| Allegations of genocide in the October 7 attacks | |
|---|---|
| Part of theGaza war | |
 | |
| Location | Gaza envelope,Southern District, Israel |
| Date | October 7–8, 2023 |
| Target | Israelis |
Attack type | Mass shooting,immolation |
| Deaths | 1,163 killed[1] |
| Defenders |  Israel |
| Accused | |
Allegations have been made that theOctober 7 attacks were conducted withgenocidal intent towardIsraelis, and that it constituted agenocide or agenocidal massacre (or a wave of such massacres). In the course of the assault, Palestinian militants attacked communities, a music festival, and military bases in the region ofsouthern Israel known as theGaza envelope. The attack resulted in the deaths of 1,163 Israelis and foreigners, two thirds of whom werecivilians. The genocidal acts that were said to have been committed include mass killings,dismemberment, infliction of serious bodily and mental harm,immolation,rape and sexual violence, anddecapitation.
Various legal experts andgenocide studies scholars cite a multitude of reasonings for their allegation of genocide, including claims that victims were targeted for theirIsraeli-Jewish identity,[2] that Hamas still adheres to the antisemitic language of itsfounding charter,[3][4][5] or that the allegedintent to destroy the Israeli people "in part" fits the legal definition of genocide.[2][6] Comparisons of the attack tothe Holocaust have been made.[7][8] Criticisms against the allegation include citing thetaking of hostages as proof that there was no genocidal intent, or that the attack was likely intended as aterrorist attack.[9][10]
A legal complaint that Hamas committed genocide was brought to theInternational Criminal Court (ICC) in November 2023.[11][12] An ICC arrest warrant for Hamas leaderMohammed Deif claimed that the group committedextermination.[13]
Both Israel and Palestine frequently accuse the other of planning to commit genocide.[14][15] American counterterrorism analystBruce Hoffman, writing forThe Atlantic, suggested the attacks were carried out withgenocidal intent, pointing to Hamas'founding charter from 1988, whichcalled for the destruction of Israel and featuredantisemitic language.[3]
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On October 7, 2023, coinciding with the Jewish holiday ofSimchat Torah,Hamas launched asurprise attack on Israel from theGaza Strip. Around 6,000 Palestinians breached the border in 119 places and infiltrated Israel, including 3,800 from the Hamas "elite Nukhba forces" and 2,200 Palestinian civilians and other militants.[16] 1,163 Israelis and foreigners were killed,[1] including 859 civilians, 282 soldiers, 57 policemen and 10Shin Bet members.[17][12]
The militants stand accused of various atrocities, includingsexual violence.[18][19] About 250 Israeli civilians and soldiers were alsotaken as hostages to the Gaza Strip, including 30 kidnapped children.[20] The Hamas assault prompted anIsraeli counter-offensive in Gaza. The day is considered the bloodiest inIsrael's history and the largest massacre ofJews sincethe Holocaust.[21][22]
Al-Qassam militants extensively recorded their actions throughbody cameras, probably for propaganda purposes.[23] They also stole victims' phones to livestream their deaths on social media. Additionally, they posted messages or media on victims' social media accounts and went as far as calling relatives to taunt them.[12]
Documents discovered on the bodies of Hamas operatives in Israel indicated that carrying out massacres was a key objective of the invasion. Israeli first responders reportedly found instructions on the bodies of the operatives, directing them to target civilian populations, including elementary schools and a youth center, with the explicit order to "kill as many people as possible". The documents also outlined the directive to take hostages for future negotiation purposes.[24][25]
Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official, stated in a late October 2023 interview that the October 7 attack against Israel was just the beginning. He vowed to launch "a second, a third, a fourth" attack until the country was "annihilated", asserting: "We are victims – everything we do is justified."[26][27][28]
On October 16, an open letter signed by around 240 legal experts, including jurists and academics, declared the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, as a "crime of genocide".[6] According to the letter, "as these widespread, horrendous acts appear to have been carried out with an intent to destroy, in whole or in part a national group – Israelis – they most probably constitute an international crime of genocide". The letter was endorsed by legal experts from prominent institutions, includingHarvard andColumbia Law Schools,King's College London, and theHebrew University of Jerusalem.Dan Eldad, former acting State Attorney of Israel from February to May 2020, played a key role in drafting the letter. TheRaoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, chaired by former Canadian Justice MinisterIrwin Cotler, also signed the letter.[29][30]
