The Genocide Case Against Hamas

A rigorous test of whether the October 7 attack meets the legal definition of genocide.

By Gerald Posner

The word “genocide” has been attached to only one side of this war: Israel. The event that started it, the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel three years ago this Wednesday, appears in discussions of genocide mostly as backstory.

This past August I wrote a rigorous primer that examined the word genocide under international law, what is required to satisfy its explicit standards, and why Gaza did not meet that test. That piece carried the irreverent title, Genocide for Dummies, but that undersells a serious legal analysis that went viral.

Writing it got me thinking about a narrower and very different question: If the 1948 Genocide Convention’s list of prohibited acts and “special intent” requirement were applied to October 7, did Hamas commit a genocidal act on that day?

The international organizations that have weighed in with opinions on genocide—the UN Commission of Inquiry, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), Amnesty International, and the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem—have only applied the standard to Israel. While some acknowledged that Hamas was guilty of “international crimes, war crimes, or crimes against humanity,” none analyzed whether October 7 constituted genocide.

A legal standard is only worth the name if it is applied to every party whose conduct plausibly triggers it. When an institution runs the Genocide Convention against one belligerent and declines to run it against the other, it is a choice that matters because the incendiary charge of genocide has become the moral center of gravity for anti-Israel activists, shaping campus debates, arms embargoes, and court filings.

Individual scholars have weighed in. Within days of the October 7 attack, approximately 240 international legal experts signed an open letter that said it was “most probably” genocide. Ten days after the attack, three Israeli international law scholars concluded in an analysis for West Point’s Lieber Institute that October 7 met the conduct and intent elements of genocide. Sara Brown, a genocide scholar, found the attacks were genocidal violence in a policy brief only two months after October 7. And the Israel Law Review published a 40-page analysis in 2025 by Avraham Russell Shalev, an Israeli attorney and Kohelet Policy Forum fellow, that argued the attack satisfied genocide’s legal standards.

And for every one of those who contended that October 7 was a genocidal crime, others disputed it. Raz Segal, the Israeli historian who called Gaza a “textbook case of genocide” in October 2023, said he saw intent to kill but not “intent to destroy” in the Hamas attack. Uğur Ümit Üngör, a genocide studies professor at the University of Amsterdam, questioned whether the killing was directed at Jews since Arab Israelis and Bedouins were among the dead. A Sudanese political scientist, Abdelwahab El-Affendi, argued that genocides are committed by states and that hostage-taking points away from genocidal intent. Raphael van Steenberghe, a Belgian professor of international law, said there was insufficient evidence that Hamas meant to destroy a “substantial part” of the Jewish people.

Rather than simply counting votes and accepting a conclusion on the strength of who reached it, I set out to do my own independent review of the law and the facts of October 7 to determine whether the Hamas attack qualifies as genocide. My home office has been buried for the past month in case law from the genocide tribunals, thousands of pages of documents about what happened on October 7, and decades of Hamas’s on-the-record statements about its goals toward Israel.

There were two threshold questions before I began analyzing the law and intent. Was a single day’s attack, no matter how savage, too brief to qualify as genocide? It turns out that duration has never been the legal test. The Genocide Convention does not require a sustained campaign; a single act, committed with intent to destroy a group, can satisfy it. Nobody serious disputes that October 7 was the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust.

The second question was more complicated. Did it matter that Hamas was not a state?

The Genocide Convention was written in 1948 by states, in the shadow of a genocide carried out by a state. Its drafters were thinking about governments that turn their bureaucracies, armies, and police against part of their own population or the populations they conquer. Much of the scholarly literature defines genocide in those terms and the cases everyone agrees on fit that pattern. The Holocaust was carried out by the German state. The Rwandan genocide was organized by the Hutu Power government and its party militia. Srebrenica was carried out by the army of the Bosnian Serb statelet. The Khmer Rouge had captured the Cambodian state before it began killing Vietnamese and Cham. Destroying a people takes a capacity that in the modern era has almost always belonged to states.

The objection also has a practical side. The Convention’s enforcement mechanism runs through the International Court of Justice, which only hears cases between states. There will never be a Bosnia v. Serbia for Hamas. That is a serious argument, and I do not minimize it, but it is an argument about how genocide has usually happened and where it can be litigated. It is not an argument about what the law requires.

Article IV of the Convention says that persons committing genocide “shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.” The drafters could have limited the crime to state agents. They chose not to.

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court follows the same approach. Article 6 defines genocide without any reference to states, and Article 25 makes individuals criminally responsible for committing, ordering, soliciting, or contributing to it. The Yugoslav tribunal went further still. In Jelisić (1999), it said that while it would “be difficult to prove” it was “conceivable as a matter of principle” for a single individual to commit genocide without the support of any organization. In Krstić, the Appeals Chamber held in 2004 that no “widespread or systematic” plan is a legal element of the crime. Genocide, as a crime, is committed by people, not by legal forms. And the historical record bears that out. Every genocide conviction by an international court has been of an individual rather than a state or organization.

The most prominent ones were government officials or military commanders or party ideologues. The legal framework is established in the prosecutions for the 1970s campaign by the Khmer Rouge against the Vietnamese and Cham minorities in Cambodia, the 1994 Rwandan genocide of the Tutsi minority, and the 1995 killings of Bosnian Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica. Convictions were handed down over twenty years, including against heads of government (Rwanda), heads of state (Cambodia), military commanders (Srebrenica), and leading ruling party ideologues (Cambodia).

Hamas’s defenders cite those convictions as “evidence” that genocide is prosecuted only against individuals who act through state machinery. That is also not true. The Rwanda tribunal, for instance, convicted Georges Rutaganda of genocide. He was a second vice-president of the Interahamwe militia’s national committee and a private individual holding no government office. And, in the Srebrenica case, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that the genocide there was committed by members of the army of the Republika Srpska — an entity no country recognized as a state — and that the killings could not be attributed to Serbia. That means the best-known genocide finding in Europe since the Holocaust was a genocide by the forces of a non-state entity.

