Less than three months after Hamas touched off the ongoing Gaza war on October 7, 2023, South Africa initiated proceedings against Israel at the International Court of Justice, alleging that the Jewish state was perpetrating a genocide against the Palestinian residents of the territory.

Since then, numerous organizations have accused Israel of committing the same crime, most recently a UN commission of inquiry, as well as two Israeli nonprofits, and a group calling itself the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

Earlier this month, four Israeli researchers issued a 300-page report published by Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA) that seeks to refute the genocide allegations.

The authors include military historians Prof. Danny Orbach of the Hebrew University and Dr. Yagil Henkin of Shalem College and the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy, independent scholar and quantitative analysis expert Dr. Jonathan Boxman, and lawyer Jonathan Braverman, an expert in international humanitarian law.

The study focused to a large degree on the most damaging charge against Israel: That it has deliberately starved the civilian population of Gaza by restricting aid.

These allegations have been the focus of international legal proceedings against Jerusalem and subsequently formed the foundation for the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant.

But the study also highlights what the authors say is a glaring omission in such proceedings: Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure in Gaza, without which Israel’s military actions cannot be understood.

Speaking to The Times of Israel, Orbach, the primary author of the study, noted that the charge of genocide, which requires deliberate intent to destroy a group of people, is untenable in light of Israeli actions to reduce civilian casualties — even if the IDF didn’t try to minimize collateral damage 100 percent of the time, and even if such actions weren’t always effective.

Orbach argued that to prove genocide, Israel’s accusers would have to demonstrate that it had sought to maximize civilian casualties.

While the authors acknowledge the likely violation of the laws of war and criticize the government for its decision to cut off aid to the Strip for 11 weeks between March and late May this year, they contend that these failings do not amount to genocide

The facilitation of “unprecedented levels” of humanitarian aid, warnings given before impending attacks, and implementation of protocols designed to reduce civilian casualties make that case impossible, he said, adding that the genocide allegations have frequently been based on false and erroneous data.

While the authors acknowledge the likely violation of the laws of war and criticize the government for its decision to cut off aid to the Strip for 11 weeks between March and late May this year, they contend that these failings do not amount to genocide.

“If you accept our factual analysis, then claims of genocide and crimes against humanity are preposterous,” said Orbach. “If you want to declare a genocide and crimes against humanity, you need to show that the perpetrator tried to maximize civilian casualties, or at the very least was completely indifferent to them.”

According to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, more than 65,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters.

Israel says it had killed over 22,000 combatants as of August and another 1,600 terrorists inside Israel during and immediately after the October 7 onslaught.

Thousands of Palestinian civilians have been treated for acute malnutrition in Gaza as a result of the dire humanitarian situation arising from the conflict, while the Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry claims some 367 people have died of malnutrition and starvation.

The report goes into detail about Israel’s facilitation of aid delivery to Gaza and what the authors call an erroneous claim about the aid supply that was key to allegations of intentional starvation.

Orbach and his colleagues argue that the claims of starvation were based on a statistical error, as the UN and other organizations compared trucks entering Gaza per working day before the war — not including non-work days when no aid entered — with monthly averages counting all 30 calendar days after the war broke out. In effect, the researchers say, the UN and others were comparing two completely different metrics.

UN agencies and other humanitarian organizations claimed that some 500 trucks of humanitarian aid — including fuel trucks — entered Gaza every calendar day before the war, 150-180 of which carried food items.

But extrapolating data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs — dividing the total number of food trucks that entered the territory in 2022 by 365 days — the Israeli researchers calculated the actual number to be 292 trucks per day that year. Of these, only 73 carried human food items, and half carried construction materials irrelevant to humanitarian needs.

Humanitarian organizations and rights groups — including the World Food Program and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) organization, which evaluates food security and famine around the world — cited the 150-180 trucks figure in their early reports in late 2023 and the beginning of 2024 as evidence that not enough food was entering Gaza.

The IPC and other organizations stopped using the 500 trucks figure after early 2024, although they did not issue a correction, Orbach noted.

The Israeli study also noted that the IPC appears to have applied a double standard in its classification of the Gaza conflict.

