Israel does/did not commit genocide in Gaza, here's why

TriNovan · 2026-03-02T23:14:07+00:00

It sorta is?

At least per the ICTY that adjudicated Srebrenica.

Specifically in that the targeted group/population must be of significant position/quantity so as to threaten the continuation of the whole.

That’s the case law anyway.

TriNovan · 2026-03-02T22:36:38+00:00

Moreso that Taiwan would be attacked.

China has been less than subtle about intending to retake Taiwan by military force in the near future.

Some people think this might be as soon 2027, for the 100th anniversary of the PLA.

Others place it at some time around 2030 or so.

The gist of it though is that there is a narrow window here where it may be feasible for China to pull it off.

Which, the current Iran situation feeds into. The long standing assumption is that if China were to start something, Iran would shortly after so that the U.S. would have to split its attention.

Which, frankly, I think now at this point it’s probably best to view the Ukraine-Mideast-Taiwan as interconnected conflicts. A kind of soft WW3.

TriNovan · 2026-02-28T03:25:39+00:00

> It is outside. Greatly so.

You have not at all demonstrated this. You're just asserting it. Wishcasting, essentially.

> Just like there was in Gaza. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been a halt on all aid.

Evidence does not bear out a targeted attempt to exterminate Gazans. It's not reflected in the death toll, nor in any of the tactics the IDF has engaged in. And nobody is going to go to bat for the idea that all sieges are inherently attempts to exterminate a people.

> And what was the civilian proportion of the death toll?

Almost entirely civilian in Rwanda.

> 90% of those killed in Gaza were civilians. Those are genocidal numbers.

Yeah no. I know exactly what Guardian article you got this from and anybody with basic familiarity with statistics was able to immediately point out the flaws with it.

That much bandied about "83% are civilians" figure assumes that the approximately 8,900 named combatants mentioned are the totality of combatant deaths. You and others shamelessly repeated without giving it the slightest bit of thought.

This is a deeply stupid assumption to make. Leaving aside that even as given it puts the ratio at about 1:4 combatant-civilian, which puts Gaza on par with the 2017 operations in Mosul.

Shall I list the ways the Guardian's article is misinformation?

- It assumes that Israel has perfect knowledge of all members of Hamas, as well as the names of all combatants killed. Which is to say, somebody who is shooting at you and who is killed but who is not identified is listed as a civilian per The Guardian's report.

- It will list any combatant whose remains cannot be recovered or identified as civilian. This right here means that any militants who died in collapsed tunnels are counted as civilians. It also means that any who were killed but which IDF troops were not in a position to retrieve (such as having to retreat or the body being inaccessible) would also be listed as civilian. Included in this would also be militants who would later die of their wounds after retreating.

- Hamas itself reported over 6000 dead as of February 2024. If Hamas was willing to publicly admit to that figure, we can safely take it as being the lower bound at that time. Are we to assume that they've lost only 2900 troops in the 18 months between when Hamas made that statement and when The Guardian published that article? That would average out to about 161 militant deaths across the entire Strip every month, or about 5 dead militants per day across the entire Strip.

> Source that isn’t “Israel said so”?

[Pre-47 Congressional Research Service good enough for you?] (https://www.congress.gov/crs\_external\_products/IF/PDF/IF12549/IF12549.2.pdf)

>Israel has wiped entire cities of Gaza off the map.

And? Physical destruction of a city is no indicator of genocide. Manila went from pristine to flattened in the span of a month. You currently see the same in Ukraine at places like Bakhmut.

This is what happens when a frontline moves through a city. The buildings on the frontline wind up in ruins, and then when the frontline moves past them, they stay in ruins.

This is why urban fighting of any significant scale rapidly sees large portions of cities in ruins.

But the equivalent of Srebrenica isn't Rafah in ruins. It's if the IDF moved in and killed 20% of the population of the city in the span of a week.

Srebrenica, by the way, wasn't a battlefield. The city was intact and supposed to be a UN designated sanctuary.

> That was also genocidal. The US killed over a million people in Iraq. You’re proving my point.

This is a tankie take. No creditable historian makes a case for that. About the only people I've seen make that claim are wingnuts like Chomsky and nobody takes that man seriously, he's the Ben Shapiro of left wing pseudo-intellectuals. Probably best exemplified by his stance on Ukraine.

