A Court Ruling That Never Existed

The International Court of Justice has so far not found Israel guilty of genocide. South Africa’s case against Israel is still pending. The decisions to date concerned provisional measures. They were intended to safeguard possible rights of the Palestinian population until the court had examined the substance of the case.

Nevertheless, in countless headlines this procedural step became the claim that the court considered an Israeli genocide “plausible.” The court’s then-president, Joan Donoghue, later made clear that the court had made no such finding. It examined whether the rights being asserted were plausible and whether there was a risk of irreparable harm. That is legally entirely different from finding that Israel had plausibly committed genocide.

Resolutions by academic associations and reports by Amnesty International or B’Tselem are not court judgments either. They may be examined, criticized and cited. But they replace neither a rule-of-law evidentiary process nor the necessary finding of a specific intent to destroy.

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Jüdische Allgemeine 17.09.2026 · 07:00 Uhr Der falsche Genozidvorwurf: Der US-Historiker Jeffrey Herf widerspricht seinem viel zitierten israelischen Kollegen Omer Bartov. Eine Klarstellung.

Hunger Is Real, but an Israeli Intent to Destroy Is Far from Proven

The humanitarian emergency in the Gaza Strip was and remains real. People suffered from hunger, displacement, destroyed infrastructure and a collapsed supply system. Yet this suffering does not automatically demonstrate Israel’s intent to starve the population. That very intent would be decisive for the genocide allegation.

In August 2025, the IPC declared a famine in Gaza Governorate. Its assessment was based, among other things, on mid-upper-arm measurements of children, telephone household surveys and an assumed mortality rate, because reliable comprehensive surveys were not possible in the war zone. The organization itself acknowledged that no direct comparative data existed for Gaza between the methods used to measure acute malnutrition. It justified its decision through an overall assessment of various indicators.

Later data, however, paint a picture that is difficult to reconcile with the claim of a lasting Israeli policy of starvation. According to Israel’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, COGAT, from the beginning of the ceasefire in October 2025 to June 7, 2026, around 1.78 million tons of food entered the Gaza Strip. COGAT compared this quantity with a need of 80,000 tons per month most recently cited by the World Food Programme and calculated a substantial surplus on paper.

These figures come from an Israeli party to the conflict and must therefore be critically examined. They must not simply be declared the final truth. But they cannot be ignored either, particularly because the IPC itself stated in July 2026 that large-scale aid since the ceasefire had significantly improved the food and supply situation. For the period from mid-April to the end of June 2026, the IPC classified all areas examined as being at the lowest level for acute malnutrition. At the same time, it warned of continuing severe food insecurity and possible renewed deterioration.

The honest finding is therefore: Food could be available in large quantities and still fail to reach many people reliably. Destroyed roads, a lack of purchasing power, inadequate storage, looting, armed control and political interference could obstruct distribution. This demonstrates a humanitarian catastrophe. But it does not prove the alleged continuous state intent by Israel to let the population starve as a group.

📊 What is decisive, however, is how this famine assessment came about. The IPC did not officially lower its standards specifically for Gaza. But it did use an alternative measurement method under which 15 percent acute malnutrition is already considered a threshold, whereas the better-known weight-for-height method requires 30 percent. This possibility had existed beforehand. In Gaza, however, the direct comparative data needed to determine whether both methods actually produced reliable results under the specific conditions were missing. The IPC also did not rely on a comprehensive representative survey, but on limited measurements, telephone surveys and assumptions about unregistered deaths.

The timing of the data selection is particularly striking. The average for the entire month of July was below the relevant threshold. Only by considering the second half of the month separately did a value above this limit emerge. The exceptionally high mortality that was also required was not measured directly either, but assumed to be likely because of suspected undercounting. The classification was therefore expressly “famine with reasonable grounds”, meaning it was not based on a fully secured body of data. After criticism, the IPC also had to explain its presentation in an addendum and clarify its data sources.