The group’s reports have repeatedly classified Gaza as being at levels four and five on its five-level food insecurity scale, with the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry claiming that 367 Gazans have died of malnutrition between February 2024 and the beginning of September 2025.

But the IPC’s report on the humanitarian crisis in Yemen for November 2023 to October 2024 found that a mortality rate of 1.03 children out of 10,000 per day in affected regions did not qualify them for emergency and famine classification levels of four or five on the food insecurity scale.

Even if one were to take Hamas’s claim at face value, this would still be far less than even 0.0001 per 10,000 per day, far below the two adults per 10,000 or four children per 10,000 threshold usually required to declare famine.

“Instead of mass death from undernutrition as predicted by various organizations, the Gaza Ministry of Health reports throughout the framework of this study (until June 1, 2025) do not indicate figures significantly higher than those of peacetime Egypt,” the Israeli study found.

Orbach noted that between January and March of this year, just ahead of the government’s 11-week halt in aid deliveries, enough aid entered Gaza to theoretically last as long as six months. He also argued that the rationale for blocking the aid — Hamas’s diversion of the supplies, which strengthened its governing capability — was legitimate. But the authors noted that it was wrong to have stopped the supply of aid without a viable alternative in place.

The intention was never to starve [Gazans], it was to stop the aid diversion. But the miscalculation [by Israel] was terrible

According to the study, the theoretical six-month estimate failed to account for three factors: the scale of Hamas’s diversions, the population’s higher consumption after months of shortages, and the spoilage of perishable goods.

“The intention was never to starve [Gazans], it was to stop the aid diversion. But the miscalculation [by Israel] was terrible,” said Orbach.

When international pressure spiked and the government received warnings of an impending humanitarian disaster, the provision of aid was significantly ramped up in late July and August.

This was conducted along with the implementation of 10-hour humanitarian pauses in military operations to allow for aid to be more safely and effectively distributed, which Orbach said was a disadvantage as far as military strategy.

“Israel never wanted to create starvation in Gaza; otherwise, it wouldn’t have fed Gaza throughout the war,” he contended. “When Israel discovered its calculation was terribly wrong, it restored aid, removed the safeguards put in place to stop Hamas’s diversion of aid, and sacrificed military advantage.”

In another key chapter of the Israeli study, the authors addressed Hamas’s go-to tactic of using civilian infrastructure for its military operations, in clear violation of the laws of armed conflict.

Israel has attacked civilian targets, resulting in large numbers of civilian casualties and massive destruction to civilian infrastructure, including hospitals and medical facilities. Those who claim that this is deliberate could argue that Israel has created conditions in Gaza designed to bring about the destruction of Palestinians as a group.

But the Israeli study points out that Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure created “one of the most complex military challenges ever faced by any Western army.”

Hamas built a military tunnel and bunker complex running for fully 500 kilometers (over 300 miles) under the length and breadth of Gaza, which the authors describe as “the most extensive subterranean tunnel network ever documented in military history,” surpassing the Vietcong’s network built during the Vietnam War.

The terror group also used hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, UNRWA facilities and other civilian infrastructure for combat purposes, as command centers or to hide tunnel entrances, and booby trapped “a vast number of buildings, leading to widespread devastation in the Gaza Strip — destruction that surpasses that typically seen in high-intensity urban warfare in other conflicts,” the study said.

“This operational reality created by Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups blurred the distinction between combatants and civilians and between military infrastructure and civilian property,” noted the report, stating that much of the destruction inflicted on Gaza by the IDF “resulted from genuine military constraints rather than malicious intent or disproportionate measures.”

The authors were careful to state that this reality did not absolve the IDF of the need to comply with international law or justify any actions that could potentially be illegal.

Analyzing Israeli behavior without taking Hamas into account is like showing a boxing match and editing one of the competitors out of the broadcast: you see a madman throwing punches everywhere

But Orbach said that organizations denouncing Israel for genocide virtually never mention Hamas’s tactics, and that understanding the IDF’s actions was impossible without this context.

“Analyzing Israeli behavior without taking Hamas into account is like showing a boxing match and editing one of the competitors out of the broadcast: you see a madman throwing punches everywhere,” said Orbach.

