More than 35 organizations from around the world have joined together in a campaign aiming to debunk “Hamas genocidal propaganda” about the Gaza war.
International Legal Forum CEO Michal Cotler-Wunsh says Hamas’s claim threatens foundational principles of law by hijacking the term genocide to spread what she calls “a modern blood libel,” accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinian people.
Other organizations involved in the “ Gaza GenoLIE ” campaign include the American-based Anti-Defamation League, the International Legal Forum, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and the World Jewish Congress.
“The term ‘genocide,’ along with other international legal terms, has been deliberately and systematically hijacked, redefined, inverted, and weaponized to demonize, delegitimize, and apply double standards to ‘the Jew’ among nations,” Cotler-Wunsh said in a statement. “This well-orchestrated campaign to spread a modern blood libel accusing Israel of ‘genocide’ began before any Israeli response to Hamas’ genocidal war crimes and crimes against humanity of October 7.”
The GenoLIE website asserts that the genocide claims began on Oct. 8, 2023, the day after Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel, killing 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians. The word genocide was already in wide use, even though Israel’s ground operation did not begin until Oct. 27.
Amnesty International, certain UN bodies and other international groups have found there is evidence Israel committed genocide during the Gaza War. But Israel insists such investigations are fatally biased, and that the nation has done all it can to limit civilian casualties in a war in which the enemy hides behind its civilian population.
Israel acknowledges more than 70,000 people have died in the war. Gaza’s population was about two million prior to the war.
The Gaza GenoLIE website says it is an educational initiative about the “generated and orchestrated genocide lie promoted by anti-Zionists and antisemitic networks in the U.S., Europe and around the world.”
Genocide was defined in the 1948 Genocide Convention, drafted after the Holocaust. Under Article II, genocide refers to certain acts, such as killing, causing serious harm, inflicting destructive conditions of life, committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
The GenoLIE campaign argues the most crucial element is the word “intent,” noting that the convention does not merely ask whether people died, or whether they died in large numbers, it asks whether the perpetrator acted with the specific purpose of destroying a protected group because of its membership in that group.
The groups argue that Israel waged war to dismantle Hamas and secure the release of the hostages, and the civilian death toll was a consequence of urban combat against an enemy that “purposely and cynically embed(ed) itself” among its own population.
They argue Israel’s war was against Hamas, not the Palestinians. The group’s website recounts that when Israel formally declared war on October 8, it set out four aims: recover the hostages; dismantle Hamas’s military capacity; remove Hamas as Gaza’s governing authority; and ensure Gaza could never again carry out such an attack.
“None of the aims reference Palestinians. They refer to an armed terror organization — its fighters, weapons, and rule.”
The groups note that Israel issued evacuation warnings in advance of its military operations, dropping millions of leaflets and placing tens of millions of phone calls, texts, and recorded messages in Arabic urging civilians to leave combat zones.
They say Hamas’s genocide assertions have led to targeting Jews around the world: “The consequences of this antisemitic rhetoric are real. For example, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2024, which was the highest total in the 46 years that they had been tracked.”
They counter Hamas claims that the IDF intentionally targeted journalists. “Even if alleged journalists do die in an active war-zone where urban combat with a cynical terror group is taking place, it does not prove there is a deliberate campaign occurring to silence the press.” Specifically, the site points to the Committee to Protect Journalists, whose numbers had been used to support a war-on-the-press narrative, opening a review of its database after Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad published obituaries identifying some of their own dead fighters, who had been listed as journalists.
International humanitarian law forbids using civilians as human shields against military objectives. Hospitals have special protection, but it is not unconditional, the groups contend — they lose their protection when used to house fighters, weapons, or a command post. The same argument is applied to the alleged Hamas use of schools and mosques.
The Gaza GenoLIE site points to photographs of emaciated Gazan children circulated in the summer of 2025, reaching the front pages of newspapers worldwide, as purported evidence that Israel was deliberately starving Gaza’s population.
“The relevant question is not whether Gazans experienced hunger during a prolonged war,” states the site, “but whether that hunger was the result of Israeli intent to destroy the population … The evidence does not support this, as Israel kept crossings open and coordinated with international humanitarian agencies when it could throughout the war.”
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