And then there is ISIS. In November 2021, a Frankfurt court convicted an ISIS member, Taha al-Jumailly, of genocide against the Yazidis, a religious minority in northern Iraq that ISIS set out to eliminate. It was the first genocide conviction of an ISIS fighter anywhere in the world. The court found that his crimes, “in conjunction with similar actions by other ISIS members,” served the organization’s aim of destroying the Yazidis as a religious group. A UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria had reached the same conclusion about ISIS in June 2016, and in May 2021 the UN team investigating ISIS crimes in Iraq told the Security Council it had found evidence that ISIS committed genocide against the Yazidis. ISIS was a terrorist organization that seized territory and proclaimed a “caliphate” no one recognized. It was found to have committed genocide, and one of its fighters was convicted for it. That is the closest analogy to Hamas in the case law.

And Hamas fits the ISIS pattern more closely than the usual framing suggests. Hamas is not a small underground cell. It had governed the Gaza Strip since seizing it in 2007, with ministries, police, courts, and an armed wing estimated at 25,000 to 30,000 men. October 7 was planned over years by a small circle at the top of that structure, and carried out by units under their command. In terms of capacity, organization, and control of territory, Hamas in 2023 was closer to the Republika Srpska than to a terrorist cell.

The bottom line is that the Convention punishes individuals “whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals,” and international courts have found genocide committed by forces that were not states. With the threshold objections addressed, the question becomes what a court must find to convict.

What the Law Requires

The first element required by the law is actus reus, Latin for “guilty act.” The Genocide Convention defines five prohibited acts: killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, inflicting destructive conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction, imposing measures to prevent births, and forcibly transferring children.

The court must determine whether what was done satisfies the conduct requirement, before moving to the second element, what lawyers call dolus specialis, special intent. This is what makes genocide different from every other atrocity crime: the perpetrator must intend to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” The victims must be targeted because of who they are, with the object of erasing the group they belong to.

If the conduct is not egregious enough to qualify as genocidal, the court never reaches the issue of intent. And if the conduct does satisfy the legal standard, it is possible the case falls short on intent.

Killing that is careless, or disproportionate, or even unlawful and massive, is not genocide. It can be a war crime or a crime against humanity, including extermination, and those are among the gravest crimes in international law. But genocide requires the extra element of special intent. That is why no charge in international law is more incendiary, or carries higher stakes, than genocide. The Rwanda tribunal itself called it “the crime of crimes.”

When it comes to October 7, the first two prohibited acts — killing, and serious bodily or mental harm — unquestionably apply. That second category is broader than most people realize. In the first genocide conviction by an international court, the 1998 Akayesu judgment, the Rwanda tribunal held that rape and sexual violence can constitute serious bodily and mental harm, and when committed with the required intent are acts of genocide. That precedent matters for what happened on October 7.

The other three acts fit poorly. Taking children hostage is a grave crime, but “forcibly transferring children to another group” has been read to mean removing them to absorb them into a different group, not holding them for ransom. Anyone who relies on inflicting destructive conditions of life, preventing births, or transferring children weakens their case. That leaves killing and serious bodily or mental harm as the conduct at issue on October 7. But establishing conduct is only half the test. The harder determination is intent.

How Is Genocidal Intent Proven?

When there is no document or order, a court examines the pattern of what was done to determine what it reveals. The International Court of Justice has set a very high bar in this regard. In Bosnia v. Serbia in 2007, it concluded that a pattern of conduct could establish genocidal intent if it “could only point to the existence of such intent.” Eight years later in Croatia v. Serbia, it reaffirmed that rule (“the only inference that could reasonably be drawn.”)

If there is another plausible explanation for the killing, such as military objectives, revenge, the chaos of war, the inference fails.

Those who charge that Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza focus on a pattern in the death toll, overall destruction, and some restrictions on aid, to contend that genocide is the only reasonable explanation. The International Court of Justice rejected a charge of genocide against Croatia although it concluded the Croats in their war with Serbia had denied food and water and medical care, and deported Serbs while killing others. While those acts would have qualified for the actus reus, the ICJ ruled there was not enough evidence to establish the special intent. That standard is why, in the detailed discussion I set out in Genocide for Dummies, the case against Israel in Gaza fails. Israel’s conduct has an obvious alternative explanation: a war against Hamas.

Some might argue that the same test run on Hamas could point to a comparable alternative: that October 7 was simply a maximalist terror operation meant to extract concessions, not to destroy a people. What forecloses that explanation is what I discuss in detail later; what Hamas’s own leadership said, not just what its terrorists did.

The second way to establish intent is direct evidence: any written policy, military planning document, commander’s order, or explicit statements of purpose by those who planned or carried out the killing. The court can also look at what the perpetrators said they intended, and then ask whether what they did matches it.

One issue that arises in relation to October 7 is how far down the chain of command does evidence of a leader’s intent reaches? The courts consistently ask two questions about the individual: did he possess genocidal intent, and did he commit, order, or contribute to genocidal acts? That is easy to apply to Hamas’s leaders, like Sinwar or Deif, whose own statements supply the answer. It is harder to apply to the men who crossed the fence on October 7 and broke into homes and pulled triggers, most of whom left no recorded statement of what they meant to do. One answer courts have provided is the joint criminal enterprise doctrine, first articulated by the Yugoslav tribunal in Tadić. Under that doctrine, a defendant doesn’t need to be shown to have personally wanted the group’s destruction. Knowing participation in a plan with a clear criminal purpose is enough.

Hamas’s centralized command structure, its ideological indoctrination of terrorists, and the specificity of the written orders they carried are enough to infer shared intent down the complete chain of command, not just the top of it. The Frankfurt court used the same logic to convict Taha al-Jumailly of genocide against the Yazidis, holding that his individual acts, “in conjunction with similar actions by other ISIS members,” served the organization’s shared genocidal aim.

But there is a stronger case anyway for Hamas’s Nukhba fighters. These were not conscripts or reluctant participants; they were an elite, ideologically indoctrinated unit who volunteered into an organization whose leadership had repeatedly and publicly stated its aim of destroying Jews as a people. Voluntary enlistment into that structure, after training, is itself evidence of shared intent. The joint criminal enterprise doctrine is the fallback for cases where only knowledge can be shown. With the Hamas terrorists who carried out October 7, more than knowledge is available.

