Before any serious discussion of the war in Gaza can begin, one fundamental distinction must be made: civilian deaths, however numerous and however tragic, do not by themselves constitute genocide, nor do they automatically establish that a war crime has been committed.

That is not an attempt to diminish Palestinian suffering. Every innocent life lost is a human tragedy. However, international humanitarian law was developed precisely because wars cause terrible suffering, including the foreseeable and sometimes unavoidable deaths of civilians. The law therefore does not ask simply whether civilians were killed. It asks much more demanding questions: Who or what was deliberately targeted? What military objective was being pursued? What civilian harm was reasonably anticipated at the time? Was that anticipated harm excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage expected? Were feasible precautions taken? And, in the case of genocide, was there a specific intention to destroy a protected people, in whole or in substantial part, as such?

Those distinctions are crucial.

Israel is fighting Hamas, an armed organisation that deliberately attacked Israeli communities on October 7, 2023, murdered civilians and took hostages, and which has embedded significant elements of its military infrastructure within one of the most densely populated urban environments on Earth. Hamas operates through tunnels beneath civilian areas, stores and launches weapons from or near civilian infrastructure, and fights from within the population it governs.

This creates one of the most morally and militarily difficult forms of warfare imaginable: an army attempting to distinguish an enemy that deliberately seeks to erase that distinction.

Hamas understands this dilemma. Civilian suffering is not merely an unfortunate consequence of its method of warfare; civilian exposure can become part of the strategic equation. When military assets are deliberately positioned among civilians, Israel faces an impossible choice: decline to attack and provide Hamas with effective immunity, or attack legitimate military targets while accepting the risk that civilians whom Israel does not intend to kill may nevertheless die.

International humanitarian law does not give an armed force immunity merely because it chooses to operate among civilians. Nor does the presence of civilians automatically make every attack upon a military objective unlawful. Equally, Hamas’ unlawful use of civilian areas does not relieve Israel of its own continuing obligations of distinction, proportionality and feasible precaution. That is precisely why individual military operations must be judged on their particular facts rather than by slogans or casualty totals alone.

This distinction is too often lost in the international debate.

The death of a Palestinian child is a tragedy. But tragedy is not itself proof of a war crime. The destruction of a building is not automatically a war crime. A high civilian death toll, however confronting, is not by itself evidence of genocide. International law requires evidence concerning targeting, military necessity, proportionality, precautions and, above all in allegations of genocide, specific genocidal intent.

That last requirement matters enormously.

Genocide is not simply a synonym for a particularly destructive war. It is among the gravest crimes recognised by international law precisely because it requires the intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such. The accusation therefore cannot responsibly be established merely by pointing to the scale of destruction in Gaza and working backwards to an assumption of genocidal intent.

Israel’s declared and operational objective is the destruction of Hamas’ military and governing capacity and the prevention of another October 7 – not the destruction of the Palestinian people. That proposition should of course be tested against evidence, including the conduct of particular operations. Individual allegations of unlawful conduct should be investigated on their merits. No democratic state and no military should be beyond scrutiny.

But scrutiny is very different from beginning with a verdict.

To describe the entire Israeli campaign as genocide before establishing the required legal intent risks replacing law with political rhetoric. It also creates a deeply troubling precedent: that a democratic state attacked by an enemy deliberately embedded among civilians may effectively lose its right to defeat that enemy because the enemy has successfully made civilian casualties inevitable.

If that principle were accepted, the laws designed to protect civilians would perversely reward the armed group that violates them most effectively.

That is the central moral and legal paradox of Gaza.

Gaza Is One Front in a Much Larger War

While the world often sees Israel’s war with Hamas as an isolated conflict, in reality it is only one front in a much larger and coordinated assault on Israel’s security and continued existence.

This multi-front confrontation is the result of decades of Iranian strategy, working through proxies and allies including Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and militias across Iraq and Syria, while other regional actors provide varying degrees of financial, political, and media support.

