Almost a year since the fighting stopped in Gaza, and in the face...
Amit Segal@AmitSegal
8 views
Oct 04, 2026
~5 min read
Advertisement
1
Almost a year since the fighting stopped in Gaza, and in the face of a growing pile of evidence that no such thing occurred, anti-Israel activists are desperately trying to keep the genocide accusation alive. This week, three more complications threatened its survival. The question is how much longer they can keep it up.
Between March 2 and May 19, 2025, Israel imposed a total blockade on Gaza, betting that they had sent enough food to prevent mass starvation. It did not account for bottlenecks and hoarding. Grain prices skyrocketed. Reports of malnutrition mounted. By July, aid agencies said more than 12,000 children had been identified as acutely malnourished, the highest monthly figure on record. That month, The New York Times ran “Gazans Are Dying of Starvation” on its front page. Its most effective argument was the photo on the front page: a child with a protruding spine, cradled in his mother’s arms. That the child had cerebral palsy, and that his brother, who was not skin and bones, had been quietly cropped out, the Times admitted just as quietly days later.
The tens of thousands said to be collapsing from hunger were supposedly buried in the ministry’s count of indirect deaths. This week, the Gaza Health Ministry released the full count. There were no mountains of skeletons. Obviously. Had there been, they would have made the Times’ front page instead of a cropped photograph.
In its Annual Mortality Report for 2025, the ministry lists 24,650 registered deaths. Of those, 17,286 are attributed to “war operations” and another 1,584 to accidents. That leaves 5,780 deaths from everything else: heart disease, cancer, old age. Roughly what Gaza buried in a normal prewar year.
The report lands two years after 99 physicians wrote to President Joe Biden alleging that 62,413 people had likely died of starvation and its complications between October 7, 2023, and September 30, 2024. A 2024 letter in The Lancet floated 186,000 total deaths. In 2025, the year of the famine, the ministry’s own data shows no meaningful excess of non-violent deaths.
The creative accounting doesn’t end there. Take the infant data. Malnutrition accounted for 4.1 percent of infant deaths in 2025. In 2021, it was 4.4 percent. And 2025 was the year famine was declared in Gaza City. The ministry’s report leads with the war dead and highlights an under-five mortality rate that more than doubled. Strip out the war deaths, though, and its own figure falls to 15.8 per 1,000. In 2022, it was 13.6. Over the same period, the ministry registered 50,227 births. By its own count, Gaza’s population grew by 1.2 percent in 2025, faster than the global average. If Israel is committing genocide, it is the most incompetent perpetrator in the history of mankind.
None of this means Gazans were feasting for two years. But the most repeated accusations were not “Gazans struggle with imbalanced diet” or “Food grows scarce under war conditions,” because neither carries the rhetorical power to justify any and all action against the accused while absolving the accusers of the burden of proof.
The genocide conspiracy had a second pillar. To hide its crime, Israel had to ban the international press and silence the truth-tellers on the ground. Yesterday, the IDF revealed that of the Gazans killed during the war and presented to the world as journalists or media workers, 170 were members of terrorist organizations. 118 belonged to Hamas’s military wing. 49 to Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The remaining three to smaller factions. 17 took part in the October 7 massacre. More than 40 of their deaths had drawn condemnation from the United Nations. I’m sure that now that their identities are known, the rest will receive similar condolences.
Some of the résumés are impressive. Amro Nahid Abdel Rahman Abu Odeh worked for Reuters and Turkey’s Anadolu Agency. He was also, per the IDF, a team commander in the photography unit of Hamas’s military wing. The military published two photos of him: one holding a camera, one holding a Kalashnikov. Hassan Majdi Ibrahim Abu Warda filed for the Barq Gaza news agency and moonlighted, according to the IDF, as a sniper in Islamic Jihad’s Northern Gaza Brigade. Others on the list had worked with CNN, the BBC, AP, AFP, ABC News, Le Monde and Australia’s ABC.
Perhaps the most important pillar of the genocide libel is its senselessness. Genocides are not waged out of reasonable security concerns, nor are they triggered by atrocities committed by the victims. They are acts of pure cruelty. That is why the genocide campaign has systematically sought to sever October 7 from the Gaza war, and from history itself.
Which makes yesterday awkward. For the first time this millennium, a full year passed without a single rocket fired into Israel from Gaza. Perhaps, then, it was a war of security after all, not of extermination.
Apply Occam’s razor. There was no mass starvation. There was no war on journalists. And when it was over, Israelis were safer than before. You can explain all of that with one simple word: war. Or you can call it genocide, and simply contort the dwindling pieces of evidence to fit that conclusion.