Formally, the rules were therefore not changed specifically for Israel. In practice, however, several uncertain assumptions, a particularly favorable choice of timing and an alternative threshold were combined in such a way that the most dramatic possible classification emerged in the end. Whether this was politically intended cannot be proven. What is clear, however, is that the public message sounded far more definitive than the underlying data were.

Hospitals Were Protected, but Not Untouched by Hamas

Few narratives shaped the war as strongly as the image of an Israeli army attacking hospitals without cause. In doing so, a crucial part of international humanitarian law was often omitted: Medical facilities enjoy special protection, but may not be misused for military operations, weapons storage, command facilities or the detention of hostages.

A declassified U.S. intelligence assessment independently confirmed that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad used the Al-Shifa complex for command purposes, to store some weapons and to hold at least some hostages. At the same time, the Associated Press found that this assessment did not confirm every far-reaching Israeli account of a vast central headquarters.

The United Nations also documented further cases of protected infrastructure being used for military purposes. In the UN Secretary-General’s report on children and armed conflict for 2025, three military uses of schools or health facilities were attributed to Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades. This does not release Israel from its obligations to protect. But it does refute the convenient notion that protected civilian sites had remained fundamentally untouched by Palestinian armed groups.

This very differentiation is missing from many debates. The military use of a hospital does not automatically make every attack lawful. Israel still had to weigh military advantage against the protection of patients, warning options and proportionality. But it does refute the narrative that Hamas never used hospitals militarily and that Israeli indications to that effect were simply fabricated.

A War in Deliberately Intertwined Infrastructure

Urban-warfare expert John Spencer describes Hamas’s tunnel system not merely as an underground network of routes, but as the core of a political and military strategy. In his analysis, entrances, command elements, weapons, fighters and hostages were closely interwoven with densely populated residential areas and, in some cases, with specially protected sites. This makes the distinction between military targets and the civilian surroundings considerably more difficult.

Spencer’s assessment is an expert analysis, not a court judgment. It does not give Israel a blank check for attacks causing heavy civilian damage. It does, however, explain why a total number of deaths after the fact alone cannot answer which targets were attacked, what information was available and what precautions were possible in a specific attack.

The Casualty Figures Tell a Different Story from the Headlines

For years, the claim was repeated that around 70 percent of those killed in the Gaza Strip were women and children. This figure became a moral piece of evidence for indiscriminate killing. However, the more detailed breakdown by the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health, published by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in July 2026, presents a different picture.

Of 71,444 identified fatalities as of December 31, 2025, 34,078 were recorded as men, 21,283 as children, 10,983 as women and 5,100 as older people. Women and children together therefore accounted for around 45.2 percent—not 70 percent. Men accounted for around 47.7 percent of the identified dead, while the separately recorded older people accounted for around 7.1 percent.

This too does not mean that all adult men were fighters. Many were undoubtedly civilians. Nor can the category “child” alone reveal how a minor died or whether they had been recruited by a terrorist organization. The new breakdown does not disprove civilian casualties. But it does disprove one of the most frequently repeated blanket figures.

Hamas Demonstrably Recruited Minors

The fact that Palestinian armed groups recruited and militarily shaped minors is not an Israeli protective claim. For 2018, the United Nations verified the recruitment and use of three 17-year-old boys by Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Al-Quds Brigades, and an unidentified Palestinian armed group. In a later report, the UN confirmed the recruitment of two additional Palestinian boys by Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades.
For 2023, the UN also documented summer camps run by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in which children were exposed to military content and activities. These documented cases do not allow a reliable overall number of underage fighters to be derived. They do, however, show why the statistical designation “child” is exclusively an age category and does not automatically describe a person’s military status.

Conversely, it would be equally impermissible to classify minors categorically as fighters. Under the law of armed conflict, people must generally be treated as civilians unless reliable information indicates membership in an organized armed group or direct participation in hostilities. The documented recruitment of minors therefore requires case-by-case examination, not another broad generalization.