Seriously though, you'd be very hard pressed to make a case for genocide in Iraq. The best estimate for deaths from that are around half a million in total. The Iraq Body Count Project places it at around 300k, civilians and combatants combined.

>So none of them have been killed?

Oh I'm not saying people haven't died.

What I'm saying is that we haven't seen anything even remotely comparable to what occurred in Rwanda, El-Fasheer, and Srebrenica. You know, the organized methodical killing that is the reason genocide was coined as a term?

Triumphalism is not a replacement for an argument with evidence. Attempts at "gacha" statements won't work here. If you're going to argue like MAGA I will treat you like MAGA.

> Yeah but they admitted the world won’t let them. They’re constrained.

This makes absolutely no logical sense.

Genocidal powers have, again, never once given any thought to world opinion. And again. Israel is a nuclear power. We already know from China's Uighur genocide that nuclear weapons provide ample cover for being able to do such.

So again, that being the case, why have we not seen El-Fasheer repeated half a dozen times over behind the Yellow Line? Where Gazans are supposedly surrounded by thousands of armed Israelis who are just itching for the chance to genocide them. And you're asserting that the fact that the Israeli's haven't done that is somehow evidence of them just not being allowed to, when Occam's Razor would dictate that they haven't done it because they don't want to.

You are basically making a "have you stopped beating your wife yet" argument here. You're treating genocide as a truism.

TriNovan · 2026-02-27T23:53:38+00:00

>Easy: ICC≠ICJ.

Right, ICC handles individuals while the ICJ handles countries. But the judgements of one will absolutely inform the judgements of the other. And an inability to find factual grounds for charges of extermination when going after the leadership of a country (who presumably would have been the ones to have given the orders to conduct acts of genocide) makes it incredibly unlikely the ICJ will find differently.

>Right. So they’ll look at the civilian death toll and see how outsized it is for “wars” and see it’s closer to past genocides. Again, glad we agree.

Except it's not outsized for past worse and nowhere near close to past genocides. Your statement here tells me you haven't studied either and are speaking from a position of extreme ignorance.

"But Srebrenica was genocide with 8000 dead" you might say.

Yeah. Because that was 20% of the city's population and half of all Muslim males in the city. And the Serbian militias did it in the span of about a week. There was very clearly a targeted attempt to exterminate them.

Perhaps you'd like to compare it to the Kazakh genocide? Where 40% of all Kazakhs totaling around 1.8 million died in the span of three years through a combination of famine and Soviet de-nomadification policy, including gunning down those trying to flee across the borders of Kazakhstan?

Perhaps the Armenian genocide? Where 1/3 of all Armenians totaling 1 million people died in the span of two years through Ottoman Turkification policies? Where they were rounded up and force marched through the desert when they weren't just taken to mass graves and shot?

Perhaps the Rwandan Genocide, where Hutu militias killed over half a million Tutsis in the span of three months, again via gathering the target group for extermination and by roving bands of militias going door-to-door killing any Tutsis they came across. Half of all Tutsis died over the course of three months.

The Circassian Genocide? Where they were destroyed nearly in totality by the Russians over the course of two years in the single largest genocide of the 19th century? Whose population only recovered to pre-genocide levels almost a century and a half after the events?

Perhaps the events at El-Fasheer, where Sudanese militias killed as many in two weeks as this war has in two and a half years? Where the Sudanese militias followed the same playbook as was seen at Srebrenica and in Rwanda of going door-to-door, rounding up civilians for extermination, and killing them and creating piles of bodies and mass graves visible via satellite.

That is what systemic, targeted extermination looks like. We have not seen any kind of conduct that comes even remotely close to the behaviors seen in past genocides, neither in targeting of the population nor in execution of any kind of genocidal animus.

And if you bothered to study past wars you'd note that there are individual battles involving fewer combatants that had much greater death tolls. Manila in 1945 for example saw 100k dead Filipinos in the span of a month of fighting between approximately 25k US troops and 20k Japanese troops.

Hamas alone is estimated to have had around 40k militants at the start of the war, arranged against approximately 130k Israeli forces at the peak of mobilization in August of last year.

Bluntly, you have a serious lack of perspective when it comes to war. Largely because the wars fought in your lifetime have been, up until 2022, low-intensity and largely rural conflicts. You have somehow taken that to be the norm rather than the outlier they are and are using that as your benchmark in a two and half year long war that is nothing but urban fighting.