Genocide Watch has accused both Hamas and Israel of committing acts of genocide in theGaza war.[31] On October 17, 2023,Genocide Watch published a "Genocide Emergency Alert", stating that "Hamas targeted Israelis simply because they were Israelis. It was the deadliest massacre of Jews since theHolocaust. Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have expressed their genocidal intent to destroy the nation of Israel. The massacres by Hamas constituted acts of genocide. The attacks were also crimes against humanity and war crimes."[32] On October 24, 2023, Genocide Watch issued a new statement. In the statement, scholars of Holocaust studies and genocide studies and prevention, includingGregory H. Stanton andIsrael Charny asserted that Hamas' actions against Israeli civilians qualify as genocide andcrimes against humanity. The statement calls on theUnited Nations Human Rights Council, theUN General Assembly, the UN Office of Special Advisors for the Prevention of Genocide, and theUN Security Council to investigate, condemn, and refer the situation to theInternational Criminal Court (ICC). It also advocates for the recognition of these acts as genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The call extends to UN member states to use national courts for legal proceedings against those responsible for the genocide.[33]
In December 2023 theInternational Association of Genocide Scholars published a research brief arguing that the statements of Hamas leadership and the scope the October 7 attacks aligned with Hamas' 1988 charter, and shows that the attack was genocidal in nature.[34]
In an opinion article forThe Hill, Israeli human rights lawyer Arsen Ostrovsky andStanislav Pavlovschi, a former judge at theEuropean Court of Human Rights, asserted that Ghazi Hamad's statement that Hamas would repeat the October 7 massacre "again and again" was evidence of the group's genocidal intentions.[28]
American counterterrorism analystBruce Hoffman opined that Hamas has consistently maintained genocidal intentions, pointing to the genocidal and antisemitic language of their founding charter. Hoffman noted that although therevised Hamas charter does not contain the same explicitly violent rhetoric, it nevertheless asserted a desire for the destruction of Israel though military force.[3]
In an interview withAl Jazeera in December 2023, former ICC prosecutorLuis Moreno Ocampo said that the attack on October 7 was "...a genocide, because it's an attack seeking to destroy a group, in this case Israelis, in Palestine", something he bases on conversations he had while working in the region, while acknowledging that the2017 Hamas charter could, after investigation, show that they have adjusted their goals. He also said that Israel's siege of Gaza "is a crime against humanity and a form of genocide", and calls for investigations of both parties.[35]
SociologistMartin Shaw viewed Hamas' attack as "a wave of 'genocidal massacres,' localized mass killings whose victims were defined by their Israeli-Jewish identity", adding that the concept of the genocidal massacre, first proposed byLeo Kuper, was "a logical extension of the notion in the convention that genocide can include destroying a group 'in part.'"[2]Stephen D. Smith, a specialist in genocide, also characterized the massacres on October 7 as a genocide.[36]Adam Jones, author of a textbook on genocide, said Hamas' "wild and indiscriminate killing" qualified as a "genocidal massacre" that should be "acknowledged and condemned as such", but the very restrictive intentionality requirement in the legal definition of genocide was still a "high evidentiary bar to reach".[9] Israeli historian and holocaust specialistRaz Segal similarly said: "I definitely see intent to kill a significant number of members of the group, to instill unbelievable trauma and terror among members of the group. But I don't see intent to destroy in relation to the Hamas attack that would render it an act of genocide."[9]
Historian and professor of genocide studiesUğur Ümit Üngör noted that "many commentators rightly pointed out that Hamas committed a genocidal massacre", while also highlighting the killing ofArab Israelis andBedouins during Hamas' attack as evidence that it may not have been "group selective".[37] He suggested that the attack might fall under the category of "subaltern genocide",[a] drawing comparisons to themass killing ofpied-noirs in Algeria.[37] Political scientist Abdelwahab El-Affendi refuted the "subaltern genocide" thesis, pointing to a "near-consensus" in the field ofgenocide studies that "genocides are almost invariably perpetrated bystates", which does not apply to the Gazan enclave.[39] He stated that the attacks were consistent with terrorism and mass violence, but that the taking of hostages for prisoner exchanges indicated that the intent of the attacks was not genocidal.[10] According to international law expert Raphael van Steenberghe, a lack of evidence that Hamas intended to destroy a substantial part of the Jewish population is "arguably the only obstacle to qualifying the 7 October attacks as involving a crime of genocide", as Hamas "may well have anticipated that their operations could not extend beyond a limited geographical area".[40]
British historianNiall Ferguson characterized the events of October 7 as indicative of Hamas' intent to re-enact the Holocaust, and stated that Hamas should be "destroyed" to prevent this.[7][41]Gideon Greif, a Holocaust historian, drew parallels between the October 7 attacks and the Holocaust in an article forMaariv. He highlighted the infliction of extreme suffering, including immolation, mutation, alleged rape, and the kidnapping of babies; the shared antisemitic hatred between Nazis and Hamas as evident in recorded statements of Hamas operatives proudly announcing the murder of Jews; and the extreme lack of mercy displayed by the attackers.[8] Philip Spencer, a genocide scholar and author of numerous papers about modern anti-Semitism, stated that the violence on October 7 was "deliberately carried out to remind Jews of the extreme violence used by theEinsatzgruppen".[42]