Over the last decade, the war in Gaza has been presented almost exclusively as a local conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. In reality, it is deeply entangled in a much larger strategic contest for regional influence and global power alignment. Iran has spent years constructing a regional ‘arc of resistance’ around Israel. Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah, in Lebanon, Shi’ite militias in Iraq and Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen are not simply disparate movements acting in isolation; collectively they have created multiple fronts capable of placing sustained military and political pressure upon Israel.

For Tehran, Israel is both a strategic enemy and a powerful political symbol. By positioning itself as the champion of ‘resistance’ against Israel, Iran seeks leadership and influence across the Muslim world while diverting attention from its own domestic repression and economic difficulties.

Russia and China have each found utility in the changing regional order. Moscow benefits when Middle Eastern instability consumes Western attention and resources. Beijing has expanded its economic and diplomatic relationships across the region while presenting itself as an alternative to Western leadership.

This geopolitical struggle intersects powerfully with an ideological narrative that has taken root in parts of Europe, North America and Australia. Israel and the United States are increasingly depicted not as democracies confronting hostile armed movements and authoritarian states, but primarily through an oppressor-versus-oppressed framework.

Within that simplified moral universe, Israel – despite being a small state whose Jewish population includes descendants of refugees from European, Middle Eastern and North African persecution – is cast simply as an outpost of Western colonialism. Hamas and other Iran-backed movements can consequently be recast as forces of ‘resistance’, notwithstanding their authoritarian ideologies, attacks upon civilians and openly eliminationist rhetoric.

Once that framework is accepted, uncomfortable facts about Hamas’ conduct – its use of civilian areas for military purposes, its treatment of political opponents, its hostage-taking and the deliberate targeting of civilians on October 7 – risk becoming secondary to a predetermined narrative.

The genocide accusation has emerged within this highly charged political environment. Increasingly, it functions not only as an extraordinarily serious legal allegation requiring rigorous proof, but as a political and rhetorical weapon capable of morally delegitimising Israel before the legal questions have even been determined.

That should concern everyone who believes in international humanitarian law.

The laws of war must apply equally. They must protect Palestinian civilians. They must protect Israeli civilians. They must constrain Israel’s military conduct. And they must equally condemn Hamas’ deliberate attacks on civilians, hostage-taking and unlawful use of protected civilian environments.

International law cannot remain credible if it is transformed into a political instrument applied according to the identity of the combatant rather than the conduct being examined.

The battlefield, therefore, is no longer confined to Gaza’s streets and tunnels. It extends into university campuses, newsrooms, international institutions, parliaments and social media feeds from London to Melbourne to Montreal.

And this is why the accusation of genocide must be examined with exceptional care.

Criticism of Israeli governments and individual Israeli military operations is entirely legitimate. Alleged breaches of international humanitarian law should be independently examined. Where credible evidence establishes individual violations, accountability should follow.

But that is profoundly different from declaring that Israel’s war against Hamas constitutes a deliberate campaign to destroy the Palestinian people.

The distinction between those propositions is not semantic.

It is the distinction upon which the integrity of international law itself depends.

The Role of Iran as Puppet Master

Iran’s overarching goal is to encircle Israel with a ‘ring of fire’ and weaken it militarily, politically, and economically. Iran’s leadership has repeatedly called for Israel’s destruction, seeing it as a way to position itself as the champion of the Muslim world and to export its revolutionary ideology.

Tehran provides not just weapons but ideological and strategic direction. This coordination ensures that these various fronts can be activated in unison, forcing Israel to fight on multiple battlefields and stretching its military resources thin.

Political capital and regional power Qatar and Turkey

Qatar and Turkey play a central role in sustaining and amplifying the conflict with Israel, each for its own strategic reasons. Qatar has become Hamas’ principal financial patron and international advocate, providing safe haven for its leadership and using its powerful Al Jazeera network to project a constant narrative of Israeli aggression and Palestinian victimhood to the Arab world and the West. This gives Doha regional relevance far beyond its size and allows it to act as both ‘mediator’ and sponsor, benefiting diplomatically from a conflict it helps perpetuate.