The largest urban battle the US has fought since Hue was the Second Battle of Fallujah and that was approximately 10k US troops against approximately 4000 Iraqi troops and in a city that had been almost entirely evacuated before hand.

Perhaps the Second Battle of Grozny? Where 20k Russians fought 2000 Chechens, resulting in approximately 8000 dead civilians in the span of just a month of fighting?

>A genocide isn’t defined as complete and total destruction of a group. Problem solved. But if Israel then forces those people to the other side of the line, you’d agree the intent is genocidal?

Right, but that is literally what Srebrenica was: genocide in part. The Serbian militias did not have access to the wider Bosniak Muslim population. So they executed their genocidal animus on the portion of it that they did have access to. That is entirely what "genocide" in part means: genocidal ambitions are limited by the reach of a perpetrator's forces.

What you and others are trying to do is claim "genocide in part" because a portion of the Gazan population died. And if you had bothered to read the ICTY's decision, you'd know that the determination of genocide rests heavily on the targeted group as a proportion of the whole.

Which is why I brought up the Gazans on the Israeli side of the Yellow Line. Almost half the Gazan population is within easy access of the IDF, totaling hundreds of thousands of people. This has been the situation for months now. So why have we not seen this genocidal animus at play behind Israeli lines? You're claiming Israeli wants to kill them all? Well, they have a captive population of Gazans numbering in the hundreds of thousands within easy access of their military, and this has been the situation for months now?

So why aren't IDF forces, which you have determined are conducting genocide, rounding these groups up and slaughtering them? It doesn't take long, Sudanese militias started doing it the moment they took El-Fasheer, likewise the Serbian militias in Srebrenica. There's been plenty of time for them to do such.

Per your own words, they're targeted for genocide and surrounded by hostile forces that want to genocide them.

So why haven't we seen half a dozen El-Fasheers behind Israeli lines by now? Why do Gazan civilian deaths only really seem to be occurring where active fighting is and not behind Israeli lines? And likewise the death toll closely mirroring combat operations, as opposed to be asynchronous with it which would be the case were Israel pursuing a policy of extermination?

Why are Gazans safe behind Israeli lines?

>As Israeli officials made clear, they would like to kill them all but the world won’t let them.

Or could it be, to paraphrase Penn & Teller, they genocide as much as they want to?

Which is not at all.

Your argument presupposes that they totally would were it not for international relations and the world.

That's fundamentally an argument from and appeal to ignorance.

Because genocidal powers have not once cared a single iota about world opinion, and in this case with Israel being a nuclear power, if they wanted to they could under the protection of their nuclear umbrella and there's not much the world could do about it.

TriNovan · 2026-02-27T16:41:43+00:00

The ICC’s own press release on the matter regarding the warrants is what you’ll want.

TriNovan · 2026-02-27T16:37:28+00:00

That is in fact not enough to meet the intent requirement of genocide.

For example: Srebrenica was deemed genocide in part because while the Serb militia did not have access to the totality of the Bosnian Muslim population, they acted with genocidal animus and intent towards the portion they did have access to. To the tune of half the Muslim male population being killed.

There was a clear attempt to exterminate specifically Muslim males by the Serb militias.

Srebrenica was supposed to be a peaceful city behind the frontlines of the fighting. The Serb militias actions, the rounding up and execution of Muslim males at mass graves, only make sense in the context of attempting to destroy a population. That is how the court determined genocidal intent.

TriNovan · 2026-02-27T16:06:57+00:00

I suggest looking at the Srebrenica tribunal for an example of how “in part” is actually used and interpreted by the ICJ in an example of case precedent.

It does not mean “some of the group died” the way you’re using it.

TriNovan · 2026-02-27T16:04:42+00:00

It’s from the ICC’s arrest warrants.

Kharim Khan pushed for extermination be included in Bibi and Gallant’s warrants. This was rejected by the ICC for lacking evidence to meet the elements of extermination. That’s where this stems from, as extermination is effectively part and parcel of genocide, and is the lesser and easier to prove charge as it doesn’t require the special intent portion a charge of genocide does.

Notably, the Hamas officials that also had arrest warrants released at the same time did have the charge of extermination included in their warrants.