The study also pointed to frequent and large-scale IDF warnings of impending airstrikes to prevent civilian casualties as evidence that Israel had sought not to maximize civilian casualties but to minimize them.

The use of a “chain of approval” by military commanders within the IDF for offensive actions, examples of times when commanders aborted strikes due to concerns for civilian casualties, and instances when the IDF decided not to conduct an attack “despite clear opportunities to target enemy combatants due to their proximity to civilians,” all demonstrated a clear effort by the Israeli military to minimize, not maximize, civilian casualties, Orbach said.

“High percentages of operations have been called off due to the large presence of civilians,” in the area of a planned attack, he said.

“Israel has given millions of focused warnings to neighborhoods of forthcoming attacks and has paid a dear price for it and endangered its own soldiers, because when you give warnings, the enemy knows where you are going to attack and where you are not going to attack, and this allows them to remove assets and attack elsewhere.”

The report itself sounded a note of warning in its concluding paragraphs, cautioning that if allegations of genocide are made too lightly, the crime itself could be cheapened and devalued.

“If every urban conflict involving significant human suffering is labeled genocide — regardless of a lack of systematic intent to destroy a group — the concept will lose its emotional and legal weight, becoming a hollow political tool,” wrote the authors.

“Should a genuine threat to annihilate an entire people or group ever arise, the erosion of sensitivity to the term ‘genocide’ may lead to a delayed or diminished response — ultimately endangering the very population the term was meant to protect.”

The Israeli authors are not the only scholars to have strongly challenged the claims of genocide and crimes against humanity leveled at Israel.

Over 500 experts on genocide and international law, calling themselves Scholars for Truth about Genocide, rebutted the allegations made by the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), in some cases making similar arguments to those in the BESA study.

The Scholars for Truth, who include former genocide prosecutors and academic experts on the topic of genocide, contested the IAGS assertion that the large number of children killed an injured by Israeli military operations in the war indicated that Israel was committing genocide, pointing out that whereas children comprise some 50 percent of the Gazan population, the proportion of children killed and injured is 22 percent of all casualties.

A paper published by two Australian academics for the Henry Jackson Society think tank in May this year made similar findings about the lower occurrence of casualties of Palestinian women and children relative to their share of the Gazan population.

They, similar to Scholars for Truth, argued that the figures demonstrated that the IDF had taken systematic measures to avoid civilian casualties, thereby undermining claims of genocide and crimes against humanity.

And similar to the BESA study, the Scholars for Truth pointed out that the standard for determining genocide as laid out by the ICJ in 2007 requires that the alleged offender had “specific intent” to destroy a particular group of people. If the allegations are based on a pattern of conduct, as claims of genocide against Israel have been, then genocide must be the only reasonable explanation for that pattern.

Given Hamas’s “weaponization of civilian and humanitarian infrastructure” and other forms of conduct exposing Gazan civilians to harm, genocide cannot be the only explanation for the civilian deaths in Gaza that have resulted from IDF action, the Scholars for Truth argued.

Also echoing the BESA study was a group of international retired generals who wrote an amicus brief to the ICC in August last year, rebutting the charges of starvation.

The generals, who included the former head of the Italian armed forces and a retired US Air Force lieutenant-general who directed US air operations over Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks, underlined Israel’s construction of new goods crossings into Gaza and its construction of roads inside Gaza to facilitate the delivery of aid, as well as the many thousands of coordination operations the IDF has approved for the collection and distribution of aid.

This, they argued, demonstrated an “ongoing and concerted effort to alleviate the humanitarian situation in Gaza,” which they said was a “direct contradiction” of the ICC prosecutor’s claims that Israel was using starvation as a method of war against Gazan civilians, the same charge which underpins the genocide allegations.

The Scholars for Truth group also made a similar argument to that advanced by the BESA study regarding the “watering-down” of the legal standards of genocide.

“Holocaust and genocide scholars can have legitimate concerns about Israeli conduct in Gaza without working to disparage the very legal standards that exist to protect people from these crimes,” the Scholars for Truth group wrote.