When it comes to Hamas, there is a written record in its own words, stretching back 35 years, a body of direct evidence that goes beyond identity-based targeting to a stated aim of destruction. The question is not whether that record exists. It is what the record proves. Hamas had fought the first and second intifadas and four rocket wars — 2008–09, 2012, 2014, 2021 — with weapons that could kill Israelis at a distance but could never put terrorists at scale inside their communities. October 7 required something none of those campaigns did: a multi-year, specific plan to breach the border in force, with trained units, coordinated intelligence, and a fixed date. What changed in 2023 was not what Hamas wanted. It was what Hamas did.

Hamas’s 1988 Covenant

Hamas published its founding charter, the Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement, in August 1988. It is not a subtle document. Its preamble quotes Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”

Article 7 quotes a hadith, a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”

Article 13 closes the door on any possibility of compromise: “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time.”

Article 32 embodied the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a true account of Jewish plans for world domination.

When those passages are read together, it is clear the target is not Israeli policy or West Bank settlers. Article 7 does not say “occupiers” or “Zionists.” It says Jews, and it describes killing them wherever they hide as a religious end-state. That is about as close to a statement of genocidal intent to destroy a religious group “as such” as a founding document can be. Some historians cite it as a prime example of “eliminationist antisemitism.”

Hamas’s defenders have an answer. On May 1, 2017, Hamas released a “Document of General Principles and Policies.” It dropped the hadith and stated that its struggle is against “the Zionist project,” not against Jews “because of their religion.” Antisemitism was described as a phenomenon “fundamentally linked to European history.” It accepted, as a “formula of national consensus,” a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines. Hamas’s leadership said the 1988 charter had become “a historical document and part of an earlier stage in our evolution.” Khaled Mashal, then Hamas’s political leader, said, “The old charter was a product of its era, 30 years ago. We live in a different world today.”

If that were all true, the 1988 Covenant would be weak evidence of what Hamas intended in 2023. It is not, however, the whole story. The 2017 document was less a change of heart than a rebrand. Hamas used it to claim it had severed ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, a move aimed at Cairo and the Gulf. Egypt’s Sisi government had designated the Brotherhood a terrorist organization in 2013 and was squeezing Hamas hard over its affiliation. The 2017 document coincided with a change in Hamas’s leadership. Yahya Sinwar took over in Gaza and Ismail Haniyeh replaced Khaled Mashal as the head of the political bureau. New leadership wanted a fresher, less militant public image. It is not a coincidence that Mashal announced the 2017 document at a Doha press conference, where Hamas’s political bureau was headquartered in exile. The Qataris had pressured Hamas to soften its public image without changing its actual principles.

And, most important, the 2017 document did not repeal the Covenant. Hamas chose to call the new text a wathiqa, a document, rather than a mithaq, a charter, but never formally revoked the original. The 2017 text still claimed Palestine “from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west,” still refused to recognize “the Zionist entity,” and still said that “at the heart of…resisting the occupation…lies armed resistance.”

What Hamas Leaders Said

This is where the evidence must be handled most carefully, because some of what circulates online is misattributed. I have left out anything I could not pin to a date, a venue, and a speaker. Here is what can be confirmed.

Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza and the architect of October 7, told a closed meeting with Gazan youth on October 19, 2017 — only six months after the “moderate” 2017 document — that “over is the time Hamas spent discussing recognizing Israel. Now Hamas will discuss when we will wipe out Israel.”

On December 14, 2022, at a rally marking Hamas’s 35th anniversary, Sinwar promised: “We will come to you, God willing, in a roaring flood. We will come to you with endless rockets, we will come to you in a limitless flood of soldiers, we will come to you with millions of our people, like the repeating tide.” Ten months later, Hamas named its attack “Al-Aqsa Flood.”

Fathi Hammad, a ranking member of Hamas’s political bureau, said at a rally near the Gaza border on July 12, 2019: “You have Jews everywhere. We must attack every Jew on the planet — slaughter and kill, Allah willing.” And to Palestinians in the West Bank: “The necks of the Jews and their legs. We will tear them to shreds, Allah willing. How much does the neck of a Jew cost? Five shekels or less?”

That is an explicit call to kill Jews as Jews. Hamas’s more press-savvy political leadership in Doha disavowed that within days, calling the remarks “personal statements that do not represent Hamas” and insisting its conflict is “with the occupation ... and not with Jews around the world or with Judaism as a religion.” The disavowal is part of the record too. So is the fact that after he said those things, Hammad remained in the Hamas politburo.

Mohammed Deif, commander of Hamas’s military wing, announced the attack in a recorded message on the morning of October 7, 2023. His stated grievances were police raids on the Al-Aqsa compound, Palestinian prisoners, the blockade of Gaza, and what he called settler violence, and his vocabulary was “occupiers” and “the Zionist entity.” He quoted the Quranic verse “kill them wherever you may find them” and told Arab citizens of Israel to “kill, burn, destroy and block the roads,” and he exhorted Palestinians in the West Bank to “sweep away these occupiers and their settlements from the whole of our land.” He went on: “Anyone who has a gun should get it out. Now is the time. And those who do not have a gun should take out a cleaver, an axe.”

Deif did not speak expressly of eliminating Jews. He did not have to. Those who followed his commands knew what to do when they attacked hours later. In the communities Qassam units reached, there was no restraint: at least 38 children were killed on October 7, six under the age of five, and more than 25 victims were over 80. Cleavers and axes are not weapons for fighting an army.

Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, gave an interview to Lebanon’s LBC television that aired October 24, 2023, while Israeli families were still identifying the dead. “Israel is a country that has no place on our land,” he said. “We must remove that country.” The attack, he said, would be repeated: “We will do this again and again. The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth.” Asked whether that meant the annihilation of Israel, he answered, “Yes, of course.” And: “We are not ashamed to say this, with full force.”

Finally, there is what the terrorists themselves said. On October 24, 2023, the IDF released a recording, for instance, that was a call made by a Hamas terrorist from a victim’s phone at Kibbutz Mefalsim. “I killed her and her husband,” he boasted to his parents. “Look how many I killed 10 with my own hands, your son killed Jews….Ten with my own bare hands. Their blood is on my hands.” Not soldiers, not occupiers, but Jews.

