Litigating 'genocide': Israeli think tank finds no evidence

The claim that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza has become one of the most emotionally charged allegations in recent international affairs. A new study by an Israeli think tank, however, says it has thoroughly researched the accusation and found it to be false.

“We discovered that, in our opinion, much of the coverage of the Gaza war is just factually wrong,” Prof. Danny Orbach, one of the report’s authors, told National Post.

“If Israel wanted to kill as many civilians as possible, like in a genocidal situation, or was even indifferent, it could just kill hundreds with one bomb,” Orbach said.

The report’s release comes at a key moment in the debate.

On Tuesday, a United Nations body — the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory — issued a report concluding that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

The commission — though not a criminal tribunal — determined that Israeli authorities and security forces carried out four of the five acts outlined in the 1948 Genocide Convention: killing members of a group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life meant to destroy the group, and imposing measures intended to prevent births. (The Israeli government categorically rejected the findings, calling the report “fabricated,” arguing the report is politically biased, misrepresents Israeli statements, strongly relies on Hamas data, and fails to demonstrate genocidal intent.)

In their report earlier this month, Orbach and other researchers took “a multi-layered approach” using open source facts, legal analysis and ethical analysis. That report, released through the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, came to a much different conclusion than the UN body.

Central to the genocide allegation is the idea of intentionality: that Israel sought to annihilate the Gazan population through policies designed to starve civilians, massacre non-combatants and bomb indiscriminately.

Orbach said that in this war, the vast majority of civilians have been killed for a variety of reasons that aren’t malicious, including: being caught in the crossfire, misunderstandings or incorrect assumptions by Israeli soldiers, or used as shields by Hamas.

“You don’t see any clip or other forensic evidence in the Gaza war for frontal massacre, putting a line of civilians against the wall and mowing them down, or executing prisoners from close range, you know, one by one,” says Orbach, a military historian from the History and Asian Studies departments at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He specializes in the dynamics of military atrocities, legal history and the study of complicated conflict zones.

One of the core planks in the genocide accusation is the assertion that Israel deliberately starved the population of Gaza, bolstered by repeated claims by humanitarian organizations.

The study’s authors say they found fundamental methodological and factual errors in this. First, the benchmark of 500 aid trucks per day as the minimum for Gaza’s survival was based on misinterpreted pre-war data: the actual average of food trucks entering Gaza in 2022 was around 73 per day.

They found that during much of the conflict, Israel facilitated the entry of food into Gaza at or above these pre-war levels.

Orbach said he was unaware of any wars “where one side supplied humanitarian aid in massive amounts,” particularly for two years, to enemy-controlled territory.

The apocalyptic predictions — claiming tens of thousands would die from starvation — were unfulfilled, a reality substantiated by the very medical and mortality data gathered by Hamas’s own Gaza health ministry, which did not register famine or mass nutrition-related deaths. The analysis reveals that reports of widespread starvation were often based on circular citations and media echo chambers, rather than surveys on the ground or reliable nutritional assessments.

The study examines whether Israel pursued a policy of systematically killing civilians. Here, the authors turn to the alleged existence of intent and systematic execution — both prerequisites of the legal definition of genocide.

After surveying extensive forensic evidence, testimonies and video documentation from Gaza, the researchers say they found no credible proof that Israeli policy-directed attacks aimed to kill civilians.

The Palestinian American Medical Association, he added, claimed children were shot by snipers, “intentionally, virtually every day.” Orbach and his colleagues concluded it was “not reliable scientifically,” representing not forensic proof, but only claims.

“We don’t rely on any source that our critics cannot check and verify by themselves.”

Allegations of indiscriminate or disproportionate bombing as evidence of genocidal intent are also examined, and found wanting. The IDF, according to the study, employed an array of unprecedented precautions to limit collateral civilian damage, including advance warnings.

Deaths in “safe zones” were rare, relative to active combat areas, he said.

“Safe zones, as defined in international law, should actually be the initiative of the defender. Hamas shot hundreds of rockets from the safe zones,” he said.

The UN, he offered, “bears responsibility for the death of many Gazans, by not cooperating with evacuations to safe zones when there was still time.”

Hamas, furthermore, ought to have opened its network of underground tunnels for civilian safety, but according to Orbach, the terror entity made a conscious choice not to. He said Musa Abu Marzouk, one Hamas’s former top leaders, said to Saudi-owned Al Arabiya TV that it wasn’t Hamas’s responsibility to keep Gazans safe.

“What Hamas did was put Palestinian civilians in danger intentionally, because they knew that the world will blame Israel,” he said.

He and his colleagues dubbed what they call “the humanitarian bias,” coming from UN agencies and human rights organizations who suspect a humanitarian disaster is about to happen, and “exaggerate in order to mobilize public opinion.”

He cited “the loosening” of Integrated Food Security Phase Classification criteria in order “to raise the alarm.”

“Political biases of the experts suddenly became very important,” he explained. “These manipulations meet a very eager audience… Then it gets more and more space in the media.”

He noted something akin to a domino effect, when certain anti-Israel individuals within world bodies make false claims about Israel, then are quoted by NGOs, subsequently appear in the media, then cited by a string of other publications.

“So the average viewer thinks there are numerous sources which document the Israeli crimes in Gaza.”

It cited examples of erroneous data made public, and later quietly corrected.

“The Hamas-run health ministry published in the beginning of the war that 70 per cent of the war casualties are women and children. Even they retracted this later. But again, the retraction was very silent, and the initial news was very loud,” Orbach said.

The United Nations Relief Works Agency “declared that due to the operation in Rafah, humanitarian aid to Gaza was cut 70 per cent” in the summer of 2024, yet retracted it later, “in small font, in the bottom of the graph. The initial news were all over the media.”