Genocide is a legal term. Here in the United States there is a lot of hand wringing about what to call the atrocities being perpetrated by the Israeli government against the population within the Gaza strip. Is it a genocide? Or just “merely” ethnic cleansing? There are a lot of reasons why someone might want to call this one thing or another – financial and/or political incentives, but also legal ones. So, let’s look a bit at how we might clarify things.

One issue we run into when using a term like “genocide” is concept creep. This is the phenomenon where a concept can be slowly expanded to include more and more instances that were not originally intended to be included under the concept. Think, for instance, how “gaslighting” is no longer just attempting to get someone to question their own ability to reliably interpret or recall some event, but has expanded to essentially just be synonymous with lying to someone. A great video (that came out as I was writing this) that talks about this idea in the context of therapy speak is the following:

This sort of concept creep could also plausibly occur with something like genocide. While “genocide” is not a common part of the lexicon for most people, it does have some concept creep. However, I think the concept creep here might actually be a narrowing, rather than expanding, of the concept. To most people, if you say something like “genocide” they will probably think only of mass murder of an ethnic or racial group. But this is not the only condition an event must satisfy to be considered genocide. Genocide is a legal term and it is defined as follows:

Article II

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

And also, adding the mental element, we could define it this way (from the same source as above):

The popular understanding of what constitutes genocide tends to be broader than the content of the norm under international law. Article II of the Genocide Convention contains a narrow definition of the crime of genocide, which includes two main elements:

1. A mental element: the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”; and
2. A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively:
   • Killing members of the group
   • Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
   • Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
   • Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
   • Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

The intent is the most difficult element to determine. To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Cultural destruction does not suffice, nor does an intention to simply disperse a group. It is this special intent, or dolus specialis, that makes the crime of genocide so unique. In addition, case law has associated intent with the existence of a State or organizational plan or policy, even if the definition of genocide in international law does not include that element.

Importantly, the victims of genocide are deliberately targeted – not randomly – because of their real or perceived membership of one of the four groups protected under the Convention (which excludes political groups, for example). This means that the target of destruction must be the group, as such, and not its members as individuals. Genocide can also be committed against only a part of the group, as long as that part is identifiable (including within a geographically limited area) and “substantial.”

Is this what’s happening in Gaza? In what follows, in order to ensure I am not guilty of circularity (i.e., since we are here trying to determine whether or not it is a genocide, I will refrain from calling it a genocide during this analysis), I am going to call what is happening in Gaza an atrocity. 

Probably a lot of people, especially those predisposed to calling the atrocities in Gaza a genocide, will likely say that all this legalistic talk doesn’t matter. Those who want to call it a genocide will point to the atrocities and call it genocide because of the emotional weight the accusation carries (and to signal to their cohorts that they are thinking the ‘correct thoughts‘ on the matter) and accuse anyone who does not call the atrocities a genocide of attempting to downplay what is happening. In that case, they may be (if it turns out, from a legal standpoint, that it is not a genocide) attempting to redefine genocide in order to rally people toward political action. This, of course, causes concept creep and may de-fang the term for future genocides, which would work against the overall project of preventing/stopping genocides.

Those who are pre-disposed to not call the atrocities in Gaza a genocide might couch their argument in these legalistic terms. There is, of course, the issue of how we can say that the conditions in the definition are being satisfied. This is why the second form of the definition adds the mental element. But even just in the physical elements, how many people have to die, for instance, for actions to be considered a genocide? What number and severity of mental or physical injury is sufficient for something to be considered genocide? What constitutes “measures intended to prevent births”? These sorts of ambiguities can offer a lot of wiggle room for those pre-disposed not to call the atrocities in Gaza a genocide to therefore claim that what is happening in Gaza is not a genocide.

But let’s look at what is happening in Gaza. I will first look at each of the physical elements in turn.

Physical Element

Killing Members of the Group

For this, we can compare death tolls in Gaza to the death rolls in other instances that most people (though not necessarily all people) will unambiguously recognize as genocide. Namely, we’ll compare the atrocities in Gaza to the Holocaust (1939-1945), the Rwandan genocide (1994), and the Armenian genocide (1915-1918).

The number of deaths in Gaza (in order to steelman the “not a genocide” position, I am using a low estimate of 62,122 as of August 2025) and the percentage of the population is clearly much smaller than for the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, and the Rwandan Genocide. One thing to put this into context, however, is that deaths resulting from war have dropped precipitously over the past one hundred years or so:

One thing to notice in this graph, too, is that in the latter half of the twentieth century, military + civilian deaths per hundred thousand have converged with military deaths per hundred thousand, meaning that the number of civilians per hundred thousand killed due to war has dropped (i.e., the people dying as a result of war, since the end of WWII, has become primarily combatants, with fewer and fewer non-combatants dying due to war each decade).