Israeli historianHavi Dreifuss wrote that "Even though Hamas is unable to replicate the scale of the Holocaust, one cannot ignore the numerous voices that rightly point to experiential elements and ideologies that exhibit similarities", also adding that "These men, women, and children weren't murdered for their actions, but rather, as in the Holocaust, for their very existence."[43]
According to German political scientistMatthias Küntzel: "there are indeed clearly identifiable lines of continuity linking the anti-Jewish terror of the Nazis with that of Hamas." Küntzel described October 7 as the result of widespread antisemitism in the Arab world which dated back to the 1930s, claiming that Hamas viewed the Holocaust as "a brilliant achievement that should be repeated".[44]
By contrast, theNew York Review of Books published an open letter from 16 scholars of antisemitism and the Holocaust which argued against the comparison. The letter stated:
Israeli leaders and others are using the Holocaust framing to portray Israel's collective punishment of Gaza as a battle for civilization in the face of barbarism, thereby promoting racist narratives about Palestinians. This rhetoric encourages us to separate this current crisis from the context out of which it has arisen. Seventy-five years of displacement, fifty-six years of occupation, and sixteen years of the Gaza blockade have generated an ever-deteriorating spiral of violence that can only be arrested by a political solution. There is no military solution in Israel-Palestine, and deploying a Holocaust narrative in which an “evil” must be vanquished by force will only perpetuate an oppressive state of affairs that has already lasted far too long.[45]
British academic Omar McDoom wrote in theJournal of Genocide Research that comparisons between the Holocaust and October 7 are indicative of a pro-Israel bias in sections of theHolocaust studies community. McDoom argues that the comparison is "problematic" because "the Germans were not an occupied and oppressed people. And Gaza is not a powerful, expansionary state. To the contrary."[46]
Genocide scholarOmer Bartov called the comparison "false, misleading, and ideologically driven", arguing that unlike the Holocaust, the root cause was not antisemitism but decades of Israeli oppression.[47]
In an opinion article for WSJ,Qanta A. Ahmed shared her firsthand experience as a human-rights observer in Israel following the October 7 attacks, branding the assaults by Hamas as a "genocidal massacre", and argued for the attacks to be legally designated as such.[48]The Economist has argued that Hamas fighters who conducted the attack on October 7 were carrying out actions in line with their genocidal intentions outlined in the group's founding charter.[4]
In a December 2023 survey conducted byHarvard CAPS and the Harris Poll, 73% of American respondents viewed Hamas attacks against Jews as genocidal in nature, and 74% believed that Hamas harbored intentions of committing genocide against Jews in Israel.[49][50]
John Kirby, US National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications, accused Hamas of "genocidal intentions against the people of Israel. They would like to see it wiped off the map, they said so on purpose. And they've said that they're not going to stop. What happened on the 7th of October is going to happen again and again and again. And what happened on the 7th of October? Murder; slaughter of innocent people in their homes or at a music festival. That's genocidal intentions."[51] PresidentDonald Trump stated that Hamas's acts on 7 October 'was genocide at the highest level'.[52]
At the UN's European headquarters, Yeela Cytrin, a legal advisor at the Mission of Israel to the UN inGeneva, emphasized: "The attacks by Hamas on October 7 were motivated by a genocidal ideology."[53]
In November 2023, French diplomat and lawyerFrançois Zimeray, representing the families of nine Israeli victims of the October 7 Hamas attacks, filed a complaint at theInternational Criminal Court (ICC) accusing Hamas of genocide. Zimeray affirmed that he and his legal team had verified the legitimacy of the "genocide" accusation in accordance with the law.[11][12]
In February 2024, a separate complaint was filed with the ICC by a delegation of family members of Israeli hostages being held in Gaza, accusing Hamas of committing war crimes. The head of the legal team, Shelly Yeviv Aini, stated that "these crimes, including genocide, hostage taking, enforced disappearance, torture and sexual violence cannot and should not go unpunished".[54]
The Great Rebellion and the Haitian slave uprising are two examples of what we refer to as 'subaltern genocide': cases in which subaltern actors—those objectively oppressed and disempowered—adopt genocidal strategies to vanquish their oppressors.
Additionally, 84% of Americans said they believe that the October 7 massacre was a terrorist attack, with almost three-fourths (73%) saying it was genocidal in nature and 73% saying it was not justified by the grievances of Palestinians. ... Additionally, almost three-fourths (74%) of Americans said they believe Hamas wants to commit genocide against the Jews in Israel, although only 58% of those between the ages of 18-24 said the same.
