One of the pillars of Amnesty International's accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is that Israel sometimes bombs civilians for no military reason at all.
This is critical to Amnesty's argument. A war in which civilians die while Israel is attacking Hamas is a war, however horrible the civilian toll may be. Amnesty needs something more to transform it into genocide. It needs evidence that killing Palestinians is itself the objective.
So Amnesty devoted an entire section of its "genocide" report to fifteen Israeli airstrikes that it says had no military justification.
"On the basis of its investigations, Amnesty International concluded that, in all 15 cases, the locations struck were civilian objects and that Israel had launched the air strikes."
Amnesty says it investigated whether the targets contained fighters or military objectives and found none. It says it interviewed survivors and witnesses, examined satellite imagery, reviewed videos and photographs and consulted weapons experts. The conclusion is categorical: Amnesty "did not find any evidence of a military objective at the locations struck."
That is about as strong a claim as an organization can make. And it is falling apart.
Salo Aizenberg has been going through Amnesty's fifteen showcase cases and comparing them with information that has since became available about the people killed in those strikes. Again and again, the supposedly inexplicable attacks on purely civilian locations turn out to have killed Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad or other armed-group personnel.
In one case, Amnesty described an Israeli strike near Jabalia's refugee-camp market that killed sixteen civilians and said it had found no military objective. Aizenberg found that five of the dead were subsequently identified by Palestinian sources as militants, including a child soldier.
There was a human rights violation here: five militants deliberately gathered in a civilian area to use Gazans as human shields. But the human rights of Gazans don't matter to Amnesty when it is Islamic Jihad who are responsible for their deaths.
In another, Amnesty investigated the destruction of the al-Dos family home and again said it could find no military objective. A PIJ unit later identified one of its commanders among the dead.
Amnesty described a strike on the al-Najjar family home the same way. Palestinian Islamic Jihad subsequently identified one of the men killed there as a battalion commander.
Another strike Amnesty treated as an apparently purposeless attack on civilians killed Mohammed Shahada, whom Aizenberg identifies through Palestinian sources as a PIJ officer.
Another of Amnesty's examples involved the al-Ayadi family home. The Mujahideen Brigades itself reportedly acknowledged that Rami Allal, one of its commanders, was killed in the strike.
A December strike on the Harb family home yielded the same pattern: Amnesty said it found no military objective, while a PIJ commander was later confirmed among the dead.
Aizenberg has since found yet another militant in another one of Amnesty's cases.
These were not fifteen incidents selected at random from tens of thousands of Israeli strikes. These were Amnesty's curated cases.
Amnesty spent weeks investigating them. It interviewed witnesses. It gathered photographs. It analyzed fragments. It examined satellite images. It went looking specifically for attacks that could demonstrate that Israel bombed civilians without a military objective.
In other words, Amnesty had every incentive to choose the cleanest examples it could find. We do not know how many airstrikes Amnesty decided to pass on because they wouldn't fit their predetermined "genocide' narrative. It wouldn't publish cases that are ambiguous or obviously targeting Hamas.
And it still got them wrong.
The supposed existence of civilian-only attacks is one of the mechanisms Amnesty uses to bridge the enormous gap between "Israel conducted a war in which many civilians were killed" and "Israel intended to destroy Palestinians as a group."
Amnesty knows that civilian deaths by themselves do not establish genocide. Every urban war produces civilian deaths. The genocide accusation therefore requires evidence that the civilians were killed because they were Palestinians, rather than because Israel was trying to kill Hamas and other fighters who embedded themselves among civilians.
These fifteen attacks were supposed to provide exactly that evidence.
Instead, they reveal something very different: Amnesty simply did not know what Israel was targeting.
That should have been obvious from the beginning. Amnesty does not have access to Israeli targeting intelligence. It does not know what Israeli surveillance showed before an attack. It does not hear the communications being intercepted. It does not know which commanders Israeli intelligence believed were inside a building at a given moment.
Amnesty interviewed people on the ground after the bombs fell. It did not even consider that most Gazans would never identify known terrorists to Amnesty out of fear of their own lives. Yet Amnesty treated its inability to identify a military target as evidence that no military target existed. Israel, as always, is guilty until proven innocent beyond any possible doubt.
There is an even larger problem with Amnesty's theory. Israel has spent an enormous amount of intelligence, manpower, aircraft time and expensive precision weaponry trying to locate and kill individual Hamas and PIJ commanders hiding among civilians. Amnesty itself has spent years complaining about how Israel weighs the military value of those targets against the expected civilian casualties.
If Israel's objective is to kill Palestinians as Palestinians, why bother identifying the Hamas commander in the building?
Why spend intelligence resources locating him? Why calculate the expected civilian casualties around him? Why decide whether his military value justifies a strike? Why use expensive precision weapons to hit the building where he is located?
You can simply bomb the civilians.
Amnesty could argue that Israel's proportionality calculations are too permissive. Indeed, critics have made exactly that argument, and I have explained why the claim that Israel simply abandoned the laws of proportionality does not withstand scrutiny.
But the proportionality argument disproves the genocide argument - because it concedes that there was a legitimate target.
Amnesty's methodological failure is now impossible to ignore. Amnesty's investigators spent weeks examining individual strikes and confidently announced that there had been no military objective. Outside researchers, using information Amnesty either missed or never bothered to look for, are now finding the military targets one after another, freely admitted by the militant groups themselves.
A serious human-rights organization would be reopening those cases immediately. it would be horrified that it reported on these cases wrong. It would contact the sources. It would investigate the militant identifications. It would publish corrections where necessary. It would reconsider every conclusion downstream that depended upon those cases.
When an organization publishes an accusation as grave as genocide, the minimum requirement should be a willingness to correct the evidence they base the accusation on when it points the other way.
Amnesty will never do any of those things. They never correct their wrong conclusions about Israel and civilians. I know because I've identified militants in previous wars that amnesty called civilian, Amnesty was aware of my research, and it said, explicitly, that it did not consider me credible even though I was quoting militant sources themselves and even when my findings were mirrored by Israeli thinktanks and others.
A real human rights organization would correct its mistakes. An antisemitic advocacy organization never will. And we have more proof of which one Amnesty is.
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