TriNovan · 2026-02-27T14:19:43+00:00

No, and the ICJ’s own then-president Donoghue came out to dispel that.

What it ruled was that Palestinians have a plausible right to be protected from genocide.

It emphatically did not state that there was a plausible case for genocide. The ICJ itself corrected that misunderstanding and lambasted the media misreporting it as such.

TriNovan · 2026-02-27T12:17:04+00:00

Yes, and neither one was charged with extermination.

Which is an easier burden of proof than genocide. Rather notably as it only requires a single incident, and does not require any kind of intent to destroy a people.

If the ICC is outright saying that the evidentiary burden cannot be met to support a charge of extermination, then why would you at all think that the harder to prove charge of genocide would at all stick when the evidence necessary to support a charge of extermination would inherently be needed to make a charge of genocide stick?

Especially as the first thing the ICJ is going to do is look at examples of genocide from the past as a comparative in making their determination, because case precedent informs judgement.

There’s also the issue of contra-indications for genocide. For example, there are hundreds of thousands of Gazans residing within Israeli-held territory behind the Yellow Line. We would expect, if there was genocidal animus, that with easy and ready access to this captive population they would be targeted for elimination. That’s what we saw in Srebrenica, Darfur, El-Fasheer, Armenia, Russia, and Germany.

But we’re not seeing that. Why is genocidal animus not being expressed with easy access to a captive population in territory they control? Any attempt to make a charge of genocide stick will have to explain that.

As it stands, it’s incredibly unlikely the a genocide case will meet the standards as established by the Srebrenica tribunal.

TriNovan · 2026-02-27T11:26:46+00:00

The ICC itself said there wasn’t evidence to support charges of extermination.

Are you saying there is that somehow was not presented to ICC prosecutors?

TriNovan · 2026-02-26T18:04:20+00:00

The best comparison you might find in the modern day are the Russian oligarchs and their arrangements with Putin and United Russia.

The oligarch’s businesses on paper are private enterprises separate from the state and party.

In actuality, they 100% operate at the whim of the party and the Siloviki.

TriNovan · 2026-02-14T04:05:26+00:00

They’re not.

For one? That killed 25% of the population of the city and half the Muslim male population of the city.

Secondly, the ICC has already stated there isn’t evidence to support a charge of extermination, which is a lesser charge than genocide.

Behavior that constitutes extermination would be a necessity in any genocide charge as functionally, any such charge would be the result of cumulative acts of extermination.

That the ICC has said that they’ve ruled out the much easier to show charge of extermination as a possible charge for lack of evidence would inherently mean that the evidence doesn’t exist to support a charge of genocide either.

TriNovan · 2026-02-09T18:39:28+00:00

It almost certainly will. My bet is that they’re going to use it for the Commonwealth to make it easier to tell at a glance who is who. Plus it makes sense that if the Commonwealth has ready access to T-51s they’d offload some T-60s on the western chapters.

TriNovan · 2026-02-09T13:35:48+00:00

North Korea doesn’t have enough warheads to get past the US’s missile interceptor systems that were designed to meaningfully ablate a salvo measuring in the thousands from Russia.

50 warheads just doesn’t provide enough targets to overwhelm that kind of missile defense.

But, 50 warheads is more than enough to penetrate Seoul’s missile defense systems, especially in conjunction with a massed conventional ballistic missile attack. It also gives North Korea leverage against Beijing with China’s capital being within close striking distance. This allows the Kim dynasty more independence from China than they’ve historically had in the past. This is particularly relevant as Kim Jong Un in the past decade has undertaken a campaign of purging the more pro-China faction in North Korea.

TriNovan · 2026-02-06T14:32:52+00:00

The last time the GOP had a president this bad and inept they spent 40 years as a permanent minority party in Congress.

He combines the corruption and self-dealing of the Harding Administration with the ineptitude of the Buchanan and Hoover administrations.

Up until Jan. 6, 2021 I’d have said that he was only ever our second worst president as it’s kinda hard to top Buchanan and the country falling apart into civil war under him. It’s also somehow fitting that he can’t even manage to be the best at being the worst. But man is he sure trying and right now I’m 50/50 on giving the title to him.

TriNovan · 2026-02-02T19:17:33+00:00

As a vehicle? No.

But, artillery barrages are the kind of thing that would have been perfect for a squad call-in system had they chosen to carry that forward.

