Genocide: one of the most horrific words in the language. Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined it in 1944 to describe the deliberate destruction of ‘a national, ethnic, racial or religious group’.

To him, it was personal: much of his own family had been butchered in the Holocaust. Now, like so much else in our overwrought public sphere, a term coined for humanity’s most appalling atrocities has been drained of meaning. Everything from desiring a moderately sane immigration policy to refusing to call biological males ‘women’ is now labelled a ‘genocide’.

But nothing is as widespread and pernicious as its daily use as a libel for Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Every day, UN bureaucrats (usually hailing from some psychopath-run hellhole), screeching Amnesty activists, Left-wing MPs, thuggish Islamists and, inevitably, the BBC line up to damn the world’s only Jewish state.

Last week, rapper Macklemore used an Ed Sheeran concert to denounce Israel’s conduct in Gaza, triggering a row that saw him dumped from the tour. Other support acts and members of Sheeran’s backing band then quit in ‘solidarity’, forcing the singer to make a public apology on stage in Philadelphia on Saturday.

Earlier this month, more than 5,000 figures from entertainment, academia and public life signed an open letter rejecting the genocide accusation. Yet they are vastly outnumbered by those using Gaza to display their ill-informed virtue.

The cumulative effect of all this is not just to slander Israel for fighting a war but to excuse the genuinely genocidal terror group Hamas for starting it. 

Never forget, the Gaza war began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas and other Palestinian gunmen murdered roughly 1,200 people and took 251 hostages, with victims raped, mutilated and tortured. Israel went to war the next day to dismantle an Iranian-backed terror enclave on its border that no sovereign nation would tolerate – and to restore the deterrence that guarantees its survival.

None of that would warrant genocide. Nothing would. But it is impossible to assess a war honestly while ignoring how and why it began.

Gaza is a human catastrophe. Its images of death and destruction have horrified me, as they have in other wars I have covered. But ‘genocide’ does not describe the numbers of people killed, buildings destroyed or bridges blown up. It has a strict legal definition, laid down in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

The term demands evidence of the intent to destroy a people. Article II states: ‘Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.’

And as Jeffrey Blackett, Judge Advocate General of the Armed Forces from 2004 to 2020, told me: ‘The charge of genocide against Israel is absolute nonsense. It simply doesn’t accord with the law.

‘There is no evidence that the Israelis are trying to destroy the Palestinians, Gazans or any other nation. They are involved in a war against terrorists, and it may be that some of their actions are disproportionate. But that doesn’t make it genocide – the deliberate destruction of a human group. This definition must be rigidly adhered to.’

So how can we be sure the Israelis are not seeking to destroy the Palestinians as a group? More than 70,000 Gazans have been reported killed (out of a total population of about 2.3 million).

Given its military capabilities, Israel could exterminate every Palestinian in Gaza within days. If genocide were the goal, it would have happened long ago. I’ve reported from Gaza: its warren of alleyways, packed apartments and throngs of people would be a nightmare for any army. 

Hamas is dug in under hospitals, mosques, hundreds of miles of tunnels and thousands of booby-trapped homes. It weaponises every building and civilian it can.

John Spencer, executive director of the Urban Warfare Institute, told me: ‘I would assess Israel’s conduct in Gaza as being in strict adherence to the law of armed conflict’ – adding that Israel has gone further in civilian-harm mitigation than any case he has examined.

Leaflets, calls and texts warning of attacks; humanitarian corridors and pauses in the fighting to move civilians out of harm’s way. ‘To say that Israel is trying to destroy, in whole or in part, the entire people of Gaza is counter to everything they’ve done since October 7,’ he added. If you want to wipe a people out, you don’t text them where the bombs are going to fall.

There is evidence of ugly intent from some in Israel. Yoav Gallant was the defence minister, not some shock-jock blowhard, when on October 9, 2023, he announced a ‘complete siege’ of Gaza – ‘no electricity, no food, no fuel ... We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.’

