The far-left spread the 'genocide' hoax when there were more deaths in Israel than in Gaza

Lately, the concept of "genocide" has been trivialized in a very irresponsible manner, simply ignoring its legal nature.

The gross manipulations of a United Nations commission to accuse Israel of 'genocide'
The far-left, that demonizes Israel, refused to condemn a genocide against Christians

What the Rome Statute says about the crimes of genocide

Article 6 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court classifies as genocide a series of acts "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such." The first of these acts is the killing of members of the group, but there are also other crimes aimed at achieving the disappearance of the group. During the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazism, each and every one of the conditions cited in that article regarding the extermination of the Jewish people were met.

Is a high death toll a reason to talk about genocide?

It should be noted that a high death toll is not sufficient reason to affirm the existence of genocide in legal terms, although obviously, if we are talking about millions of victims it is obvious to assume that these conditions are met. As W. van Mourik points out in Bilanz des Krieges (Ed. Lekturama, Rotterdam, 1978), Germany suffered 3.64 million civilian casualties in World War II, but I have not seen anyone calling this a "genocide." In fact, these deaths are attributable to Hitler's dictatorship, which started that war, a regime that committed the aforementioned crimes of genocide during the Holocaust, which was not an act of war, but the planned extermination of millions of people.

However, in the Srebrenica massacre (2007) 8,372 people were murdered, almost all of them men, including children, adults and the elderly. All the victims were Bosnian Muslims. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia classified the events as "genocide" because its perpetrators "deliberately and methodically eliminated them, solely on the basis of their identity". It was a clear attempt at extermination, even if it only succeeded in wiping out a small part of Bosnia's Muslim population.

Those who have committed crimes of genocide are the Hamas terrorists

What is happening in Gaza right now is not a genocide, but a bloody war started by Hamas, a terrorist organization that launched a massive terrorist attack against Israel on October 7, 2023. That Hamas attack could indeed be classified as a crime of genocide, since in its founding charter, that organization advocates the extermination of the Jews and the atrocities it perpetrated in that attack clearly correspond to that purpose: the cruel and ruthless murder of unarmed civilians, including children and babies, in one of the most horrendous massacres seen since the Holocaust.

Unlike Hamas, Israel has repeatedly called for the evacuation of civilians from areas of Gaza where it carries out its military operations, and has even issued advance warning of its attacks through various means to ask civilians to evacuate, an evacuation that Hamas systematically prevents because it wants to use these civilians as human shields, which is a war crime. If there are currently many civilian casualties in Gaza, it is something attributable to Hamas, just as the German civilians killed in World War II are attributable to the nazis.

In the entire history of modern warfare, the Israeli army is the only one that indicates where it will attack to facilitate the evacuation of civilians. No other army has done this in an operation to seize a certain territory. To call this "genocide" would mean calling all the Allied offensives of World War II the same, in which massive aerial bombardments and artillery attacks against civilian populations were carried out without any advance warning, as part of military operations.

A hoax launched when there were more deaths in Israel than in Gaza

One might ask: When was this hoax accusing Israel of "genocide" started? What evidence did those who made this accusation have? Thanks to the internet, these things are now relatively easy to track. On October 10, 2023, just three days after Hamas attacked Israel, Spanish communist MP Enrique Santiago published this:

In this message, Enrique Santiago already spoke of "genocide" and accused the UN of starting this war by partitioning the British Mandate of Palestine into two states: one Jewish and one Arab. The communist deputy also spoke of "an attempt at extermination, of genocide" in reference to what he described as "collective punishment," a reference to the Israeli operations to free hostages kidnapped by Hamas. The communist deputy was lying: the war was started by the Arabs of the Middle East by attacking Israel as soon as it gained its independence, because they did not want any Jewish state in the Middle East. But also, what was Israel supposed to have done in the face of the largest terrorist attack in its history? Allow its civilian population to be killed and kidnapped without defending itself?

Given the date the message was posted, it wasn't hard for me to find the death toll published that day. CNN published them at 1:00 PM GMT that day, almost an hour after Enrique Santiago posted his message:

• "People killed in Israel after Hamas attacks: at least 1,008 as of Tuesday's update."
• "People killed in Gaza after Israel's response: at least 765, according to an update on Tuesday."

Obviously, the Gaza figures were provided by its Hamas-controlled "Ministry of Health" and which has been providing false death figures that are not even verified by the Western media and organizations that disseminate them, as the UN itself acknowledged in May 2024, despite which that organization has followed those Hamas figures. But even if those figures are accepted, the death toll in Israel was higher.

765 Palestinian deaths are 'genocide' but 1,008 Israeli deaths are not?

Despite this, the far left was already accusing Israel of "genocide" for killing 765 people (including Hamas terrorists) but not Hamas for killing 1,008 Israelis, many of them by shooting unarmed civilians or setting fire to homes with entire families inside. The far left didn't care about the intention or the numbers: they invented a hoax, and did so to demonize a democratic country that had just suffered the worst terrorist attack in its history. A terrorist attack that Hamas broadcast live so that the world could see how it murdered defenseless civilians simply for being Jewish, which does deserve to be classified as a crime of genocide.

A far-left party linked to a Palestinian terrorist group

Of course, the origin of this hoax is no mere coincidence. Enrique Santiago is the secretary general of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), which includes two ministers in Pedro Sánchez's government: Yolanda Díaz and Sira Rego. As I pointed out here on October 10, 2023, the same day Enrique Santiago published that message, the PCE claims to be twinned with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an organization classified as terrorist by the European Union and which supported Hamas's attack on Israel, encouraging "attacking the enemy army and its settlers", a term used to refer to the civilians massacred by Hamas. A call to attack civilians that could indeed be classified as incitement to genocide.

A party that refused to accuse ISIS terrorists of genocide

Let us also remember that in 2016, Izquierda Unida (one of the electoral brands of the PCE) refused to support the European resolution accusing ISIS of genocide for the massacre it perpetrated against Christians and Yazidis in the Nineveh Plains, in northern Iraq. Unlike Israel with the civilians of Gaza, ISIS intended to exterminate the non-Muslim population of the area and committed monstrous crimes to achieve this. However, for Izquierda Unida, this was not a "genocide" and it justified it by appealing to "Islamophobia." I leave it to the readers to decide how that should be qualified.

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Photo: DPA. Israeli soldiers collecting the bodies of civilians killed by Hamas terrorists in the Kfar Aza massacre on October 7, 2023.