Turkey, under President Erdoğan, has embraced political Islam as part of its foreign policy identity and sees itself as the natural leader of a revitalised Muslim world. Confrontation with Israel plays well domestically, shores up Erdoğan’s nationalist-Islamist base, and positions Ankara as a defender of Palestinians against supposed Western hypocrisy. Both Qatar and Turkey therefore instrumentalise the conflict: they do not primarily seek its resolution, but rather leverage it to expand influence, undercut rival Arab states, and challenge Western-aligned regional orders.

In this way, support for Hamas and the relentless portrayal of Israel as a colonial oppressor are not accidental by-products of sympathy, they are deliberate tools of state strategy, ensuring the conflict remains a source of political capital and regional power for Doha and Ankara.

The Trigger: The Abraham Accords and October 7th, 2023

The October 7, 2023, Hamas attack, which saw unprecedented brutality and the mass murder of Israeli civilians, was not a random event. Intelligence assessments suggest that Iran approved and encouraged Hamas’ actions as a direct response to the imminent normalisation of ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia through the Abraham Accords.

Iran views the Abraham Accords as a mortal threat to its regional influence. A potential alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia, two powerful and wealthy states, could isolate Iran and curb its ambitions. By allegedly pushing Hamas to launch the October 7 massacre, Iran aimed to:

Derail the Saudi-Israel normalisation process
Inflame the region and galvanise Muslim anger against Israel
Force Israel into a prolonged war that would distract it from the diplomatic breakthroughs of the Abraham Accords

This manipulation has been chillingly effective: the Gaza war has put normalisation talks on hold and refocused global attention on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, exactly what Tehran wanted.

As the war between Israel and Hamas continues to grip global attention, accusations of genocide and disproportionate force have been levelled against the Jewish State. These claims not only misrepresent the facts but also undermine international law and morality. It is essential to address these allegations head-on by turning to the legal definitions, the principles of modern warfare, and the reality on the ground.

Understanding Genocide Under International Law

The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) defines genocide as acts committed with ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group’. This includes killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm, inflicting conditions of life calculated to destroy the group, and other forms of destruction – all with the specific intent to eliminate that group. Intent is the cornerstone of a genocide determination.

To accuse Israel of genocide against the Palestinian people is not only legally baseless but a profound distortion of reality. Israel’s war is not against a people, a race, or a religion – it is a defensive war against a terror organisation: Hamas, whose founding charter calls explicitly for the destruction of the Jewish State and whose actions on October 7, 2023, unleashed one of the worst terrorist atrocities in modern history, murdering 1,200 Israelis and abducting over 250 civilians.

Proportionality, Responsibility to Protect (R2P), and the Legal Use of Force Under International Law

Critics of Israel’s actions in Gaza frequently cite ‘disproportionate force’ without a proper understanding of the legal framework that governs warfare. In the context of international humanitarian law (IHL) and the laws of armed conflict (LOAC), particularly the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, the concept of proportionality is not a numerical comparison of casualties, nor is it a requirement for equal force between parties. Rather, it is a legal doctrine deeply embedded in the principles of jus in bello – the laws that govern conduct within war.

Jus ad Bellum and Jus in Bello: The Legal Foundations of Warfare

Jus ad bellum governs the justification to enter war. Under Article 51 of the UN Charter, Israel has the inherent right to self-defence following an armed attack. Hamas’ October 7, 2023 massacre, marked by deliberate killing, rape, and hostage-taking of civilians, constituted a clear casus belli. Israel’s response is fully within its sovereign right to defend itself from continued aggression.

Jus in bello, on the other hand, governs how war is conducted. It includes the core principles of:

Distinction (between combatants and civilians)
Proportionality (limiting collateral damage relative to military gain)
Military necessity (legitimate targeting of enemy assets)
Humanity (avoiding unnecessary suffering)

Israel is operating within the bounds of these laws by targeting legitimate military objectives, such as Hamas command centres, rocket launch sites, and tunnel networks, often located beneath civilian infrastructure.

