(Based on published article by Andrew Fox)
“The “Gaza genocide” is the greatest hoax of all time, enabled
by social media, antisemitism, and gullibility.
Remember: genocide means a deliberate attempt to exterminate a
group, simply for being members of that group. That’s what “genocide in Gaza”
alleges: that Israel is unsuccessfully attempting to exterminate every last
Palestinian.
But what about the overall population of Gaza? If Israel had wanted
to wipe out every Palestinian, you’d expect that overall total to fall, right?
At some point, the word genocide has to survive contact with
arithmetic. Gaza’s own records now sit in open contradiction with the claim
that Israel attempted to destroy its population: approximately 121,000 live
births since 7 October 2023, against a reported direct war death toll,
including natural deaths, of just over 73,000.
The extermination narrative looks increasingly absurd. More babies
have been born in Gaza during the war than Gazans have been recorded as killed,
including both civilians and combatants.
The usual escape route is to say that genocide need not succeed.
That is legally correct and intellectually evasive when deployed to make every
contrary fact disappear. Genocidal intent still has to be proved, and the ICJ
has held that, where it is inferred from conduct, the destruction of the group
must be the only reasonable inference available.
In Croatia v Serbia, it examined whether civilians had been spared,
evacuated or allowed to survive when their supposed destroyers had the
opportunity to kill them. Conduct preserving members of the protected
population counted against genocide. Now apply that reasoning to Gaza.
a a) Start
with polio. In September 2024, while Israeli troops were still fighting across
the Strip, Israel agreed daily, area-specific pauses so Palestinian and
international medical teams could vaccinate Gaza’s children. The first round
reached 559,161 children under ten, around 95 per cent of the eligible
population.
b)b) Israel
then agreed to do it again. The second round reached 556,774 children, with
448,425 children between two and ten also receiving vitamin A. The campaign
required the delivery of 1.6 million vaccine doses, refrigerators, freezers,
ice boxes and hundreds of vaccine carriers. WHO and UNICEF planned for the
vaccines and cold-chain equipment to transit through Ben Gurion Airport before
entering Gaza.
c) c) A
third campaign followed in February 2025. It vaccinated 602,795 children under
ten, reaching 102 per cent of the estimated target because medical teams found
children missed during earlier rounds.
d) d) The
combined figure is 1,718,730 administered polio doses. (That represents
repeated protection of roughly 600,000 individual children, rather than 1.7
million different children.) Almost the entire under-10 population was reached
again and again.
These vaccines were administered by Palestinian health workers,
WHO, UNICEF, UNRWA and their partners. Without Israeli cooperation, the
campaigns could not have happened.
UNICEF’s end-of-year report says the outbreak had been interrupted
by July 2025. It also records 49,000 children under two receiving catch-up
vaccinations, with coverage exceeding 80 per cent. BCG vaccinations rose from
37,471 in 2024 to 47,556 in 2025.
It was an enormous public health enterprise, run over several
months, involving thousands of workers and protecting nearly every child in
Gaza from paralysis.
That is the physical reality of what Israel enabled: the children
it was supposedly trying to destroy were repeatedly protected against a disease
that could disable or kill them.
A coherent programme of genocide cannot be inferred by treating
every Israeli action that preserved Palestinian life as irrelevant.
BIRTH FIGURES The birth figures deepen the
problem for the accusation. A reconstruction using Gaza Ministry of Health and
civil registration records suggests approximately 12,000 babies were born
during the final quarter of 2023, around 38,000 during 2024, 49,267 live births
during 2025, and roughly 21,000 so far in 2026. The latest portion is
necessarily estimated because complete July and August registrations have not
yet been published.
Many babies born during the first months had been conceived before
7 October. That explanation expired nine months into the war. Tens of thousands
of children were subsequently conceived and delivered while Israel supposedly
pursued the biological destruction of Gaza.
Births fell below their pre-war level, hardly surprising amid
displacement and combat. Miscarriages, premature births and maternal
complications also rose. Nothing about those conditions was humane or
desirable.
However, the comparison remains devastating. Approximately 121,000
live births against just over 73,000 reported direct war deaths leaves a
difference approaching 48,000. The number killed includes combatants as well as
civilians, of course.
Gaza’s overall resident population fell because the calculation
includes outward migration, the missing and other demographic changes. The
Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics estimates that around 100,000 people
left Gaza during the war. A decline driven substantially by people leaving a
war zone cannot simply be relabelled as physical destruction.
No Israeli advocate needs to pretend that civilian life in Gaza was
tolerable. It was an urban war fought against an enemy dug into hundreds of
miles of tunnels beneath neighbourhoods, hospitals, schools and camps. Hamas
designed that battlefield to make civilian deaths unavoidable and politically
useful.
Israel issued evacuation warnings, created corridors and
humanitarian zones, admitted food and medicine, coordinated medical
evacuations, paused military operations and enabled almost 600,000 Palestinian
children to receive repeated protection against polio. Around 121,000 babies
were born during the war, far exceeding the reported direct death toll.
The genocide allegation survives only by declaring every piece of
exculpatory evidence meaningless. Births supposedly tell us nothing.
Vaccinations tell us nothing. Food deliveries tell us nothing. Humanitarian
pauses tell us nothing. Failed famine predictions tell us nothing. The absence
of measured famine mortality tells us nothing.
Such reasoning insulates the genocide accusation from reality for
the Palestinians. Every death becomes proof of genocide, while every
Palestinian life preserved through Israeli cooperation is dismissed as public
relations.
The simpler explanation: Israel fought a devastating war against
Hamas, accepting extraordinary military and political costs while repeatedly
undertaking measures to preserve Palestinian civilian life. Those measures were
imperfect and sometimes failed, as measures do in war.
Gaza’s own birth records, vaccination figures and famine evidence
have negated the allegations. A country attempting to destroy a people does not
enable more than 120,000 births, facilitate 1.7 million childhood vaccine doses
and support humanitarian operations feeding virtually the entire population.
That is war, with all its brutality and tragedy. It is not
genocide.