A large number of retired American military leaders, as well as experts in the law of war, have just released a collective letter denouncing the claim that the IDF is committing “genocide” in Gaza. More on their refutation of that claim can be found here: “Over 75 retired US military leaders, legal experts reject Gaza genocide allegations,” by Idan Kweller, Jerusalem Post, October 7, 2026:
More than 75 senior retired US military leaders and legal experts rejected allegations that Israel committed genocide in Gaza in an open letter released Wednesday, on the third anniversary of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre.
The letter, organized by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), concludes that the genocide allegation is unsupported by the facts and does not meet the legal definition of genocide.
Among the signatories are former senior US military officers who commanded American forces in combat. Drawing on their military and legal experience, they argue that civilian casualties, however severe, do not in themselves establish the specific intent required for a finding of genocide.
According to the signatories, Israel has neither demonstrated an intent to destroy Palestinians as a group nor conducted its military campaign in a manner consistent with such an intent.
“Accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza is obscene,” JINSA President and CEO Michael Makovsky said. “It egregiously distorts the truth, the facts, and the law.”
Makovsky said the former commanders and lawyers who signed the letter understand both “the realities of war” and what he described as the unprecedented measures Israel has taken to limit civilian casualties.
The letter cites a series of measures taken by the IDF during the war, including advance warnings, evacuation instructions, protected corridors, tactical pauses, legal reviews of potential targets, and decisions to cancel strikes when civilians were present.
The IDF has made a tremendous effort, by dropping millions of leaflets, sending millions of text messages, and making millions of robocalls, as well as using the “knock-on-the-roof” technique, to warn civilians away from sites about to be targeted. It has also created evacuation corridors, along which Gazans can travel to “safe spaces” that have been created, places where those evacuees can be assured the IDF will not attack, as the tent city at Al-Mawasi.
Those precautions, the signatories argue, have at times required Israeli forces to relinquish tactical advantages and expose their own personnel to greater risks….
When Israel warns civilians away from targets, it is at the same time warning Hamas of impending IDF attacks, allowing its fighters either to escape, or to remain and set up ambushes for IDF troops about to enter an area. Thus the IDF, as it continues to warn Gazan civilians away from targets, also puts its own soldiers at greater risk. It’s a price it is willing to pay, in order to minimize harm to civilians, and for which it deserves gratitude.
The letter does not include details as to the number of Gazan civilians who have been killed due to combat. It turns out to be about 20,000, a figure arrived at by subtracting from the total dead — 73,500 according to Hamas itself — both the number of Hamas fighters killed (25,000, according to the IDF), and the 24,000 Gazans who died from accidents and disease during the past three years (the historical data shows that in Gaza, 8,000 people die each year of diseases and accidents), and the number of Gazans, estimated to be between 3,000 and 5,000, who died from rockets that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad launched from Gaza, but instead of landing in Israel, misfired and fell inside the Strip, killing civilians. The most deadly example of such misfiring was the PIJ rocket that, instead of landing in Israel, fell on the parking lot of the Al-Ahli Hospital, killing 371 civilians. In Gaza, roughly 20,000 civilians died from combat, and 25,000 Hamas combatants died. The civilian-to-combatant ratio, then, is 20,000:25,000, or less than 1:1. The American military men might have included such information in an addendum to their letter, noting that the UN has said that in all the wars fought since 1945, the average civilian-to-combatant ration has been 9:1; in Afghanistan, the Americans reduced that ratio to 4:1, and in Iraq to 3:1. But no army has managed to achieve what the IDF has, in reducing that ratio to just below 1:1.
The signatories also distinguish between statements made by Israeli political officials and the conduct of the IDF. They condemn inflammatory rhetoric by Israeli politicians but argue that such statements cannot, by themselves, substitute for evidence of genocidal intent in the conduct of military operations.
The wild remarks of two Cabinet ministers, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, in the aftermath of the October 7 attack, that “Gaza should be entirely destroyed,” were expressions of unhinged fury. It was never the intention of either the government of Israel or of the IDF to carry out such a policy. There has never been any evidence of an IDF “intent” to commit genocide.
The generals and legal experts are outraged at the baseless charge of genocide flung at the Jewish state. They know what a tremendous effort the IDF makes to minimize civilian casualties, especially difficult when the enemy embeds itself among the civilian population, in schools, hospitals, mosques, and apartment buildings. But they are also alarmed at the prospect that this expansive definition of “genocide,” a word being so wantonly applied to describe the Gaza operation, despite the palpable want of intent by the IDF, could in the future be used against the American military. The bar for proving “genocide” would be lowered, no longer requiring intent, so that whenever there are large numbers of civilian casualties, “genocide” would be charged and believed by all too many people who dislike the United States. One can already foresee those UN General Assembly resolutions denouncing America for its “genocide” if it dares to attack Iran again, and kills a few thousand Iranians.
Taffy says
“More than 75 senior retired US military leaders and legal experts rejected allegations that Israel committed genocide in Gaza in an open letter released Wednesday, on the third anniversary of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre.”
One doesn’t need to be a meteorologist to know which way the wind is blowing, and one does not need to be a chicken to know a rotten egg. One certainly doesn’t need to be a military “expert” to say that Israel’s response to the October 7th atrocities and massacre is not genocide in any sense of that word.
The problem arises when persons of authority or prestige, e.g. Mamdani or Francesca Albanese, lie and “call evil good, and good evil; put darkness for light, and light for darkness; put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” Isaiah 5:20. As soon as the first entity or person does it, the snowball rolling down the ski trail soon becomes the size of a house and is generally unstoppable.
The UN is so effed up, that it eats up any anti-Israel sentiment, amplifies it, and then spews it out as official edict, and it facilitates its actions by making shocking appointments such as putting Iran on a human rights committee. The Court of International Justice is another example of evil. Perhaps that’s why neither The US nor Israel agreed to be governed by it. These entities and individuals feed off of each other until they form a pillar of consensus that rings true to the uninformed non-thinking masses.
So, the 75 retired US military leaders, legal experts who reject Gaza genocide allegations are correct, they are farting against thunder, and shoveling s**t against the tide of metastatic cancerous public opinion.
Emilie Green says
If Israel is conducting genocide, it’s doing one piss-poor job of it. Maybe it should open a dialogue with Turkey which knows more than a thing or two about conducting genocides.