Does “Wipe Out Israel” Mean Genocide?

Many of these statements — Sinwar’s “wipe out Israel,” Hamad’s “remove that country,” Deif’s “sweep away these occupiers” — describe destroying a state, not physically destroying a people. The Genocide Convention protects national, ethnic, racial, and religious groups. It does not protect states. Hamas’s defenders argue that a call to end Israel as a political entity, however violent, is not by itself a call to destroy Jews as a group. I made the parallel argument about Israel in Genocide for Dummies. Netanyahu’s reference to Amalek and Gallant’s “human animals,” read in context, were about Hamas, not about Palestinians as a people. Even read otherwise, the ICJ held in Bosnia v. Serbiathat targeting a group’s members because of who they are shows only discriminatory intent, not genocidal intent: “Something more is required.” If I insist on reading Israeli statements in context, I must read Hamas’s statements the same way.

Two things, however, distinguish them.

The first is that Hamas’s record contains statements that cannot be read as being about a state. Article 7 of the Covenant is about killing Jews. Hammad’s 2019 speech was about killing Jews “on the globe,” not in Israel. The terrorist on the phone was bragging about killing Jews. There is no contextual reading of those words that turns them into statements about a government.

The second, and more important, is conduct. In Genocide for Dummies, I argued that the Israeli statements were contradicted by what Israel did: evacuation warnings, humanitarian pauses, the polio vaccination campaign, repeated ceasefire and hostage negotiations. Conduct inconsistent with intent to destroy undercuts rhetoric that sounds genocidal. The same test applies in reverse. If Hamas’s statements were only about ending a state, we would expect those who crossed into Israel to have concentrated on military and state targets. If they were, however, about killing Jews as such, we would expect them to go house to house through civilian communities hunting and killing whoever they found. Which of those two patterns the evidence shows is the subject of the next section.

What Hamas Actually Did on October 7

This section goes act by act — covering Hamas and the groups that crossed the fence with it — and asks which of the Convention’s five prohibited acts in Article II the evidence supports.

Killing Members of the Group — Article II(a)

The numbers first. Israel’s official figure is roughly 1,200 dead; 796 civilians and 379 members of the security forces, including 38 children and 71 foreign nationals. Hamas, and the allied terrorists who crossed with them, took 251 people hostage into Gaza; and all have been accounted for, either released alive or their corpses returned.

The test is whether people were killed as such, because of who they were, with the object of destroying the group, in whole or in part. There are three features of the attack that bear directly on that question.

The targets were mostly civilian communities. Hamas did overrun the Nahal Oz army base, where fifty-three soldiers were killed and ten taken hostage, attacked the Gaza Division headquarters at Re’im, and hit the Zikim base and the Erez crossing. Roughly a third of the dead were soldiers and police. But the other two-thirds of victims on October 7 were civilians, and they were not killed in crossfire. More than 20 civilian communities were attacked. At Kibbutz Be’eri, home to about 1,200 residents, 101 civilians were killed — about one in twelve — along with 31 security personnel, and 32 residents were taken hostage. Eighty percent of the recovered bodies showed they had been tortured before being killed (recovered-body data compiled by the October 7th Geo-visualization Project and MEMRI’s Hamas Atrocities Documentation Center). At Kfar Aza, more than 100 residents out of 950 were killed or abducted. At Nir Oz, a kibbutz of 427, more than a quarter of the population was murdered or taken hostage. Terrorists went house to house, broke into safe rooms, set homes on fire to drive families out, and shot them when they emerged.

Hamas’s media office provided its own account in January 2024 when it released a 16-page document, “Our Narrative.” It claimed its fighters avoided harming civilians and that “maybe some faults happened” in the chaos. In a July 2024 report, after 144 interviews and review of hundreds of videos and photographs, Human Rights Watch — not an organization sympathetic to Israel — concluded that “killing civilians and taking hostages were a central aim of the planned attack, not an afterthought, a plan gone awry, or isolated acts.” In fact, every serious investigation, including by the UN Commission of Inquiry and Amnesty International, found the opposite of what Hamas claimed about October 7.

Hamas’s planning documents reinforce this. Papers recovered from the bodies of terrorists instructed attackers to “kill as many people as possible” and identified an elementary school and a youth center at Kibbutz Sa’ad as targets. An operational plan that sends armed men into residential communities with an instruction to maximize the number of dead is not a plan to fight an army.

The communities were chosen for who lived in them. I have not been able to confirm in any primary source one claim that circulates widely — that terrorists carried lists of residents and checked identities at the door. Therefore, I have not relied on it. What is documented is that they carried detailed maps of the kibbutzim, including the locations of homes and security personnel. The selection of targets was done at the level of the community rather than the individual. The kibbutzim along the Gaza border were Jewish Israeli communities. Choosing to attack them, rather than only the military positions next to them, was a choice of victims by identity.

By itself, this only proves discriminatory intent — the same limit I described earlier. The ICJ held that the Bosnian Serb leadership’s 1992 “Strategic Goals,” a plan to separate Bosnian Muslims from Serb-held territory, was not enough, because a plan to separate a group from territory can be satisfied by expulsion rather than extermination. What distinguishes October 7 is what the terrorists were told to do once they reached those communities: not clear them, not expel their residents, but “kill as many people as possible.” An instruction to maximize the number of dead in a community selected for who lived there forecloses the expulsion alternative that saved the Strategic Goals from a genocide finding. Selection by identity plus an order to kill, not remove, is what turns discriminatory intent into evidence of intent to destroy.

The Nova festival. The single deadliest site of the day was at the Nova music festival near Re’im, where 364 people were killed and dozens taken hostage. Nova is often cited as proof that Hamas deliberately targeted civilians. Hamas’s defenders cite an Israeli police assessment from November 2023 that Hamas likely did not know about the festival in advance. The maps recovered from terrorists showed kibbutzim, not the festival site. Therefore, they contend, the festival appears to have been found, not targeted.