For instance, if we look at a recent deadly war, using that in 2002 the population of Iraq was about 26 million and between 2003 and 2023 about 210,000 civilian deaths occurred, that comes out to about 0.81% of the 2002 population (about 85% of the total Iraqi dead). The point being, as bad as 210,000 civilian deaths over 20 years is, it is still a much smaller percentage of the total population (in 2002; if we used the population halfway between it would be about 0.6%), which is indicative of a greater (though still far from perfect) concern for civilian casualties in more modern wars. 

What this means for our context is that, the fact that most of the people killed in Gaza since October of 2023 (i.e., roughly the past two years as of writing this) are civilians (about 67% if we, for the sake of steelmanning the “not a genocide” position, trust the Israeli numbers for how many of the low estimate 60,000 dead were actually Hamas combatants, which the Israeli’s claim is about 20,000 of the dead; this number is in dispute) goes against this trend of primarily combatants being killed due to war. In other words, the prosecution of the war in Gaza is primarily affecting civilians, not Hamas combatants. This can only happen if (1) the Israeli’s are acting with a high level of disregard for civilian casualties, or (2) the Israeli’s are purposefully targeting civilians.

Regardless of the reason, what we can say is that, even though the number and rate of deaths in Gaza are lower than for the three twentieth century genocides used for comparison, in the context of humanity’s much greater concern for civilian deaths in the past fifty or so years, the sheer number of deaths as a percent of the total population (see below) and the disproportionate affect on civilians is telling (especially when we are attempting to adjudicate the mental element, i.e., the intentions of the Israeli government). 

We also need to put this into the context of relative deaths between the two belligerents. The numbers on Wikipedia have the number of Israelis killed at 1022 civilians and 961 security forces. With a Jewish population of roughly 7.2 million in 2022 (using the populations from 2020 and 2024 summed and then divided by two) this amounts to about 0.028% of the population, compared to the roughly 2.9% of the Gazan population, making the percentage of Gazans killed about two orders of magnitude greater than the number of Jewish Israeli’s killed.

Israel has claimed that about 20,000 of the Palestinians killed are Hamas fighters, so if we take their word for it (and this is certainly not without controversy) and remove these 20,000 from the civilian ledger, then the number of civilians killed goes down to 42,122 which, to steelman the Israeli position and round that down to 40,000, this makes the percentage 1.8% of the total population of Gaza. If we look at just the number of Israeli civilians killed (1022) the percentage here goes down to 0.014%, which is still two orders of magnitude less than the number of Gazan civilians killed.

Even with this context, it is still the case that a much smaller proportion of Gazans have been killed compared to the more unambiguous genocides of the twentieth century. But, we have to remember, genocide is not only about the number of people killed. We also must examine the other conditions for the legal definition of genocide.

Causing Physical and/or Mental Harm

The number of Gazans who are independently verified to have suffered physical injuries for which they have received medical attention, due to Israeli combat operations, is, according to OCHA, about 163,000 people (as of August, 2025). This amounts to 7.5% of the population. These qualifiers – independently verified, having received medical attention, due to Israeli combat operations – mean that this is a low estimate. This low estimate is almost certainly higher. Gaza also has the highest per capita rate of child amputees.

Based on satellite data, as of July 2025, some 70% of buildings have been leveled in the Gaza strip, and:

According to a Hebrew University mapping, 89% of the buildings in Rafah, 84% of the buildings in the northern Gaza Strip and 78% of the buildings in Gaza City have been completely or partially destroyed.

In all the rubble, there are almost certainly more bodies that have yet to be discovered, and with the healthcare system in Gaza devastated and about 90% of the population displaced there are almost certainly many more injuries that have gone unreported.  

But what about mental harm? Obviously, having cities destroyed and being displaced is going to cause some mental harm. Also, given that the situation is ongoing, it is hard to assess what mental harms are actually being inflicted. But, a study that came out in April of 2025 (the sampling was done in November of 2024) found the following:

The majority [of the sample] were unemployed (73.7%). Over half of the participants were displaced in camps (55.6%), while 40.4% lived in shelters. Nearly a fifth (20.3%) had lost a first-degree relative, 12.7% were injured, and 4.8% were detained by the military. Moderate or higher levels of anxiety and depression were reported by 79.3% and 84.5%, respectively. The rate of symptomatic PTSD was 67.8% when defined as meeting the DSM-5 criteria for PTSD and having a PCL-5 score ≥ 23, and 88.2% based on the latter criterion alone, while subthreshold PTSD was encountered in 18.1%. Also, 63.1% suffered significant symptoms of all three comorbidities.

