure and protected sites for military purposes and operates among civilians as human shields. Hospitals, schools, residential areas, and underground networks have all been incorporated into the battlefield. The military problem is therefore the very one that the word “genocide” conveniently removes from view: how do you fight an organization that deliberately places its military apparatus among the people it claims to protect?

Israel, meanwhile, has used phone calls, text messages, leaflets, recorded warnings, evacuation corridors, and evacuation orders on a scale rarely seen in urban warfare. John Spencer, chairman of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, concluded that Israel had taken more measures to reduce civilian harm than any army he had studied in comparable urban combat. His analysis takes into account Gaza’s extreme density, Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure, and the measures Israel adopted to move civilians away from areas of intense fighting.

That reality sits awkwardly beside the claim of an extermination policy. An army supposedly intent on destroying an entire population is simultaneously devoting enormous resources to warning that population to leave areas it intends to attack. Individual strikes can be examined. Individual mistakes can be investigated. But stripping those precautions from the record and leaving only the total number of dead means removing precisely the evidence that bears on intent.

The Karim Khan Episode

Karim Khan provides another awkward episode. The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court sought arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Not genocide. In 2026, Mehdi Hasan asked him why. Khan replied that a prosecutor should not act under the pressure of public clamor, but on the evidence. Asked whether genocide charges might still come later, he said that no crime was off the table if the evidence was there. After years in which the word “genocide” had been treated as self-evident in much of the public debate, the prosecutor personally pursuing Israeli leaders had still not charged them with it.

What followed badly damaged Khan’s own moral authority. A female colleague accused him of serious sexual misconduct; Khan denied the allegations. In July 2026, ICC member states voted by 82 votes to remove him from office. He has not been criminally convicted of rape, but the sexual misconduct case that arose during his tenure ultimately contributed to his institutional downfall.

South Africa’s Political Context

South Africa also needs to be placed in its actual political context. Pretoria did not arrive in this case from some neutral planet. The ANC has long maintained political ties with Palestinian movements and warm relations with Iran. South Africa’s own Parliament has described the Islamic Republic as a “valuable and strategic ally” and has pointed to the close political, diplomatic, and commercial ties between the two countries.

The history goes back long before Gaza. In September 2001, the World Conference Against Racism in Durban was supposed to be about racism. It became, in part, a political tribunal against Israel. Colin Powell withdrew the American delegation, explicitly denouncing the return of “Zionism equals racism,” the comparison of Israel with apartheid, the minimizing of the Holocaust, and the singling out of Israel for condemnation. Hamas did not yet rule Gaza. October 7 had not happened. Netanyahu was not under indictment at the ICC. The intellectual machinery was already in place.

Rewriting Memory

Its first task is to rewrite history before rewriting the present. Jews must first be turned into foreigners in their own historic homeland. Jerusalem, Hebron, Judea, Galilee, the Temple Mount, the ancient Jewish kingdoms, the texts, the archaeology — all of it disappears behind a more useful word: “colonist.” The Jew becomes European, white, imported. Jewish history in the land is reduced to a modern political claim, as though it were no older than a border drawn yesterday.

In that battle over memory, the Nakba has gradually assumed enormous importance. The term itself dates back to 1948 and was not invented to imitate the Holocaust. But the memory culture built around it has increasingly placed the two catastrophes opposite one another. Gaza is compared to Auschwitz, Palestinians to the Jews of Europe, and Israelis are then assigned the only role left in the comparison.

“Six million. A Palestinian catastrophe is placed, deliberately or not, next to the number that has come to stand for the extermination of Europe’s Jews.”

The refugee issue performs a similar transformation through arithmetic. When UNRWA began operating in 1950, it served roughly 750,000 Palestinian refugees. Today it registers about 5.9 million, because descendants of the original male refugees and their descendants can also qualify for registration. Those are UNRWA’s own rules. Six million people registered today therefore do not mean six million people were expelled in 1948.

The number nonetheless carries an unmistakable resonance. Six million. A Palestinian catastrophe is placed, deliberately or not depending on who is doing the speaking, next to the number that has come to stand for the extermination of Europe’s Jews. The Nakba meets the Holocaust. Gaza meets Auschwitz. The Palestinian gradually becomes yesterday’s Jew. Someone must then be assigned the role of the persecutor. That role is reserved for the Israeli.

What October 7 Became

Which brings us back to October 7. Hamas and other armed groups crossed the Israeli border, murdered about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and abducted 251 others. The war that followed began with that attack. Yet over time, in much of the Western discourse, October 7 has been reduced to an inconvenient preface. The version of the story that matters begins the next morning.

That is what makes the word “genocide” so politically useful. It frees people from having to tell the whole story. Remove the distinction between fighters and civilians. Remove the tunnels. Remove military infrastructure embedded in civilian areas. Remove the hostages. Remove the evacuations and warnings. Remove the attack that started the war. Then a total number of deaths becomes a total number of civilians, that civilian total becomes proof of intent, and the alleged intent becomes a verdict.

Durban had prepared the ground long before Gaza. October 7 simply provided the setting in which the old machinery could start running at full speed again. The images of the war did the rest, carried by social media at a speed no earlier propaganda campaign could have imagined. South Africa then carried the accusation into a courtroom.

By then, only one thing still had to be forgotten: no verdict had ever been delivered.

Pierre Rehov

Pierre Rehov is a documentary filmmaker and commentator on Middle East affairs, contributing analysis on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, international law, and the politics of wartime narrative to Faith & Freedom News.