Defining Proportionality in International Law

The principle of proportionality, as codified in Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions (1977), prohibits attacks which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, or damage to civilian objects, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.

In other words, proportionality is not about matching Hamas rocket for rocket or comparing death tolls. It is about whether the anticipated military advantage – such as dismantling a Hamas command centre hidden beneath a hospital, justifies the foreseeable collateral damage.

Israel’s military operations are consistent with this principle. The use of overwhelming force against fortified military objectives is not only lawful, it is often necessary. The scale of the force is not prohibited if it is directed at a legitimate objective and avoids unnecessary civilian harm. Precision-guided munitions, intelligence-based targeting, and early warnings (leaflets, SMS alerts, roof-knocks) all underscore Israel’s commitment to this standard.

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and the Obligation to Confront Terror

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is a global political commitment endorsed by all UN member states in 2005. It asserts that:

States have the primary responsibility to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.
The international community has a duty to assist states in fulfilling this responsibility.
If a state fails to protect its citizens – or is the perpetrator of such crimes – then the international community has the responsibility to intervene, using diplomatic, humanitarian, and, if necessary, military means.

Hamas has violated every aspect of this doctrine – not only failing to protect civilians in Gaza, but actively endangering them. Israel’s military response, far from being an aggressor, is fulfilling its responsibility to protect its population against mass atrocity terrorism and to prevent further loss of civilian life – both Israeli and Palestinian.

The Illegality of Human Shields and Hamas’ Violations of International Law

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Article 8) identifies the use of human shields as a war crime. So too does Article 51(7) of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, which explicitly prohibits the use of civilians ‘to render certain points or areas immune from military operations’.

Hamas’ strategy is built upon this war crime. It deliberately situates:

Rocket launchers near schools
Tunnel networks under hospitals
Weapons caches inside mosques
And command centres beneath residential blocks

This is not accidental – it is calculated and strategic. By embedding their military assets within civilian infrastructure, Hamas:

Increases the likelihood of civilian casualties, which it then exploits to demonise Israel in international media.
Manipulates Western sentiment, creating a false moral equivalency that equates a democratic state defending itself with a terror regime committing war crimes.

Distinction, Precaution, and Moral Asymmetry

The IDF employs extensive measures of distinction and precaution to avoid civilian harm, unparalleled in modern warfare:

Advance notice through text messages, phone calls, and airdropped leaflets.
Delaying attacks to allow civilians to flee.
Aborting strikes when civilians remain in the area.
Real-time intelligence to minimise harm.

By contrast, Hamas targets Israeli civilians deliberately and indiscriminately – with rockets, suicide bombers, and tunnel infiltrations aimed at homes, schools, and hospitals.

Egypt’s Complicity Through Inaction

While Israel allows hundreds of aid trucks into Gaza, often under fire, Egypt, which also borders Gaza, has kept the Rafah Crossing tightly shut. Egypt refuses to admit Gazan refugees or deliver significant humanitarian aid. This Arab inaction is rarely criticised, highlighting the hypocrisy in singling out Israel while ignoring the broader regional dynamics.

Conclusion: A Just War in Defence of Humanity and Law

Israel is not perpetrating genocide. It is not violating international law. It is waging a just war, under the principles of jus ad bellum and jus in bello, against an enemy that has made war crimes its standard operating procedure. The accusation of genocide not only distorts the legal and moral reality but also diminishes the seriousness of that charge when used without foundation.

To uphold international law is to recognise Israel’s right, and duty, to defend its people. The world must stand not with false narratives but with truth, law, and the moral clarity that comes from distinguishing between terror and self-defence.

Under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter (Chapter VII), a state has the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs. The October 7 attacks were not symbolic or isolated, they were brutal acts of war. In any other circumstance, any sovereign state would be expected to respond.

Israel’s actions in Gaza are part of this legal right to self-defence, conducted within the framework of international humanitarian law.