I’ve had a more difficult time finding data on these conditions prior to the war, but a 2020 (prior to the war) study found that 53.5% of children suffered from symptoms of PTSD. This is exceptionally high already, but still lower than the total rates of PTSD from the 2025 study.

This, of course, brings up the fact that those who are pre-disposed to call the current atrocities a genocide will point out that the genocide was occurring even before the current war. The apartheid state and the blockade since 2005 to which Gazans were subjected, according to this view, was a sort of slow-moving genocide by virtue of “[d]eliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” This brings us to our next point.

Inflicting Conditions for Physical Destruction

One aspect of this conflict that has garnered a lot of attention is the deliberate blocking of food and medical aid from reaching Gazans. But this brings up the obvious issue: why, exactly, do the Gazans even require aid coming in from the outside? The major reason is because the conditions in Gaza are making it all but impossible for Gazans to produce their own food. And not just because so many are displaced, but also because the farm land in Gaza has been damaged, which is considered anywhere between a war crime and a crime against humanity according to the ICC.

According to the UN, only 1.5% of farm land in Gaza is both accessible and undamaged. Looking at this by governorate (a term for a governmental region akin to “counties” or “provinces”) we find that, according to Food Security Portal, damage to agricultural land has increased substantially over the course of the war:

This can be seen quite starkly in satellite images:

Indeed, the World Health Organization now calls (as of August, 2025) what is occurring in Gaza a famine. A famine, similar to a genocide, has a strict definition:

“We say there is a famine when three conditions come together in a specific geographic area, whether a town, village, city, even a country,” WFP’s [World Food Programme] Mr. Husain explained.

• At least 20 per cent of the population in that particular area are facing extreme levels of hunger;
• 30 per cent of the children in the same place are wasted, or too thin for their height; and
• The death – or mortality – rate has doubled, from the average, surpassing two deaths per 10,000 daily for adults and four deaths per 10,000 daily for children.

This famine, then, is not only occurring due to the activities of the Israeli military, following policies by the Israeli government, but is also a predictable result of such policies. In other words, the ongoing famine is at best due to gross negligence and at worst is premeditated. 

Preventing Births

While I do not know of any particular efforts by the Israeli government to forcefully sterilize Gazans, or force them to have abortions for the purpose of reducing their population size, it should be clear that the conditions in Gaza are not conducive to birthing children. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights says:

These measures [to prevent births] include failing to protect pregnant women from military attacks, depriving them of medical care by destroying the healthcare system and obstructing their access to it, using starvation as a weapon of war, and imposing harsh living conditions that exacerbate health risks, such as continuous forced displacement and the spread of disease.

I’m not a legal expert, so I’m not sure if the measures to prevent births must be in addition to the other conditions listed here. For example, killing people will prevent those who are killed from producing more children, but this could be as a byproduct, not as the intended effect. Regardless of the intention, it is certainly having that effect. To me, the destruction of the healthcare system would be a leading contender for a measure taken with the specific intention of preventing births, but certainly all the measures listed in the above quote succeed in doing this and could very easily be done with such an intention.

Transferring Children

The forceful detention and transfer of Palestinian children by the Israeli government has been occurring since even before the war. Over twenty years some 10,000 Palestinian children have been detained by the Israeli government (about 500-700 per year, mostly boys, often as young as 12 years old). As of October of 2024, the number of children detained per year quadrupled according to Defense for Children International. I haven’t been able to find a good source with more recent numbers of children being detained in Gaza, but even if this went down by half since 2024 it would still be about 1000 children per year being detained.

What this detention entails is being detained, often without charge or legal counsel, held in terrible and violent conditions, and can result in life in prison even for children as young as 12 years old. 

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Mental Element

The mental element – what the intentions of the perpetrators are – is the more difficult aspect of a genocide to demonstrate. We cannot peer into the minds of the perpetrators, and their stated intentions are not often going to be as straightforward as saying “we intend to wipe this group of people out” or some such. Proclamations of intention are usually going to be couched in euphemism and obfuscation. This is even the case for unambiguously genocidal programs, such as the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide, where to this day people will still (falsely) claim that it didn’t happen or that it wasn’t as bad as everything thinks. Thus, adjudicating the intentions of the perpetrators can be much more circumstantial and interpretive. 