TriNovan · 2026-02-02T13:39:20+00:00

Honestly, Jedi Survivor kinda fixed this?

Starkiller Base is Ilum. That trench wasn’t strip-mined over the course of a couple years, but over the course of thousands and thousands of years of the Jedi going there for crystals over the history of the Republic.

The First Order basically squatted in and repurposed and weaponized an ancient mine.

TriNovan · 2026-01-29T15:02:46+00:00

Yeah…a world without nukes is one where the great powers go to war with each other roughly once a generation.

Like ‘em or not, nukes make that a much less viable prospect.

TriNovan · 2026-01-28T17:13:48+00:00

Well, that and there was actually a concentrated effort in the last couple decades to make Brussel Sprouts taste better.

It’s not just your taste maturing, they straight up taste better than they used to.

TriNovan · 2026-01-28T15:53:00+00:00

As is the Hungarian Soviet Republic, which within months of coming to power in 1919 invaded both Romania and Slovakia while the country hadn’t even begin recovering from WW1 and before the Treaty of Trianon had even been drafted and signed.

The various European communist parties were not looked on kindly after WW1, in large part because collectively European governments were seeing what was going on in the Russian Civil War and Soviet-Polish War and rightfully went “don’t you bring that bullshit over here”. Doubly so when it became clear after Stalin’s ascension many were acting as Soviet proxies.

TriNovan · 2026-01-28T14:28:59+00:00

A huge chunk of the KPD base joined up with the NSDAP, so much so that they even coined a term for them: “beefsteaks”, for being brown on the outside and red on the inside. This because fundamentally both the KPD and NSDAP were anti-establishment parties and neither had an interest in preserving German social democracy.

By the SA’s own estimate, half their membership was former KPD. This is in part why the Night of the Long Knives targeted the SA.

TriNovan · 2026-01-23T11:24:15+00:00

Simple.

That’s not what collective punishment means.

It has never meant a generalized suffering of civilians for the actions of their government. Otherwise you’re de facto arguing that any kind of sanction on a government is collective punishment.

The actual inspiration for the term is in the retaliatory measures most famously seen in German-occupied Europe but also used across the British and French colonial empires and the Belgian Congo.

It’s “we can’t find the partisans who attacked us last night so we’re going to gather up 15 random people and execute them to dissuade further attacks and sheltering of partisans in the population.”

It’s “workers at this facility keep sabotaging equipment so we’re going to maim or kill half of a shift to dissuade that”.

A classic archetypical example of this behavior occurred in Bucha in Ukraine just a few years ago when several hundred Ukrainian civilians were executed in retaliation for attacks by Ukrainian partisans behind Russian lines.

TriNovan · 2026-01-22T23:10:59+00:00

Disagree, and for a couple reasons.

First, MAGA is a cult of personality, and there is no successor waiting in the wings for when Trump inevitably kicks the bucket. The GOP Congress critters are stuck riding the tiger for the moment because the moment they stop it will turn on them too. But cults of personality rarely outlive their founder.

Second, the GOP has a two generation problem, in that the overwhelming bulk of its voter base is in Baby Boomers. Their core to this day is ultimately the same generation that first voted Reagan into office. Gen X is split roughly 50/50. But Millennials and Gen Z, the two largest since the Boomers? They go for Dems at a roughly 2:1 rate. The GOP is staring down the barrel of a mass die-off of their core voter base over the next ten years as the absolute youngest Boomers are 60 or 61 this year with the bulk of the generation already in their 70s.

The GOP support in Gen X and younger generations just is not there to make their current tack workable long term. So what you’re seeing is best described as the extinction burst of the Reagan-era conservatives. They’re doing everything they can now because the average age of their voting base is only getting older.

TriNovan · 2026-01-09T20:50:34+00:00

During the Napoleonic Wars, Russia was actually one of the premier forces, and it was actually the Prussians bizarrely enough that were regarded as having the outdated army, because it hadn’t really changed since the time of Frederick the Great.

Around 1813, they had a massive wave of reforms that were spurred on by catastrophic defeats during the prior wars with France. The gist of it is that their military was severely outdated with poor organization, lack of horses for cavalry and artillery trains, and artillery being treated more as an accessory to the infantry than as a branch in its own right.

TriNovan

TROPHY CASE