One of the most enduring weapons in modern conflict is not the rocket or the rifle but the accusation. For Hamas, the most effective charge has always been the word “genocide.” It is repeated with such frequency, across so many platforms, that it begins to feel less like an allegation than an axiom.
It is a meticulously organized tactic, accomplished with the support and encouragement of the UN and various NGOs. It goes like this. Make a sweeping claim, ensure it races through the headlines, and move on before anyone has time to dismantle it. By the time the details are checked, the falsehood has already shaped public opinion. The lie itself becomes the fact.
It is not only the word itself that matters, but the way it is deployed. Hamas and its advocates understand the power of a flood. One falsehood is never enough. They release dozens at a time. A hospital bombing, a famine, a mass grave, a strike on aid workers, a claim of genocide. Each accusation is crafted to dominate headlines for a few hours or days. By the time the details are debunked, the news cycle has already moved on and the next charge is already circulating.
A lie that travels faster than the correction can never really be corrected. The falsehood lingers in memory long after the retraction, shaping opinion in ways that facts no longer reach. In time, the accumulation of accusations builds a kind of moral sediment. Each story, however false, leaves behind a residue that hardens into conventional wisdom.
That is why the genocide accusation feels so immovable. It is not that anyone has proved it. It is that the sheer repetition has made it seem axiomatic. Each new claim adds another layer, another echo. Even when dismantled, the next one has already arrived to take its place. The flood itself becomes the strategy. The goal is not persuasion in the courtroom of law, but saturation in the court of public opinion.
That cycle is playing out again today. Israel has ordered civilians to evacuate Gaza City, Hamas’s last remaining stronghold. Simultaneously, the UN has once again declared that Israel is commiting genocide. Predictably, Western outlets splashed the front page with cries of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.” Yet these two headlines directly contradict one another. After nearly two years of war, Gaza City was still full of civilians. If Israel had truly been pursuing a campaign of extermination, there would not be hundreds of thousands left to evacuate. The presence of so many people at the very center of Hamas’s operations is evidence not of indiscriminate slaughter, but of a military campaign that has left vast populations untouched.
This is not the first time the genocide narrative has been deployed. In 1979 Edward Said accused Israel of “naked genocidal wars.” In the 1980s Noam Chomsky spoke of “Israeli concentration camps” and dismissed the Hebrew Bible as a “genocidal” text. The 2001 Durban NGO Forum labeled Israel guilty of “acts of genocide” while calling for its isolation. Mahmoud Abbas repeated the charge at the UN in 2014. Most recently, UN rapporteurs and professional activist networks have institutionalized the accusation in resolutions and reports. The word has become a political instrument, passed down through decades, polished and redeployed in every conflict.
But politics and law are not the same thing. The International Court of Justice, the only body with authority to rule on genocide, has never convicted Israel of it. In fact, even its much-cited provisional ruling has been widely misrepresented. In April, Joan Donoghue, the president of the court at the time, explained in a BBC interview that the court did not find Israel guilty of genocide, nor even that genocide was occurring. The court’s purpose, she said, was simply to affirm that South Africa had standing to bring its case and that Palestinians had “plausible rights to protection from genocide.” That careful legal distinction was collapsed by activists and the media into a false headline: “ICJ rules Israel plausibly guilty of genocide.”
That is why the current evacuation order matters so much. It is not a footnote in the war. It is the collapse of the central accusation. The existence of large civilian populations inside Gaza City proves that Israel has not waged a campaign of indiscriminate killing. The evidence completely contradicts the indictment.
And yet the indictment will never be withdrawn. It was never meant to withstand scrutiny. Its purpose is not to protect civilians but to delegitimize the state that fights the terrorists who endanger them. The word “genocide” has become less a claim than a strategy. A way to fix Israel permanently in the moral imagination as heir to the crimes of the twentieth century.
The tragedy is not only that this slander persists, but that it is echoed and amplified by institutions that are still considered reputable in the eyes of the world. When UN bodies, NGOs, and media outlets repeat the charge without rigor, they do not illuminate the truth. They just make it harder for Israel to finish this war once and for all.
And that is the anatomy of the lie. It begins with Hamas, but it finds its power only when others choose to repeat it.
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