We can look at what the people in the Israeli government prosecuting the current war are saying. One of the more provocative is Finance Minister and member of the security cabinet Bezalel Smotrich, who has said things like:

There are no half measures. [The Gazan cities of] Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat – total annihilation. ‘You will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven’ – there’s no place under heaven. [source]

And

It is impossible in today’s global reality to wage war – no one in the world would let us starve and thirst two million citizens, even though it may be just and moral until they return our hostages [source]

But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that he plans on taking over Gaza city for the purposes of

• The disarmament of Hamas
• The return of all hostages, both living and dead
• The demilitarisation of the Gaza Strip
• Israeli security control over the Gaza Strip
• The establishment of an alternative civilian administration that is neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority

Of note for this plan is that it only mentions Gaza city. No concrete plan (as of writing this post, at least that I have been able to find) has been proposed for the rest of the Gaza strip. Of course, Donald Trump once suggested clearing out all the Gazans and turning the Gaza strip into “the Riviera of the Middle East”. It is telling that Netanyahu did not object to this:

It was not clear if Mr. Netanyahu expected Mr. Trump’s plan, but grinned with satisfaction when the president talked about permanently clearing Gaza out of all Palestinians, an action that Israel has not dared itself. After Mr. Trump added that the United States would take over Gaza itself, the Israeli leader said that the proposal was “something that could change history” and that it was worth “pursuing this avenue,” without explicitly endorsing the idea.

Of course, world leaders know that they need to humor Trump since appealing to his ego is the best way to get what they want from him, so it is not clear how on board with this Netanyahu really was. It does make one wonder how far Netanyahu would allow the U.S. to take such an undertaking – surely offloading such an atrocity to someone else would make it easier to stomach and thus make him less likely to raise objections. But such a hypothetical does not demonstrate Netanyahu’s genocidal intentions.

It is important to note a few things here. One, the Israeli military has made efforts to get civilians to evacuate areas that are about to be bombed. Also, as glib as Netanyahu may sound, it is true that if he wanted to exterminate everyone in Gaza, the Israeli military could do it much faster than what they are. But it is also important to note that Israeli policies have fairly consistently prevented aid from getting in, which can be construed as using starvation as a weapon of war. These two considerations can mean anything between Netanyahu actually not intending to commit genocide as he claims is the case, and all the way to intending to commit genocide but using starvation as a way of obfuscating this intention (i.e., it would be stupefyingly obvious what the intentions were if they just bombed the entire Gaza strip into oblivion to kill everyone, but starving them in this fashion while always blaming Hamas leaves room for plausible deniability). It may also be somewhere in the middle, where creating unlivable conditions will force people to flee and convince other countries to take them in out of pity (i.e., it really is “merely” ethnic cleansing and not genocide; note that this was one of the strategies the Nazi’s took to removing Jews from Germany, and eventually conquered territory, during the 1930’s, but when nobody would take the Jews in and there was nowhere to send them, the Nazi’s resorted to murdering them (source)). 

Many people have accused Netanyahu of prolonging the war in order to remain in power. Motivations like these only muddy the waters. For one, it makes it difficult to take anything he says at face value – he could easily be lying about not wanting to commit a genocide, but just as easily lying to his hardliner supporters that he does. But secondly, it makes it so that his motivations may be more prosaic and self-serving than genocide (which, at least ostensibly, can be euphemized into ‘making the region safer for Israel’ – i.e., create a wasteland and call it peace). 

Again, while it can be difficult to determine the motivations and intentions of the people in charge, we can also look at what the Israeli public at large wants out of this war. I’ve made the following graphs using data from a March 2025 poll by Tel Aviv university (there are other questions with data you can look at, but I looked at a few of the most pertinent to the question of genocide):

According to these data, opinions seem pretty split on what the future of Gaza ought to be. Of note, the majority of both Jews and Arabs oppose the appartheid state (the topmost graph), yet many Jews support having Israeli or international control over Gaza (second and third graphs). The answers become even more inconsistent:

Where, of course, this last graph fits the definition of ethnic cleansing. The number of Jews who either highly support or support a program of ethnic cleansing in Gaza is 61.8% according to these data.

Why these data about public opinion in Israel matters for our purposes is that Israel is a democracy, and so political leaders are typically going to do things that fall near what a majority of their people want. In other words, looking at public polling data is a way of assessing what intentions a political leader might have. If there is almost two thirds of the population who would be willing to support a program of ethnic cleansing, then political leaders are more likely to perpetrate such a crime. 

