The genocide claim against Israel doesn’t add up

“The genocide in Gaza” cause has been roiling university campuses in the US and around the globe. The genocide accusation is the subject of a lawsuit filed by South Africa against Israel at the International Court of Justice and has been repeated by a few other countries, some scholars, endless activists, and one US congresswoman. Its political importance is not restricted to Israel. President Biden, it is argued, might be punished in the upcoming elections by progressive voters for complicity with this alleged genocide. The accusation could thus exert tremendous influence on world politics. This is a fascinating socio-political phenomenon since it is easy to prove that there is no genocide. Here we present a once-and-for-all clear-cut refutation.   

To sustain the charge of genocide, the Genocide Convention (1948) requires that one prove both an “intent to destroy” a group and that acts were committed to implement that intent. Since intent is elusive, battles of narratives with respect to it can be interminable. Implementation, on the other hand, refers to empirical facts, and here the numbers swiftly refute the possibility of genocide – indeed, they attest to the exact opposite. 

It is widely admitted that Israel has a right to retaliate against the perpetrators of the October 7 massacre and to seek to free its hostages, yet Israel is accused of leading a military offensive that resulted in an excessive – and therefore unjustified – level of civilian casualties in Gaza. While no one seems ready to offer a criterion for “excessiveness,” one parameter that would be flatly incompatible with genocide is an inordinately low combatant-to-civilian ratio. That this is precisely what the numbers show has been intimated but never properly demonstrated.

Numbers provided during war are never accurate, but let us work with the numbers we have. On February 29, the Gaza authorities reported a total of 30,035 Gazans dead. On the very same day, the Israel Defense Forces tallied the number of killed Hamas militants in Gaza at “over 13,000.” (Multiple analyses – e.g. here, here, and here – make the numbers released by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry extremely hard to believe, but we’ll treat them as accurate anyway; and if, for argument’s sake, we believe Hamas, it behooves us to believe Israel too.) 

During war people do not stop dying of non-war-related reasons

Now thirteen thousand militants out of 30,000 total dead spells a combatant-to-civilian ratio of 13:17. During war people do not stop dying of non-war-related reasons, however. The CIA World Factbook assesses 3/1000 deaths yearly in the Gaza Strip. This translates to about 2,500 non-war-related deaths between October 7 and February 29 (given a population of 2.1 million). Since Hamas militants make up about 1.5% of the Gazan population, virtually all these 2,500 deaths are civilians. Hence the war-related combatant-to-civilian ratio drops to 13:14.5. Of course, not all civilians who died of war-related reasons died because of Israel: Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fired some 12,000 rockets during this war, roughly 12% of which fell within the Gaza Strip. That’s 1,440 rockets falling indiscriminately on civilians. Hamas also opened fire on civilians who tried to follow IDF instructions and evacuate the fighting zones so as to stop serving as Hamas’ human shields. And so on. We do not know how many civilians died in these ways, but it is reasonable to conclude that the combatant-civilian death ratio stands at about 13:14, which is less than 1:1.1.  

And now the crucial question: What should we make of this figure? It can only be evaluated meaningfully by comparison to historical references. The combatant-to-civilian ratio of wartime casualties varies widely according to the character of the war theater. A wide comparative historical analysis suggests a (conservative) ratio of 1:1 on average. Crucially, however, in urban warfare the ratios climb very sharply. The Washington DC-based Center for Civilians in Conflict reports that “In cities […] civilians account for 90 percent of the casualties during war.” Similarly, in its global survey of armed conflicts from 2011 to 2020, the NGO Action on Armed Violence found that “91% of those reported killed or injured by explosive weapons in populated areas were civilians.” Even when attacks were “explicitly coded as targeting armed actors” specifically, civilian casualties in populated areas still accounted for 69%. The (less than) 1:1.1 ratio of combatant-to-civilian casualties of war in the inordinately densely populated Gaza Strip is astonishingly low in historical comparison. Not only is this conceptually incompatible with genocide – it is its very polar opposite. 

Notice also that since the 1:1.1 ratio is inordinately low compared to the norm in urban warfare, then even if, hypothetically, the final true numbers turn out to be doubly worse, they would still be low in historical comparison and therefore incompatible even with a prima facie suspicion of genocide. 

Since nobody attributes to the IDF extreme ineptitude in killing, the 1:1.1 ratio of combatant-to-civilian casualties achieved in Gaza should be recognized as a historical achievement of protecting civilian lives. Thus the numbers also testify to a lack of genocidal intent.    

War is invariably replete with human tragedies. Nothing written here overlooks this. Our point is only that a historically low overall ratio of combatant-to-civilian casualties refutes the possibility of genocide. Stories of specific tragedies are surely an important aspect of the coverage of war; but focusing exclusively on those at the expense of the overall statistics amounts to informational manipulation. 

The conclusions presented here are based on simple reasoning and information available to all. That the ICJ judges in The Hague, who proceed with the genocide trial, cannot produce simple reasoning is deeply disturbing. If they can, yet proceed, this is alarmingly worse. The Jewish people and the Jewish State have been repeatedly victims of blood libels. This looks like yet another one – if you just do the math. 

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Shlomo Cohen is an associate professor of philosophy at Ben-Gurion University, specializing in ethics, and a medical doctor. His book The Concept and Ethics of Manipulation is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

Yaacov Samet is a vascular surgeon. He is a major in the IDF, who has served for months in the Gaza Strip during Iron Swords.