That matters, but not in the way Hamas’s defenders suggest. If Nova was not on the plan, then what happened there is an even more critical piece of evidence about intent. It reveals how the terrorists behaved when they encountered a large group of unarmed Israeli civilians they had not expressly been ordered to attack. They hunted them across open fields for hours, raped many, shot people hiding in bomb shelters and under vehicles, and took captives. Improvised sexual assault and savage killing of civilians on that scale says something about the intent the terrorists carried with them, independent of any written order.

Two further points raised by critics must be addressed.

First, not every victim was Jewish. Foreign workers were killed and kidnapped. There were Thai agricultural laborers, Nepalese students, Filipino caregivers, and Arab and Bedouin citizens of Israel. The genocide scholar Uğur Ümit Üngör has cited this to question whether the killing was aimed specifically at Jews or was indiscriminate. It is a fair question, but the legal answer is well settled. Genocide does not require that only members of the targeted group die. In Rwanda, Hutu who opposed the killing were murdered alongside Tutsi, and that did not change the tribunal’s findings about the intent to destroy the Tutsi. The question is whether the protected group was the object of the attack, not whether others were caught in it.

Second, some Israelis killed that day were killed by Israeli fire. The best-documented case is the house of Pessi Cohen at Be’eri, where Hamas held about 15 hostages, 13 of whom died, and an Israeli tank fired shells during the battle. The IDF’s investigation, presented in July 2024, concluded that one hostage was killed by shrapnel and that most of the others were “likely murdered by the terrorists.” Any unintended civilian death from Israeli fire does not change the overall picture. The overwhelming majority of the dead were killed by the attackers, and it was Israel’s own investigations that brought the friendly-fire deaths to light.

Causing Serious Bodily or Mental Harm — Article II(b)

This category is broader than killing, and the October 7 evidence under it is extensive: torture, mutilation, the burning of people alive, the wounding of thousands, and the psychological harm inflicted on survivors and on hostages held for months or years. International tribunals have recognized that serious mental harm includes the trauma of those who survive a genocidal attack. The UN Commission of Inquiry’s June 2024 report found torture and the mutilation, burning, and desecration of bodies.

The most legally significant part of (b) for this case is sexual violence, so precision matters.

In March 2024, Pramila Patten, the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, reported to the Security Council after a mission to Israel. Her team found “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations” on October 7, including rape and gang rape at the Nova festival site, Road 232, and Kibbutz Re’im. It also noted a pattern of victims, mostly women, found “naked from the waist down... hands tied and shot multiple times, often in the head.”

This matters because when the Rwanda tribunal in 1998 first ruled that rape can constitute an act of genocide when committed with intent to destroy the group, its finding rested on evidence that the rapes of Tutsi women were systematic, targeted at Tutsi specifically, and encouraged as part of the campaign of destruction.

For October 7, the evidence establishes that widespread sexual violence occurred at multiple sites, and there is a pattern in how victims were found. Israeli investigators have concluded that sexual violence was planned as part of the operation. A 2024 report from The Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel was equally unsparing in recounting graphic evidence of rapes and sexual mutilation carried out on female and male victims, often in front of their families. That report concluded “that sexual abuse was not an isolated incident or sporadic opportunistic cases but rather a clear operational strategy.” Papers found on captured Hamas terrorists included instructions of how to say, “take your pants off” and “open your legs” in Hebrew.

Avraham Russell Shalev also points to a November 2023 declaration of intervention in Gambia v. Myanmar, in which Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom argued that conflict-related sexual violence “has no military value besides harm to the group.” That is the kind of act whose only apparent purpose is destroying the group itself, which he argues supports treating it as intent-bearing conduct on October 7. I should flag a tension in relying on it. That same declaration also urged the ICJ to adopt a looser standard for inferring genocidal intent than the “only reasonable inference” test I have used throughout this piece, and that I criticized intervening states for pushing in Genocide for Dummies when the argument ran the other way, toward Israel. I am citing the declaration only for its factual claim about the nature of sexual violence, not adopting its proposed intent standard. What is undeniable is that sexual violence on October 7 is a strong candidate to qualify as an Article II(b) act of genocide.

Forcibly Transferring Children — Article II(e)

About 40 children were among the hostages taken to Gaza. Some legal commentators have argued that their abduction fits Article II(e), the forcible transfer of children of the group to another group.

I do not think it does, and I will not rely on it. The purpose of (e), as its drafting history and later case law reflect, is the removal of children to absorb them into another group — to end their membership in the group they were born into. The children taken on October 7 were held as bargaining chips, and most were released within weeks in the November 2023 exchange. Their abduction was a grave war crime. It is not the act Article II(e) describes. Stretching it to fit would give critics an easy reason to dismiss everything else in this analysis.

Acts That Do Not Apply

Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about a group’s physical destruction, Article II(c), describes a sustained process — starvation, deportation marches, denial of shelter. A one-day assault does not fit it. Article II(d), measures to prevent births, has no application to October 7.

That leaves a case built on two acts: killing, which is overwhelmingly documented, and serious bodily and mental harm, which is extensively documented, with sexual violence as its most significant element. That is enough. Every genocide conviction at Srebrenica rested on those alone. The question, as it always is in genocide, is not whether the acts occurred. It is whether they were committed with intent to destroy the group. That is the question I next address.

The Srebrenica Comparison

Every serious discussion of whether a single massacre can be genocide eventually arrives at Srebrenica. It is the case that answers the objection “but the numbers are too small.” It is also the case that, read carefully, sets the hardest test October 7 has to pass. Both halves of that matter.

The numbers

In July 1995, over roughly a week, Bosnian Serb forces killed between 7,000 and 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys from the Srebrenica enclave. The 1991 census counted about 1.9 million Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Measured against the whole group, the dead at Srebrenica were about 0.4 percent.

On October 7, about 1,200 people were killed, the large majority of them Jewish Israelis; the true number of Jewish victims is somewhat lower than the total, because foreign workers and Arab and Bedouin citizens were among the dead. Israel’s Jewish population at the time was about 7.2 million. Measured the same way, the dead of October 7 were under 0.02 percent of Israeli Jews, and less than 0.01 percent of the world’s roughly 15.7 million Jews.

By that measure, October 7 is about one twenty-fifth the size of Srebrenica relative to the group. If the percentage decided the case, it would be over.

