The International Association of Genocide Scholars’ False Claims About Israel

By Hugh Fitzgerald | Sept 4, 2025

The UN has said that in all the wars fought since 1945, the civilian-to-combatant ratio of deaths has been 9:1. In Afghanistan, the Western powers brought that figure down to 4:1, and in Iraq, to 3:1. But no army in history has managed to bring that ratio to below 1:1, as Israel has done in Gaza, with 17,800 civilians killed because of the war, and 26,000 Hamas combatants killed. Shouldn’t this feat by the IDF be shouted from the rooftops?

The International Association of Genocide Scholars, which has wrongfully and in outrage of the evidence accused Israel of “genocide,” also criticizes Israel because some Israeli politicians have called for the forced expulsion of people from Gaza. Some Israeli leaders — a minority — have called for the forced expulsion of people from Gaza.

Many of them have called for the temporary expulsion of Gazans while the territory’s infrastructure is being rebuilt, for their presence while that is going on would be dangerous for them, and at the same time would slow the pace both of the removal of rubble and the rebuilding. Some Gazans will want to leave permanently, tired of the violence and squalor, for places less likely to revert back to violence, but their voluntary removal does not constitute ethnic cleansing.

It is true that in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attack, several Israeli leaders gave vent to their rage, noting that more than a thousand ordinary Gazans accompanied Hamas terrorists when they went into Israel, to join in the fun of raping and murdering Israelis, and furthermore, when the hostages were being dragged back, deep into Gaza, those “ordinary Gazans” beat them as they lay helpless and half-naked on the back of flat-bed trucks or flung on the handlebars of motorbikes. But they did not “dehumanize” the Gazans, as the IAGS claims, and when the initial shock of the attack had worn off, dialed down their rhetoric.

Hamas proved on October 7, 2023 with its orgy of rape, torture, mutilation, and murder, with its burning whole families alive, decapitating babies, gouging out eyes, cutting off the breasts of women and genitalia of men, that it is hellbent on genocide. And the triumphant Allahu-akbaring of many Gazans, and other Arabs and Muslims too, when they learned of that attack, makes clear their genocidal impulse.

The IAGS claims that Israel has “targeted Gaza’s entire population.” If Israel has “targeted Gaza’s entire population,” as those 120 IAGS members claim, then why has it devoted so much effort to warning that “entire population” away from sites that the IDF has targeted? If it has targeted Gaza’s “entire population,” then why has Israel sent 1.3 million tons of aid into Gaza since the war began? Why has Israel, just since May, delivered more than one hundred million meals to Gazans? Why has Israel arranged for wounded children to be transferred from Gaza to hospitals in Jordan?

Civilians have been killed in Gaza, but that has not been Israel’s intention. Those deaths are an unavoidable result of Hamas’ policy of embedding itself and its weapons in civilian areas and buildings.

Since only 120 of the 500 members of the IAGS have declared Israel to be guilty of genocide, that body can hardly be honestly invoked as supporting the charge of “genocide.” But while the UN and some Western countries declare that they will not be swayed by the IAGS, they still say that they will accept whatever the International Court of Justice decides. But the ICJ is rotten through and through with antisemitism.