Repugnant words, which the International Court of Justice (ICJ) itself noted. But Gallant was talking about Hamas, not the civilian population – ‘the Isis of Gaza’, he called the terror group.

And what happened next? The ‘siege’ was only temporary. Aid subsequently entered Gaza in vast quantities. The rhetoric was ugly, but policy was softer.

Genocidal intent need not be stated explicitly. It can be inferred from a pattern of conduct. For example, the UN tribunal for the former Yugoslavia – later upheld by the ICJ – ruled that the 1995 Srebrenica massacre constituted genocide not because more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were murdered, but because the killings, combined with the forcible removal of women, children and the elderly, demonstrated a wider intent to destroy Srebrenica’s entire Bosnian Muslim community.

Accusers argue that Israel’s conduct – mass displacement, destruction of infrastructure and restrictions on food and aid – permits a similar ‘inference of intent’.

But genocidal intent inferred from a pattern of conduct must be the only reasonable inference available – not merely a ‘possible’ one.

Gaza is a war against a savage, pitiless, Islamo-fascist enemy embedded in tunnels, hospitals and homes, fought by a military that delays offensives for months and evacuates the population its accusers insist it is trying to destroy. Far from being the ‘only’ reasonable inference from Israel’s conduct, genocide is among the hardest to sustain.

The other charge is famine. In August last year, the international Famine Review Committee confirmed famine in Gaza Governorate, finding that thresholds for extreme food deprivation, acute malnutrition and deaths had been crossed. This matters because the Genocide Convention covers not only killing but ‘deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction’.

But after the October ceasefire brought increased humanitarian and commercial access, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification found that famine conditions had been reversed, even though severe food insecurity remained.

That does not erase the suffering or excuse Israel’s earlier 11-week aid blockade. But it undermines the argument of intent.

Not least because aid continued to enter Gaza: UN data show humanitarian organisations collected some 54,000 tons of food from crossings between May 19 and August 18, although distribution inside Gaza was severely disrupted. Nobody feeds and vaccinates a population it intends to exterminate.

If the case for genocide is this thin, why does the charge still carry such weight? First, the world is repeatedly told the ICJ found a ‘plausible’ case of genocide in Gaza. This is false. Joan Donoghue, ICJ president at the time, told the BBC that the court ‘didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible’. Judgment is not expected before 2028.

Israel’s enemies have levelled the genocide charge for decades – much as they have done with charges of ‘apartheid’ and ‘colonialism’. Beneath much of this lies an older impulse.

The great obstacle for modern anti-Semites has always been the Holocaust: a crime against the Jews so vast, well-documented and horrifying that it became impossible to explain away. Once, the answer was reassuringly crude: just deny it happened. Now, in this area at least, things are more sophisticated.

If Israel can be cast as ‘genocidal’, the moral equation is reversed. The victims of the Nazis become Nazis themselves. The Jews lose their claim on the Holocaust’s memory because, in the end, they are said to have become guilty of the same crime. Yes, Israel has fought a brutal war and made grievous errors. But genocide is a legal term with a legal test, and Gaza does not meet it.

There is, however, one party in this war that is genocidal. That, of course, is Hamas. The terror group’s 1988 founding charter makes its intentions plain. ‘Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it,’ it reads. Article Seven goes further, invoking the hadith in which Muslims fight the Jews until even the stones and trees cry out: ‘There is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’

Hamas qualified this in its 2017 political document, declaring that its conflict was with ‘the Zionist project’ rather than Jews because of their religion. But critics dismissed the change as a cynical exercise in rebranding.

As former judge Jeffrey Blackett observes: ‘Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran all want to get rid of Israel. If there’s any genocidal intent, it’s from them, not from Israelis.

‘I think a failure of Israel has been they have not spent enough time countering what their enemies have been saying. They’ve allowed the terrorists and their sympathisers to infiltrate Western democracies with what’s effectively a blood libel.’