Using Occam’s razor assumes that logic has been the accusers’ goal. Had that been the case, we would never have gotten this far. The question is not when they will recant and beg Israel’s forgiveness, but when the evidence will become so overwhelming that the lie simply cannot be sustained. Speedily, and in our days.
Between March 2 and May 19, 2025, Israel imposed a total blockade on Gaza, betting that they had sent enough food to prevent mass starvation. It did not account for bottlenecks and hoarding. Grain prices skyrocketed. Reports of malnutrition mounted. By July, aid agencies said more than 12,000 children had been identified as acutely malnourished, the highest monthly figure on record. That month, The New York Times ran “Gazans Are Dying of Starvation” on its front page. Its most effective argument was the photo on the front page: a child with a protruding spine, cradled in his mother’s arms. That the child had cerebral palsy, and that his brother, who was not skin and bones, had been quietly cropped out, the Times admitted just as quietly days later.
The tens of thousands said to be collapsing from hunger were supposedly buried in the ministry’s count of indirect deaths. This week, the Gaza Health Ministry released the full count. There were no mountains of skeletons. Obviously. Had there been, they would have made the Times’ front page instead of a cropped photograph.
In its Annual Mortality Report for 2025, the ministry lists 24,650 registered deaths. Of those, 17,286 are attributed to “war operations” and another 1,584 to accidents. That leaves 5,780 deaths from everything else: heart disease, cancer, old age. Roughly what Gaza buried in a normal prewar year.
The report lands two years after 99 physicians wrote to President Joe Biden alleging that 62,413 people had likely died of starvation and its complications between October 7, 2023, and September 30, 2024. A 2024 letter in The Lancet floated 186,000 total deaths. In 2025, the year of the famine, the ministry’s own data shows no meaningful excess of non-violent deaths.
The creative accounting doesn’t end there. Take the infant data. Malnutrition accounted for 4.1 percent of infant deaths in 2025. In 2021, it was 4.4 percent. And 2025 was the year famine was declared in Gaza City. The ministry’s report leads with the war dead and highlights an under-five mortality rate that more than doubled. Strip out the war deaths, though, and its own figure falls to 15.8 per 1,000. In 2022, it was 13.6. Over the same period, the ministry registered 50,227 births. By its own count, Gaza’s population grew by 1.2 percent in 2025, faster than the global average. If Israel is committing genocide, it is the most incompetent perpetrator in the history of mankind.
None of this means Gazans were feasting for two years. But the most repeated accusations were not “Gazans struggle with imbalanced diet” or “Food grows scarce under war conditions,” because neither carries the rhetorical power to justify any and all action against the accused while absolving the accusers of the burden of proof.
The genocide conspiracy had a second pillar. To hide its crime, Israel had to ban the international press and silence the truth-tellers on the ground. Yesterday, the IDF revealed that of the Gazans killed during the war and presented to the world as journalists or media workers, 170 were members of terrorist organizations. 118 belonged to Hamas’s military wing. 49 to Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The remaining three to smaller factions. 17 took part in the October 7 massacre. More than 40 of their deaths had drawn condemnation from the United Nations. I’m sure that now that their identities are known, the rest will receive similar condolences.
Some of the résumés are impressive. Amro Nahid Abdel Rahman Abu Odeh worked for Reuters and Turkey’s Anadolu Agency. He was also, per the IDF, a team commander in the photography unit of Hamas’s military wing. The military published two photos of him: one holding a camera, one holding a Kalashnikov. Hassan Majdi Ibrahim Abu Warda filed for the Barq Gaza news agency and moonlighted, according to the IDF, as a sniper in Islamic Jihad’s Northern Gaza Brigade. Others on the list had worked with CNN, the BBC, AP, AFP, ABC News, Le Monde and Australia’s ABC.
Perhaps the most important pillar of the genocide libel is its senselessness. Genocides are not waged out of reasonable security concerns, nor are they triggered by atrocities committed by the victims. They are acts of pure cruelty. That is why the genocide campaign has systematically sought to sever October 7 from the Gaza war, and from history itself.
Which makes yesterday awkward. For the first time this millennium, a full year passed without a single rocket fired into Israel from Gaza. Perhaps, then, it was a war of security after all, not of extermination.
Apply Occam’s razor. There was no mass starvation. There was no war on journalists. And when it was over, Israelis were safer than before. You can explain all of that with one simple word: war. Or you can call it genocide, and simply contort the dwindling pieces of evidence to fit that conclusion.
Using Occam’s razor assumes that logic has been the accusers’ goal. Had that been the case, we would never have gotten this far. The question is not when they will recant and beg Israel’s forgiveness, but when the evidence will become so overwhelming that the lie simply cannot be sustained. Speedily, and in our days.
