Hamas Committed Genocide
Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir once expressed her yearning for peace like this: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.” No one forced Hamas to invade Israel on October 7, 2023, which resulted in the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. No one forced them to rape and genitally mutilate their female victims, or to take over 250 hostages back to Gaza. The actions were the deliberate and cruel choice of Hamas. And those actions were an attempt at genocide.
The term genocide was first coined during World War II at the height of the Nazi’s deportations, as lawyers and scholars of the age had no other words in the English language to describe the systematic murders of 6 million innocent Jews in a mass campaign of planned extermination on the basis of their shared heritage. The atrocities of the Nazis were so indescribably evil that it was not until 1946 that “genocide” was defined as a crime against humanity, adopted into the United Nations Genocide Convention in 1948.
For a genocide to have taken place, a perpetrator must have committed acts with the specific “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Intent is the key factor in determining whether a genocide has occurred.
Hamas’ desire to violently destroy Israel and replace it with an Islamist theocracy is hardly a secret; they openly and repeatedly expressed their intentions in their 1988 founding charter and in their oft stated desire to repeat October 7 over and over in televised interviews.
Since its violent take over of Gaza in 2007, Hamas has deliberately propagated genocidal rhetoric throughout Gazan society. The curriculum for Gazan children features incitement to kill Jews, support for terrorism, and prayers for Israel’s destruction. Children and young teens in Hamas summer camps practice stabbing, shooting, and kidnapping Jewish civilians. Copies of Mein Kampf have been found in terror bases across the enclave.
Holocaust scholars recognize that a key stage of genocide is denial, and historically, its worst perpetrators (notably the Nazis) took great pains to cover up their crimes. Hamas, on the other hand, filmed and broadcast their savage atrocities for the world to witness. Yahya Sinwar, planning the assault, directed Hamas to deliberately target civilians and residential communities. As victims–like kidnapped children and the violated corpse of a young woman–were paraded through the streets, scores of civilians emerged into the streets to spit on them, celebrate, and hand out candies.
Hamas’s intent to commit unspeakable crimes was very clear. Hamas deliberately carried out its villainy on a joyous Jewish holiday, Simchat Torah. With them, the attackers carried maps of the civilian communities they planned to target, with marked infiltration routes, designed to maximize civilian casualties.
Hamas deliberately targeted the Nova Music Festival, murdering 378 mostly young people, innocent dancers. Hamas shot barrages of bullets at an ambulance at the festival, then threw a grenade into it, and then set it on fire with an RPG. The genetic material of eighteen unique individuals was found inside the ambulance.
Captured Hamas records prove that Hamas originally collaborated with Iran and the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah to commit similar massacres in Northern Israel, with the intent of provoking the collapse of the state of Israel. Although it never launched a full-scale invasion, Hezbollah did launch a missile barrage into Israel that slaughtered children.
Perhaps nothing shows intent so clearly as Hamas’s civilian hostage taking. 251 innocent people were dragged into Gaza, including 30 children under 18 years of age, and 16 under 10. Two babies, Kfir and Ariel Bibas, were murdered in captivity. Hostages were starved, filmed emaciated, and forced to dig their own graves in the tunnels. Some were raped repeatedly. Teenage hostages were forced to commit sex acts on each other. Others were executed.
Hamas has weaponized genocide denial, engaging in a strategy of reverse accusations, smearing Israel as a way of deflecting attention from their crime. In so doing, Hamas is weakening the precedent for identifying and prosecuting genocide around the world. They hope to villainize Western powers that go out of their way in wartime to protect innocents and distract from their own barbarism.
Israel is acting based on military need and prioritizing civilian survival, fighting under unthinkable circumstances engineered by Hamas to turn civilian infrastructure into military sites. Hamas apologists misquote Israeli politicians to claim intent, and grow silent when confronted by tens of millions of warning messages, thousands of tons of aid, and guarded humanitarian corridors provided by the IDF. The legitimacy of genocide charges themselves is compromised when accredited international institutions have committed clear errors in the rush to judgment of Israel, the victim power, instead of identifying the actual aggressor, Hamas.
Meanwhile, real genocides are being ignored by the rest of the world. According to the United Nations, more than 740,000 people are killed each year in armed conflict and criminality. The slaughter of tens of thousands in Sudan has left pools of blood in the sand visible from space. Hamas’ false accusation does an injustice to the actual victims of genocide who lost their lives on the basis of their shared heritage. It leaves tens of thousands massacred around the world without the chance of getting justice for their murders.
As a Palestinian, it is vital that I speak the truth. Hamas committed genocide on October 7th. Every attempt to aggravate their denial by smearing Israel only dishonors the victims, weakens the legitimacy of real genocide charges, and protects the perpetrators. Justice must be done, and history must never forget the crimes that were committed on October 7, 2023 – and by whom.