In the small local newspaper, The News-Gazette (Lexington, VA), a university professor is spewing big lies. In a July 15 op-ed titled, “Gaza And Genocide,” the words “Facts Matter” appear before the author’s name, Chris Gavaler, a professor at Washington and Lee University. We couldn’t agree more. That’s why it is so alarming to see so many inaccuracies in Gavaler’s op-ed, which accuses Israel of committing genocide.
Though CAMERA reached out to the paper with a correction request, the article remains available on its website.
Consider several of Gavaler’s errors The News-Gazette has chosen to stand by.
Indiscriminate Bombing?
Many of Gavaler’s allegations unravel with the slightest bit of commonsense analysis of his own claims.
For example, he accuses Israel of “indiscriminate” bombing in Gaza. He also tries to contrast Israel’s campaign with the German bombing of London in WWII, writing: “Where Germany dropped 18,000 tons of explosives on London during World War II, Israel had dropped 100,000 tons on the Gaza Strip – an area less than a quarter of London’s size.”
The comparison defeats his own argument.
The Imperial War Museum estimates that the Germans dropped 12,000 tons of explosives on London, killing 30,000. That’s 2.5 deaths per ton of explosives. Even accepting Gavaler’s figure of 18,000 tons of explosives, that’s still 1.7 deaths per ton of explosives.
Gavaler asserts that Israel dropped 100,000 tons of explosives in Gaza that killed 60,000 Gazans. That’s 0.6 deaths per ton of explosives. Put another way, the German bombs were 3 to 4 times deadlier than the Israeli ones.
The disparity is even more notable when taking other key factors into account. Gavaler himself acknowledges that Gaza is more densely populated. And while Londoners were able to take shelter in the London Underground network, Hamas built their tunnels underneath civilians to shelter its terrorists, using Gazans as human shields.
These factors suggest the deaths per ton of explosives should’ve been substantially higher in Gaza, not significantly lower.
If Israel truly was engaged in indiscriminate bombing, it had another critical advantage over the Germans. Whereas London had the Royal Air Force and anti-air weapons to defend its skies, the Israeli Air Force faces no comparable impediment toward executing its goals.
Other World War II urban bombing campaigns show even more starkly what an indiscriminate bombing campaign looks like. Using commonly cited figures, the deaths per ton of explosives amounted to approximately 4 in Hamburg, 8-9 in Dresden, and over 50 in Tokyo.
Put together, these figures don’t suggest indiscriminate bombing on the part of Israel. In fact, they suggest precisely the opposite.
Israeli Intent?
Perhaps the most confusing part of Gavaler’s article is when he recites the legal definition of genocide, which requires acts “committed with intent to destroy” an ethnical group as such, only to then accuse Israel of having the intent to grow the population of Gaza too much:
The 141-square-mile area [of Gaza] is less than a quarter the size of Rockbridge. Including Lexington and Buena Vista, our population is about 36,000. Gaza has over 2 million people, almost half children. The Gaza population was only 80,000 in 1948. The civilian concentration is the direct and intended result of decades of forced displacements and blockades. (Emphasis added)
Does Israel want a lot of Palestinians in Gaza, or does it want to kill them all? Gavaler seemingly can’t decide.
Aid for Gaza
A July 20, 2026 infographic from Israel’s COGAT detailing the amount of food that has entered Gaza since the start of the ceasefire in October 2025.
Another straightforward lie in Gavaler’s piece: “Israel continues to block humanitarian aid.” But since October 2025, “approximately 1.78 million tons of food” has entered Gaza. That’s approximately three times the World Food Programme’s benchmark to meet humanitarian needs in the territory. Gavaler doesn’t need to take Israel’s word for it either; the U.N. itself is tracking how much aid it is delivering into Gaza (notably, the U.N. cannot and does not track all sources of aid, making its data partial).
Is Gaza “Leveled”?
Gavaler claims that “90% of the Gaza Strip has been leveled by bombing.” This, too, is flatly false. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), an already questionable source for data, has claimed that the air campaign has damaged 92% of housing units to some extent, but it has destroyed less than 37% of them. According to most recent estimates by the U.N. Satellite Centre, “approximately 81% of all structures in the Gaza Strip are damaged,” but again, the figure for “destroyed” is substantially less. The rest of the figure includes tens of thousands of “possibly damaged” structures.
Gavaler is counting any amount of damage to a building, no matter how minor and perhaps even nonexistent, as equivalent to being “leveled.” That is dishonest.
Antisemitism & Gavaler’s Sources
Finally, it’s worth noting the “authorities” the author appeals to for the proposition that there is a “genocide.” They amount to a U.N. commission of inquiry (COI) and a statement by a handful of U.N. special rapporteurs.
Gavaler implies that the Israeli government is cynically referring to their reports as antisemitic libel, “like it calls all condemnations of its military actions in Gaza.”
But once again, Gavaler picked unfortunate examples. Israel isn’t the only one to have accused the COI of antisemitism. Dozens of countries have condemned the COI’s members for antisemitism. One commissioner once suggested that Jews control social media. Another pushed the antisemitic dual loyalty trope, accusing Jewish organizations of being agents of Israel. The lead “U.N. expert” in the statement cited by Gavaler has, among her many other outrageous remarks, claimed that the “Jewish lobby” has “subjugated” the United States.
Those with histories of indisputably antisemitic rhetoric are not reliable sources when it comes to leveling accusations against the Jewish state.
When the facts don’t fit, but the allegation is made anyway, that’s a libel.
Gavaler is right that facts matter. It’s a shame that he chose not to deal with them in leveling his own anti-Israel libel.