There is also a fundamental problem: The Ministry of Health does not distinguish between civilians and fighters in its overall figure. A high death toll describes the scale of the war, but it does not automatically answer the legal question of target selection, proportionality, or genocidal intent.

The former US military lawyer Brian L. Cox points to a decisive legal standard: The proportionality of an attack is not assessed solely on the basis of its later visible outcome. What matters are the expected civilian harm, the expected concrete military advantage, and the information reasonably available to those responsible at the time of planning or execution. Overall statistics can trigger investigations and make patterns visible, but they do not replace the examination of individual attacks.

Alleged journalists were subsequently reclassified as fighters

The worldwide count of journalists killed was similarly problematic. The mere occupational designation was often treated as if it proved protected civilian status and, at the same time, Israel’s intent to eliminate reporters.

In June 2026, the Committee to Protect Journalists announced a complete review of its Gaza database. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad had previously published their own obituaries, in which people listed as journalists by CPJ were described as fighters. CPJ subsequently removed eight names because of confirmed affiliation with Hamas or Islamic Jihad. A further twelve names were removed for other reasons.

This is not a minor matter. A person may have worked as a journalist and nevertheless participated directly in hostilities. At that moment, they lose their special protection as a civilian. Conversely, no one may be declared a legitimate target solely because of political proximity or work for a partisan media outlet.

The corrections therefore do not prove that all or most of the media workers killed were fighters. But they do prove that the original lists were not as reliable as their constant repetition suggested. Anyone who inferred from such lists that Israel was waging a targeted war against journalists should have examined the individual cases beforehand, not years later.

Even the United Nations now identifies Hamas’s role

Another convenient narrative was that every disruption of aid supplies was solely attributable to Israel. In July 2026, however, UN Humanitarian Coordinator Ramiz Alakbarov explicitly condemned obstruction by the “de facto authorities” in the Gaza Strip—that is, Hamas.

According to the UN, armed forces affiliated with these authorities forcibly entered a food distribution point and a World Food Programme warehouse. Drivers were attacked. The UN coordinator spoke of intimidation, violence, obstruction, and attempts at smuggling. At the same time, he criticized the shrinking of the available civilian space through the expansion of Israeli-controlled areas.

Here too, reality is more inconvenient than political camp thinking. Israel bears responsibility for access restrictions and military decisions. Hamas bears responsibility for control, violence, intimidation, and the abuse of civilian structures. Anyone who removes one side from the equation is not describing Gaza, but their own worldview.

Not every allegation has been settled, but the claimed certainty has not

Andrew Fox’s original text at MENA-Watch speaks of the complete collapse of all genocide allegations. The findings cannot responsibly be taken that far. Amnesty International, B’Tselem and a UN Commission of Inquiry maintain their assessment that Israel is committing genocide. The International Court of Justice has not yet ruled. The question of possible war crimes by individual perpetrators also remains open.

But the opposite certainty—that genocide has long since been proven—is equally irresponsible. Central factual claims on which this certainty rested have been corrected, qualified, or seriously undermined by new data. The alleged 70 percent share of women and children is not correct for the identified dead. The military misuse of Al-Shifa and other protected facilities is documented. UN reports substantiate the recruitment of minors and militarized youth camps. CPJ had to remove fighters from its list of journalists. The UN documents obstruction of aid by Hamas forces. Large food deliveries and subsequent improvements are inconsistent with a simple narrative of permanent, total starvation.

This is not a general absolution for Israel. It is a rejection of prejudgment.

The media, academics, NGOs, and politicians had a duty to visibly correct their earlier statements. Instead, what usually happens in political debates happens with remarkable consistency: The original accusation gets the headline, while the later correction disappears into the small print.

The gravest accusation in international law must not degenerate into a political catchphrase. Anyone accusing Israel of genocide must prove genocidal intent. Images, casualty figures, and outrage cannot replace that burden of proof.