It does not, however, decide the case. The Convention requires intent to destroy a group “in whole or in part,” and the tribunal held that the “part” must be substantial. In Krstić, the Appeals Chamber did not measure the Srebrenica dead against 1.9 million Bosnian Muslims. It identified the targeted part as the Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica — about 40,000 people — and asked whether that community was a substantial part of the whole. It concluded that it was, because of the enclave’s strategic importance to the Bosnian Serb leadership and its prominence as a symbol, to Bosnian Muslims.

Then the court looked at the effect of the killing on that community. The 7,000 to 8,000 men killed were, in the tribunal’s words, “about one fifth of the overall Srebrenica community.” Because the community was patriarchal, their deaths had “severe procreative implications ... potentially consigning the community to extinction.” The women, children, and elderly were bused out, “completing the removal of all Bosnian Muslims from Srebrenica.”

So, numbers mattered — just not the national percentage. What mattered was the relationship between the killing and the survival of a defined community.

And one more passage from Krstić is central to October 7: “The intent to destroy formed by a perpetrator of genocide will always be limited by the opportunity presented to him.” The tribunal said the “area of the perpetrators’ activity and control, as well as the possible extent of their reach, should be considered.” Genocide is judged against what the perpetrators could reach, not against the whole world population of the group.

That doctrine is the strongest legal tool available to anyone arguing October 7 was genocide. Oved Lobel, a policy analyst at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, who writes on jihadist movements and Middle East security, contended in January 2024 that the relevant population under Krstić is the kibbutzim and towns of the Gaza border region that Hamas reached. That denominator is not assembled after the fact to fit the casualty count. The communities along the border have been administratively and colloquially grouped for decades as “the Gaza Envelope” — a defined region, organized under specific regional councils, precisely because of its exposure to Gaza. The boundary existed before October 7; the attack did not create it.

Apply the same measure the tribunal used for Srebrenica — deaths relative to the community under attack — and the picture changes sharply. The IDF’s own investigation found that 101 civilians were killed at Be’eri, about a tenth of the kibbutz. At Kfar Aza, about 10% were killed or abducted. At Nir Oz, 11% were killed and it was closer to 29% of all the residents counting those taken hostage. At Srebrenica, the tribunal’s figure was one-fifth. At the level of the communities that were attacked, the losses on October 7 are in the same range.

A court would not stop there. There are, however, three genuine differences between the two cases, and each must be addressed.

Control and time. At Srebrenica, the Bosnian Serb army controlled the area for days. It separated the population, transported the men to execution sites, killed them methodically, buried them in mass graves, and later dug them up with bulldozers and reburied them to hide the evidence. It was an industrial operation. On October 7, Hamas held Israeli communities for hours, under fire, before the IDF began retaking them. The killing was fast and chaotic rather than administered.

That difference cuts both ways. It means there is no Srebrenica-style logistical record of intent. It also means, under Krstić’s “opportunity” principle, that Hamas’s inability to kill more is not evidence that it did not intend to kill more. Applying that principle to a few hours of a raid, rather than days of sustained administrative control, is a novel extension — no tribunal has done it this way. But a novel application is not a wrong one; it means a court has not yet been asked to decide it, not that it would decide it against my reading. The terrorists killed as many people as they could reach in the time they had. The recovered planning documents instructed them to “kill as many people as possible.” Hamas’s leaders said afterward that they would do it “again and again.” The Hamas operation ended when the IDF counterattack reached it, not because the terrorists had finished.

Selectivity. At Srebrenica, the killers separated the population by sex and age. The women, children, and elderly were expelled; the men and boys were killed. The Bosnian Serb defense argued that the men were combatants or potential combatants, a military threat rather than victims chosen for their identity. The tribunal rejected that argument.

On October 7, there was no such separation, and no such defense is available. The dead included infants, children, and people in their 80s and 90s, killed in their beds and safe rooms. There is no military rationale for those murders. In that respect, October 7 is less ambiguous than Srebrenica on the question of whether victims were chosen “as such.”

There is a counterpoint, and it is the argument made by the Sudanese academic Abdelwahab El-Affendi and others: Hamas took about 250 hostages rather than killing everyone it captured, and a force intent on destruction does not take prisoners to trade. But Srebrenica answers that too. The Bosnian Serbs did not kill every Muslim in the enclave; they expelled tens of thousands of women and children. The tribunal still found genocide. I am not arguing here that expulsion and hostage-taking are the same act. One is a permanent removal, the other becomes a transactional exchange. But the principle is broader than the mechanism. Sparing part of a group, or using part of it for another purpose, does not negate intent to destroy another part. Applying that principle to hostage-taking is my extension of the Srebrenica finding. No international tribunal has faced this exact fact pattern. The underlying logic is consistent, however: how a perpetrator instrumentally uses some victims says nothing about its intent toward the others it kills.

The effect on the community. The Krstić court tied the killing to the physical survival of the Srebrenica Muslim community. Whether October 7 threatened the survival of the border communities in the same sense is harder to argue. Be’eri and Nir Oz were devastated, and their residents were displaced for a long time afterward, but that displacement was ordered by Israel for their safety, and the communities have begun to rebuild slowly. The displacement would never have happened but for the October 7 attack. Still, it is the weakest point of the parallel, and I would rather say so than have a critic say it for me.

Where This Leaves the Srebrenica Comparison

The parallel between Srebrenica and October 7 is not in the method or the scale. It is in the structure of the choice: identity-based selection is discriminatory intent in the ICJ’s sense, and by itself would prove no more here than it did for the Bosnian Serb “Strategic Goals.” What turns it into evidence of intent to destroy, in both cases, is what came next. At Srebrenica, men were killed because they were Bosnian Muslims. On October 7, men, women, and children were killed because they were Jews living in communities Hamas could reach. In both cases, the identity of the victims was the reason they were targeted, and the killing extended as far as the perpetrators’ opportunity allowed.

There is also a route to the “substantial part” requirement that does not depend on the border communities’ survival. Krstić itself ties “substantial part” to scale and organization — extermination, the tribunal wrote, “assumes a substantial degree of preparation and organization.” October 7 had both: not a single killing, but hundreds of dead across more than twenty communities, carried out under written orders by a trained, ideologically indoctrinated force years in the planning. The “substantial part” question does not have to be answered at the level of any one kibbutz’s survival. It can be answered at the level of the operation as a whole — which is exactly the scale and organization Krstić said the law requires.

This brings me back to the consistency point that runs through this piece.

In September 2025, the UN Commission of Inquiry analyzed statements by President Herzog, Prime Minister Netanyahu, and then-Defense Minister Gallant and concluded, in its words, that “those statements are direct evidence of genocidal intent.” I think that conclusion was wrong, for the reasons I gave in Genocide for Dummies. But set my view aside and take the Commission’s standard as it wrote it.

If wartime remarks by Israeli officials — made in the days after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and followed by conduct that cuts against them — are “direct evidence” of genocidal intent, then a founding charter that calls for killing Jews as a religious duty, a politburo member’s call to slaughter “every Jew on the globe,” a commander’s order to take cleavers and axes to “the occupiers,” and a senior official’s promise to repeat the massacre “again and again” until Israel is annihilated are direct evidence too. And they are stronger evidence, because they are more explicit and because the conduct that accompanied them matches them.

The Commission never applied its standard to Hamas. That is the choice I described at the start of this piece. You can argue that the Commission’s standard is too loose, as I do. Or you can argue it is correct. What you cannot do is apply it to one side and not the other.

The ICC: Jurisdiction, Charges, and a Question Worth Asking

The International Criminal Court has jurisdiction. Palestine joined the Rome Statute in 2015, and in February 2021 the court’s Pre-Trial Chamber ruled that its jurisdiction extends to Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. That ruling did not cover Israeli territory. Israel is not a party to the Statute. The court’s jurisdiction over crimes committed inside Israel on October 7 rests on a different basis: the perpetrators were Palestinian nationals, and the Statute covers crimes committed by nationals of member states wherever they occur.

In May 2024, then-Prosecutor Karim Khan applied for arrest warrants for Sinwar, Deif, and Haniyeh on charges of extermination, murder, hostage-taking, rape and sexual violence, and torture — and for Netanyahu and Gallant on charges including starvation as a method of warfare. He charged neither side with genocide. That decision takes some explaining, given Khan’s own record. Before he became ICC prosecutor, he headed the UN team investigating ISIS crimes in Iraq, and it was Khan who told the Security Council in May 2021 that ISIS had committed genocide against the Yazidis — a finding about a non-state terrorist group, built largely on evidence of organizational intent. Only Deif’s warrant was issued before the three Hamas leaders were confirmed dead, and it was withdrawn in February 2025.

Why no genocide charge against Hamas’s commanders?

Part of the answer is institutional. The ICC has sought genocide charges only once in its history, against Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir in 2010. Prosecutors charge what they believe they can prove, and extermination as a crime against humanity requires proof of mass killing as part of an attack on civilians without requiring additional evidence of special intent. It is the safer and simpler charge to prove.

Part of the answer is legal. The ICC’s Elements of Crimes add a requirement that the Yugoslav and Rwanda tribunals rejected: the conduct must take place “in the context of a manifest pattern of similar conduct directed against that group,” or be conduct that “could itself effect such destruction.” A single day’s attack would struggle to meet the second test. Whether Hamas’s record — decades of suicide bombings and rocket fire aimed at Israeli civilians — amounts to a “manifest pattern of similar conduct” is a strong argument, but it is one that a prosecutor would have had to win.

October 7 gave him no comparable record and that may be the difference he could not get past. Charging genocide here would also have meant pushing into untested legal territory rather than the better-established ground of extermination and crimes against humanity. Khan chose the safer ground.

And part of the answer is simply unknown. Khan went on leave in May 2025 during a sexual misconduct investigation, and the Assembly of States Parties removed him from office in July 2026. The office has been run by two deputy prosecutors since, both under U.S. sanctions, and a new prosecutor has not yet been selected. Whether the office ever seriously evaluated a genocide charge against Hamas’s commanders is not on the public record.

In Genocide for Dummies, I treated the absence of a genocide charge against Israeli leaders as meaningful. I must therefore treat the absence of one against Hamas’s leaders the same way — as evidence that a cautious prosecutor did not think the charge worth bringing, though not as proof that it could not be proven.

The new prosecutor will inherit a thinner file than the one Khan had. Sinwar, Deif, and Haniyeh are dead; Izz al-Din al-Haddad, the last surviving senior planner of the attack, was killed by Israel in May 2026. But the men who carried out the killing are not all gone. Israel is holding roughly 300 people accused of taking part in the October 7 attack, most of them Nukhba fighters, for eventual trials before a military tribunal created earlier this year just for this purpose. There are also forums beyond the ICC and Israel’s own courts. Germany used universal jurisdiction to convict an ISIS fighter of genocide against the Yazidis, and the same route is available against Hamas members abroad. A plaintiff who filed such a case in Argentina wrote in the Jerusalem Post this past May that he was pursuing a universal-jurisdiction case treating October 7 as genocide and crimes against humanity. In the United States, the Justice Department’s Joint Task Force October 7, announced in March 2025, has brought terrorism charges against several defendants — not yet genocide counts. The question of whether October 7 was genocide can still be put to a court, through one of these routes. It should be.

While there are undoubtedly real questions about whether October 7 will ever receive the adversarial verdict that is the third part of my test, it is not a reason to conclude that the crime could not have been committed.

The Selective Application Problem

I started this piece by describing how the institutions that found Israel guilty of genocide treated October 7. I want to come back to that now, because after working through the law and the evidence, the gap looks different than it did when I began.

A legal standard is a test you run before you know the answer. You define the elements, gather the evidence, and see whether it satisfies them. If the evidence falls short, the answer is no, however much you might have wanted it to be yes. That is what makes it a standard.

When a standard is applied to one party’s conduct and not to another’s — when the response to an attack is measured against the Genocide Convention and the attack itself is not — it stops working as a standard. It becomes a conclusion looking for support. That is not a political complaint. It is a problem of method, and it would be a problem no matter which side benefited from it.

What the International Institutions Omitted

The earlier sections make it possible to be specific about what each institution chose not to examine.

