Claims Israel is committing genocide and starving Palestinian children in Gaza are growing louder. It’s a theme of the liberal bourgeois media, U.N. agencies, Stalinist parties and Hamas apologists, and the chorus is being joined by growing numbers of capitalist politicians from both the Democrats and Republicans, and the governments of more imperialist powers.
If these forces all charge that Israel is committing “war crimes,” why does the Militant say it’s not true?
Working people and others who defend Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews — in a capitalist world where acts of anti-Jewish violence are on the rise — need to start with the facts.
Israel’s defensive war is aimed at eradicating Hamas, not the Palestinian people, to prevent another Holocaust. The only genocidal forces operating in Gaza are Hamas and its allies. They’ve stated repeatedly their goal is to destroy Israel and eliminate the Jews.
That’s what they tried to do on Oct. 7, 2023 — financed, trained and armed by the reactionary regime in Tehran — murdering 1,200 people in Israel, mostly civilians. It was the worst anti-Jewish pogrom since the Holocaust.
The Hamas death squads deliberately murdered entire families, tortured and killed immigrant workers, raped women and mutilated their bodies, took hostages and proudly posted photos and videos of their atrocities.
Within weeks U.N. agencies and other Hamas apologists began claiming Gaza was on the verge of mass starvation and that Israel’s defensive war was genocide.
The truth about 1948
The middle-class left, Stalinists and Hamas supporters allege that Israel has been carrying out genocide since 1948, when it won its independence and defeated armies from five reactionary Arab regimes that sought to crush it at birth.
Genocide is the systematic attempt to exterminate an entire people. That’s what the Nazis tried to do leading up to and during World War II. They murdered 6 million Jews, two out of every three Jews in Europe, 40% of the Jews in the world.
The imperialist powers from Washington to Ottawa and beyond closed the doors to Jews fleeing the slaughter and its aftermath. That’s why Jews went to Palestine. Where else could they go?
A look at population figures refutes the claim that a decadeslong “genocide” is being inflicted on the Palestinians. In 1948 there were some 1.3 million Arabs living in Palestine, including what is now Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. Today there are some 7.4 million there. And another 7.8 million or so living in other countries. That’s more than 10 times more Palestinians than in 1948!
In contrast, as a result of the Nazi’s attempt at genocide, the Jewish population of the world today has just barely reached the size it was before World War II.
In October 2023, 2.2 million Palestinians lived in Gaza. The Gaza Ministry of Health — which is an arm of Hamas — claims that 63,000 people have been killed there since Israel launched its war to destroy Hamas. Israel says it has killed 20,000 Hamas fighters, but the Gaza health ministry makes no distinction between the deaths of civilians and combatants.
Even accepting the Hamas-run ministry’s figures, that’s less than 3% of the population during an intense urban war.
Hamas — with the indispensable aid of Tehran — built the largest military tunnel system in modern history, yet not one bomb shelter for civilians. It places its command posts and ammunition stores in and underneath schools, hospitals, mosques, homes and U.N. offices.
The deaths in Gaza are the result of Hamas’ refusal to end its war, return the hostages it seized and its deliberate strategy of maximizing civilian deaths, which it blames on Israel in the hopes of generating sympathy for its aims.
The Israeli government and Israel Defense Forces are capitalist institutions. But they take measures to move civilians out of harms way, despite Hamas’ efforts to prevent evacuations and the fact this gives Hamas more time to prepare before battle.
Famine? Or Hamas manipulation?
“Starvation as weapon of war being used against Gaza civilians.” This was the headline in Oxfam International on Oct. 25, 2023. For nearly two years, the U.N., so-called humanitarian aid organizations, the New York Times and Washington Post have repeated the same libel.
Imperialist rulers, including those in Canada, Britain and Australia, echo the charges against Israel, accusing it of deliberately starving Gazans. In pressing Israel to lay down its arms, they seek to position themselves to join in the plunder of the labor, oil and other resources in the Middle East, which is still dominated by U.S. imperialism.
“Debunking the Genocide Allegations: A Reexamination of the Israel-Hamas War from October 7, 2023 to June 1, 2025,” a report just released by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, is well worth reading.
The report found that more food aid has been sent to Gaza since the war began than before. From Oct. 7, 2023, until January 2025, trucks entering Gaza provided enough food to meet the needs of the entire population along with a six-month reserve.
There is hunger in Gaza. But that’s largely because Hamas systematically loots and profits off the aid and uses it to maintain the loyalty of its dwindling network of supporters. And since Gaza, like Israel, is class-divided, better off middle-class layers are able to buy food diverted from humanitarian groups at high-priced markets, while poorer families struggle to survive.
The road forward
The cries of “genocide” and “famine” are increasing as Israeli troops surround Hamas’ last stronghold, Gaza City, preparing to end its rule.
Defeating and dismantling Hamas is a necessity to prevent a new Holocaust in Israel, home to half the world’s Jews. It would free Palestinians in Gaza from Hamas’ tyranny.
Defeating Hamas cannot put an end to Jew-hatred. But it would remove a key obstacle to working people in Israel, the Palestinian territories and the region — Jews, Arabs, Muslims, Druze, Christians, immigrants and more — finding ways to come together in defense of their common interests today and, out of those struggles, to fight to take political power.
The protests unfolding in Iran — including toilers of all nationalities — show what is possible.