Simply Hawkish Independent

I’m glad to hear you say that it isn’t about the number of people. That’s true. October 7 was a genocide. The war in Gaza was not. Here’s why. According to Article 2 of the Genocide Convention, genocide requires an “intent to destroy the group as such.” Hamas had such genocidal intent on October 7. They went with the sim of killing everyone they encountered and were limited only by their lack of means. Israel’s counter-campaign is not motivated by similar intent. Some of the facts that contradict genocidal intent in the Gaza are these: 1) Israel has given warnings to civilians in buildings they are about to strike so as to give them time to leave; 2) Israel has provided evacuation corridors for civilians; 3) Israel has set up safe zones; 4) Israel has set up more than a dozen field hospitals for civilians; 5) Israel has facilitated the vaccination of 600K Gazan children; 6) Israel has facilitated the shipment of millions of tonnes of humanitarian aid. In addition, there are the following facts about the war: 7) The IDF has munitions (not including nuclear arms) that could have killed everyone in Gaza in the space of a few days, from the air, without risking the lives of any Israelis; they did not use them. 8) There are 2.1 million Arab citizens of Israel who are of the same ethnicity as the people of Gaza. 95% of them are Muslim. Those people have not been harmed or persecuted in the least. 9) Hamas could have ended the war at any time by releasing the hostages and surrendering. There is no such thing as a "conditional genocide" (i.e. "we'll kill you all unless you do X"). Genocide, remember, is intent to destroy the group as such (i.e. for being who they are). 10) The pattern of casualties is inconsistent with an intent to destroy the group as such. If Israel intended to destroy the group as such and was therefore killing indiscriminately, one would expect the demographics of the casualties to roughly match their proportion of the population. That is not what we see at all. Taking Hamas's own casualty lists from November 2025, we see that women and children are underrepresented relative to their share of the population while combat-age males are overrepresented. See table and graph below. Together, all of these facts (and others I've left out) are inconsistent with "intent to destroy the group as such." There is no reason for Israel to have spent any resources to save people that they intended to destroy. Remember: war is a bloody affair, but not every war is genocide. This one isn’t. October 7 was.