Concluding Remarks

Again, motivations and intentions are extremely difficult to firmly establish. One could probably spend hours making a case for or against why the Israeli government intends genocide for the population of Gaza. Much of it is going to come down to speculation that is highly colored by one’s other ideological commitments. One must therefore appeal to the physical element, i.e., stop looking at what the political leaders say and instead look at what they are doing.

To me, the physical evidence weighs in favor of calling the atrocities being committed in Gaza by the Israeli government a genocide. If we are forced to take the mental element into consideration, then I think we must err on the side of agnosticism on that particular aspect (at least based on the small amount of research I’ve done on that topic here; feel free to correct me in the comments if you know of other statements of intention by the current Israeli government). In the end, I think it is probably less bad to call it a genocide, even if future historians, after examining all the evidence, decide it was only “merely” ethnic cleansing, than to call it ethnic cleansing only to have future historians come to the conclusion that it was, in fact, a genocide.

What really brings me to the conclusion that what is occurring in Palestine is a genocide are two things. The first is that this did not begin on October 7, 2023. These policies – the apartheid state, the settlements in the West Bank, the unbearable conditions inflicted upon the Gazans – has been going on for decades. The October 7 attacks, as awful as they were an as justified as the Israelis may be in crushing Hamas and rescuing the hostages, supplied the Israeli government justification to ratchet an already existing program of (at best) ethnic cleansing up to the level of genocide. The other thing is less of an argument and more an appeal to (or reminder of) empathy and conscience. It’s one thing to look at all the numbers, as I’ve done here, but we must keep in mind that those numbers represent real human beings going through real suffering. Even if those hypothetical future historians sift through the evidence and conclude that it does not fit a strict definition for genocide, we still, right now while it’s happening, need to recognize that there is suffering occurring in Palestine on an enormous scale, and that the suffering is the direct result of policies and strategies employed by the Israeli government (i.e., it is a problem caused by humans, not some pathogen or natural disaster). 

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Just as a postscript to this, I want to point out that I have not closely followed what has been happening in Gaza. I hear about from various news and commentary channels (mostly on Youtube) that I watch regularly and so was somewhat aware of events, but before writing this post (which took, altogether, about seven hours) I had not looked that deeply into the facts and figures. As such, I have also not looked into other analyses attempting to determine how to classify the atrocities in Gaza. Indeed, one of my motivations for making this post was because I had called the atrocities going on in Gaza a genocide in my recent post about Donald Trump, and that led me to wonder if I was even using the term properly, and so I wanted to look into it myself with as little bias as possible. The reason this is important to point out is twofold: (1) I am quite ignorant about all the details of what is going on in Gaza, and (2) although I had a bias, based on my limited previous exposure to events, toward concluding that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide, I was not (and, to some extent, am still not) 100% committed to the conclusion and would have changed my position if the data did not support the genocide conclusion. But, because of my ignorance, I could still be swayed away from my conclusions in this post if the evidence supports doing so.

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EDIT: Since making this post, I ran across the following podcast:

The podcast covers all the same ground I do in this post, and then some (and also with a guest who is much more knowledgeable than I am). What I also found interesting are many of the comments to the video. There are quite a few people saying things that I mentioned in this post, which is essentially “who cares about all this legal bickering, what’s happening to the Palestinians just is a genocide.” In other words, they are advocating for concept creep because calling it the worst crime on the books has a certain emotional catharsis. One could argue (and the guest in the podcast does at multiple points) that the legal bickering is sort of pointless – no matter what label we put to the atrocities occurring in Gaza, it has gone far beyond the initial justification Israel had in retaliating to the October 7 attacks (i.e., targeting civilians and using starvation as a weapon of war is, and always is, completely unjustified, i.e., even as a response to the crimes committed by Hamas this can never be justified), it is clearly criminal (regardless what crime label is applied), and needs to stop immediately. Even though, in this post, I came to the conclusion that to me the Israeli conduct in Gaza constitutes genocide (even though the extremely narrow definition used by the courts, as the guest discusses, might not see it that way), it seems just as unhelpful to harangue people into calling it a genocide as it is to bicker over the narrow legal criteria for genocide (I’m aware that bickering over legal criteria is precisely what this post is, but other than the donations I’ve given to Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund since making this post, I’m not sure what other immediate action I could take).

I also found the following video since making this post which covers the topic quite well (this video also has a fundraiser for the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund):