Hamas Official Undermines That Charge of Israeli ‘Genocide’

Basem Naim is a high official in Hamas and a former Minister of Health in Gaza. He was a recently interviewed by Jackson Hinkle, a social media opinion-molder on X, who is virulently anti-Israel and long ago crossed the line into antisemitism. This vicious hobbledehoy, all of 25, has expressed his admiration for, inter alia, the following: Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party, Vladimir Putin, the murderer of Alexei Navalny, and hundreds of others, anti-white South African racist Julius Malema, and the Syrian mass murderer Bashar al-Assad. Quite a galère, don’t you think? Naim, in his interview with Hinkle, managed to unintentionally undermine Hamas’ claim that Israel has been committing “genocide” in Gaza. More on Naim’s appearance on Hinkle’s show can be found here: “Hamas Official Says At Least 2.3 Million People Alive in Gaza, Undermining Claims of ‘Genocide,’” by Corey Walker, Algemeiner, February 20, 2025:

During an interview with anti-Israel social media personality Jackson Hinkle, a Hamas leader claimed that over 2 million people are still alive in the Gaza Strip, undercutting the notion that a so-called “genocide” has taken place in the war-torn enclave.

Citing recent comments made by US President Donald Trump that roughly 1.7 million people remain in Gaza, Hinkle asked interview guest Basem Naim, a Hamas official and former Gaza Minister of Health, whether he believed that far more people had died in the enclave than originally thought. Naim immediately dismissed the claim, clarifying that over 2 million Palestinians in Gaza are still alive.

“Donald Trump has come out a few times and he says the population in Gaza is 1.7 to 1.8 million. Of course, before [Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel] the population was much more than that, 400,000 to 500,000. Do you think his statistics are accurate, and if so, where did all those people go? Because we see the Ministry of Health in Gaza, they say the [Palestinian] death toll registered officially is over 40,000 [during the Israel-Hamas war],” Hinkle asked.

“I have no idea about his intentions to mention this number. But officially, there are 2.3 million-plus Palestinians in the Gaza Strip,” Naim said.

Hinkle was hoping Naim would confirm Trump’s mistaken assertion, that there were now 1.7 million people in Gaza, so that he, Jackson Hinkle, could then assert that, given the population figure for Gaza before the war began of 2.1 to 2.3 million, there must have been a steep drop since then, and surely that was evidence of “genocide.” Unfortunately for Hinkle, Basem Naim — remarkably for a member of the Hamas nomenklatura — told the truth, that there were 2.3 million people now in Gaza.

The senior Hamas official added that around 200,000 Palestinians have fled the Gaza Strip to other areas for safety reasons both before and after the current war. He claimed that many Palestinians left for academic or professional reasons….

Still worse for Hinkle’s attempt to have him buttress the “genocide” claim, Basem Naim explained that about 200,000 Gazans had left the Strip, thus diminishing the population inside Gaza. But they left, he insisted, for safety reasons, and not in order to escape an ongoing “genocide.” And it was not only safety they sought abroad; Gaza has a sky-high unemployment rate, and many of the young left for study in universities abroad and to take advantage of professional opportunities.

The total number of Gazans killed now stands at 48,000. Of those, at least 20,000 were members of Hamas. Historically, 800 people die in Gaza each month from diseases and accidents, and thus, over the past 16 months of fighting, we can calculate that 12,800 Gazans have died from non-combat-related causes. And we won’t even count all the people in Gaza who died from rockets and missiles that were launched by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) toward Israel, but fell to earth inside Gaza. The IDF believes that at least 10% of the Hamas and PIJ rockets and missiles have misfired; many have killed Gazan civilians. Let’s not attempt to count the Gazans killed by the terror groups’ “misfires.” We can calculate the total number of civilians who died because of the fighting as follows: 28,000-12,800 = 15,200. Do the deaths of 15,200 people, out of a total population of 2.3 million, sound like “genocide” to you?

And do we have any evidence that the IDF has ever committed “genocide”? In 1949, there were 160,000 Arabs in Israel. By 2025, that number is now well over two million. “Genocide”? In Gaza, when Israel took over the territory in 1967, 400,000 Arabs lived in the Strip. By 2005, when Israel pulled completely out of Gaza, its Arab population had more than tripled, to 1.3 million. Is that “genocide”? In Judea and Samaria, there were 900,000 Arabs in 1967, when Israel took over that territory after the Six-Day War. Now there are three million. Again, I have to ask: “Is any of this genocide”? You know the answer to that.

Naim is confirming what many Israelis now realize. The war in Gaza is not only with Hamas, but with most of those wrongly identified by the mainstream media as “innocent civilians.” Hundreds of those “innocent civilians” accompanied Hamas into Israel on October 7, 2023. They came to join in the fun, to watch — and possibly participate in — the rapes and tortures and murders. They certainly did a great deal of looting at the kibbutzim. More of those “civilians” ran beside the flatbed trucks and cars and motorcycles carrying helpless Israeli hostages back to Gaza, beating them as they passed slowly by. Later, released hostages have explained, they were sometimes taken to be kept in the houses of “innocent civilians,” where they were kept, some to be exploited as domestic workers or as sex slaves. The “innocent” civilians were not so innocent as we like to think. Naim is right: the Palestinian Arabs, and not just Hamas or PIJ, are full of hatred both for Israelis and for Jews.

Basem Naim tells one truth about Hamas, though he conceals another. He says that the goal of Hamas is the complete destruction of the Jewish state, and its replacement by a 23rd Arab state “from the river to the sea.” He does not say what the fate of Israeli Jews will be; he leaves that unsaid. But it is clear from the Hamas Charter, and from many hundreds of statements made by Hamas leaders over many years, that the Jews now in Israel are either to be killed or to be expelled. None will be left alive in “Palestine.”

Naim added that the Oct. 7 attacks — in which roughly 1200 people were killed in southern Israel and 250 were abducted as hostages — were a justified response to Israeli aggression. He denied that the brutal and unprovoked slaughter of Israeli civilians was “initiated from our side.”

So those Israeli children in the kibbutzim who were decapitated, those Israeli family members who were tied together with wire and burned alive, those Israeli girls who were subject to mass rapes, those mothers who saw their children killed, and had their breasts slit off before they were murdered, those men who had their genitalia cut off, and their eyes gouged out, while they were still alive — all that constituted, in Basem Naim’s view, a “justified response” to “Israeli aggression.” What aggression did Israel commit in Gaza? Every single Israeli was pulled out of the Strip in 2005. Since then Israel had been supplied both electricity and water to the Gazans. The Israelis had provided jobs inside Israel, at wages four to five times what they could earn in Gaza, to 19,000 Gazans.

Hinkle has an extensive history of spreading unsubstantiated and false claims about Israel. Like many anti-Israel critics, he has repeatedly asserted that the Jewish state has committed a “genocide” in Gaza as revenge for Oct. 7. However, Hinkle has gone further than other anti-Israel commentators, oftentimes lauding the Hamas terrorist group as a “resistance” organization and celebrating Iran’s April 2024 missile attacks against the Jewish state.

Hinkle has referred to the anti-Israel outrage following Oct. 7 as a personal “godsend,” which allowed his X/Twitter follower count balloon from roughly 400,000 to over 2.3 million in the span of a few months.

Hinkle’s anti-Israel rants posted on X since October 7, 2023 have greatly increased the numbers of those who follow him on the site. These new followers share Hinkle’s loathing of Israel, and enjoy calling for its disappearance; he to see it destroyed, and he has also attracted those who do not hide their antisemitism. He’s encouraged all of these nauseating people to follow him on Twitter.

Hinkle’s virulent anti-Israel stance long ago crossed over into outright antisemitism. He praises the steadfastness of the Palestinian “resistance,” and has not uttered a word of condemnation of the atrocities — rapes, tortures, mutilations, murders — carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023. He’s taken the side of the Iranian dictatorship run by fanatical mullahs, that is an enemy not just of Israel, but also of America, the “Great Satan,” and has been posting messages on X calling for people to declare their solidarity with “IRAN in the face of ISRAELI TERRORISM.” He is also fond of the Russian despot, Vladimir Putin, whose invasion of Ukraine he praises, and has defended what is America’s most dangerous current enemy, the Chinese Communist Party. He has praised Julius Malema, a black South African anti-white racist who inflames his followers by calling upon them to “kill the farmer, kill the Boer,” and sings a song whose lyrics contain such lines as these: “These people, when you want to hit them hard, go after a white man, kill their women, kill their children.”

Jackson Hinkle now has over two million followers on Twitter. He’ll continue to lie and spew his hatred, but at least in this one encounter with Hamas’ Basem Naim — who inadvertently undermined his attempt to prove Israeli “genocide” in Gaza — the hateful Hinkle came a cropper.