The International Association of Genocide Scholars’ August 2025 resolution found that Israel’s conduct in Gaza met the legal definition of genocide. It mentioned Hamas only twice, in subordinate clauses: once to say October 7 “itself constitutes international crimes,” and once to describe Israel’s actions as a “response.” It did not analyze the Hamas Covenant as evidence of intent, did not examine the killings of October 7 against Article II, and did not say which international crimes it had in mind. That silence is harder to explain than an oversight. In December 2023, the association had published its own peer-reviewed policy brief by the genocide scholar Sara Brown. She concluded that Hamas’s attacks on Israeli civilians were acts of genocidal violence and recommended that IAGS say so. The association ignored those recommendations, and its 2025 resolution went the other way. This was the most widely cited scholarly finding of genocide in the conflict, from the professional association of the people whose job is to apply the framework — and it had the counter-argument in its own publication series nearly two years before it wrote a resolution that skipped past it.

The UN Commission of Inquiry’s September 2025 report ran 72 pages. It examined statements by Israeli leaders — Gallant’s “human animals,” Netanyahu’s reference to Amalek, Herzog’s remarks about responsibility — and concluded that they were “direct evidence of genocidal intent.” It applied no comparable analysis to Article 7 of the Hamas Covenant, to Sinwar’s 2017 promise to discuss “when we will wipe out Israel,” to Deif’s order on the morning of October 7 to take up “a cleaver, an axe,” or to Ghazi Hamad’s pledge to repeat the attack “again and again.” Nor has the Commission since. Its June 2026 report, which found that Israel targeted Palestinian children as part of an ongoing genocide, revisits October 7 only to recap its own earlier findings: that Hamas committed war crimes and crimes against humanity against Israeli children, and according to its own count, that included dozens killed or “targeted for abduction.” It does not reconsider, with two additional years of evidence, whether that record meets the genocide standard it applies to Israel three paragraphs later.

The Commission’s defenders will say its September report was a legal analysis of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and that its June 2024 report had already addressed October 7. Both are true. But the Commission’s mandate, set by the Human Rights Council in 2021, covers violations “in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel.” Nothing prevented it from asking the genocide question about October 7. When it examined October 7 in 2024, it found war crimes and stopped. When it examined Israel’s response, it asked the genocide question and answered yes. The choice of which question to ask was the Commission’s alone.

Amnesty International and B’Tselem both concluded that Israel is committing genocide. Amnesty’s own report on October 7 found extermination and cited “statements from Hamas leaders” as evidence the attack targeted civilians, then went no further. B’Tselem called October 7 war crimes and “likely also crimes against humanity.” Neither asked whether it was genocide.

What Explains the Failure of the International Institutions?

One reason is prevention. The Genocide Convention imposes a duty to prevent, and prevention looks forward. By the time most of these reports were written, October 7 was over, and the war in Gaza was continuing. An institution focused on stopping ongoing killing will naturally concentrate on the conduct still happening.

A second is forum. South Africa’s case at the ICJ put Israel’s conduct before a court, and no parallel ICJ case can exist against Hamas — the ICJ hears only disputes between states. Much of the institutional analysis followed that case.

Those explanations account for emphasis but do not account for absence. The prevention rationale cuts the other way: Hamas’s leaders publicly promised to repeat October 7. If prevention is the point, that promise is exactly the kind of statement the duty to prevent exists to take seriously.

I want to be precise about my claim. I am not saying that because these institutions failed to apply the framework to Hamas, their conclusions about Israel are wrong. I think they are wrong, and I explained why in detail in Genocide for Dummies, but that is a separate argument, and it stands or falls on its own evidence.

My claim here is narrower. An institution that applies the Genocide Convention to one party in a conflict and not to the other, when the evidence against the other is at least as strong on the element that matters most, has not shown that it is applying a standard. The burden is on those institutions to explain the difference. So far, none has.

The Falsifiable Standard

I ended Genocide for Dummies with a challenge: tell me what evidence would change my mind, and if you produce it, I will write the correction myself. It is only fair to end this piece the same way: applying the same standard I did to Israel, the case that October 7 was a genocidal act is much stronger than the case against Israel — and that it has never been examined by the institutions that were most eager to use the word.

Here is what would change my conclusion.

First, show me a military rationale. Hamas attacked army bases on October 7. Its defenders will argue those attacks were legitimate targets under the laws of war. Explain then why the same operation also sent terrorists into more than 20 residential communities, with written instructions to “kill as many people as possible” and to target a school and a youth center, if the object was military. Show me that the killing of infants and the elderly in their homes served any military purpose.

Second, show me that Hamas’s 1988 Covenant was only rhetoric. Hamas says its 2017 document replaced the charter’s call to kill Jews with a struggle against “the Zionist project.” If that is true, explain why the conduct on October 7 looked like the 1988 text and not the 2017 one. Explain why a terrorist called his parents to boast, “Your son killed Jews.”

Third, show me that Hamas’s leaders were misunderstood. Put Sinwar’s 2017 promise to discuss “when we will wipe out Israel,” his 2022 “roaring flood,” Deif’s call for cleavers and axes, and Hamad’s “again and again” in their full Arabic context and show me that they meant something other than what they said.

Fourth, show me that the killing of civilians was not the plan. Many people crossed the fence on October 7 — Hamas’s Nukhba forces, terrorists from Islamic Jihad and other groups, and Gazan civilians who followed them through the breaches. Human Rights Watch concluded that killing civilians was a “central aim of the planned attack,” not a plan gone awry. If the atrocities were the work of undisciplined followers rather than the organization, show me the evidence that Hamas’s command made any effort to stop them.

Fifth, on sexual violence, let the investigation finish. The UN Special Representative found that rape and gang rape occurred at multiple sites. The UN’s own investigation did not find that sexual violence was ordered but instead called for a full investigation. There are other investigations now underway. If they uncover credible evidence that the sexual assaults were not directed policy, then it should drop out of the genocide analysis, and I will say so.

That is the standard. It is the same one I set for the case against Israel. The only difference is that no one has yet been willing to apply it here. And until that happens, my conclusion stands: there is a solid case for genocide against Hamas in the October 7 attack.