Amnesty International’s latest accusation — the most recent installment in its ongoing crusade against the Jewish state — is “genocide.” In a December 2024 report, the group charged that Israel is in breach of the Genocide Convention.
Amnesty’s ugly conclusion hinges on the question of intent. As it must. Genocide under international law is defined as certain acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” (The pivotal role of intent is discussed, by lawyers and other Latinophiles, with the terms mens rea and dolus specialis.)
For the report’s charge to be valid, then, it cannot merely note that the fighting, an unprecedented hybrid of urban combat and tunnel warfare, has taken a steep toll on civilians. Rather, it has to prove that Israel, in the war that Hamas began on Oct. 7, has intended the physical or biological destruction of Gaza’s Palestinians, as a group.
As Israel gained ground in Gaza, the rate of civilian casualties there dropped steadily.
With that in mind, Amnesty quotes statements by Israeli officials that, we are told, reveal Israel’s intent to wipe out Gaza’s Palestinians. What Amnesty actually exposes — though that’s perhaps too strong a word to describe business as usual — is the bad faith and outright absurdity of its analysis.
Here we’ll look at the report’s misrepresentation of quotes by Benjamin Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant, and Isaac Herzog. Of the various officials cited in Amnesty’s report, Prime Minister Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Gallant were the most significant in guiding the conduct of the war. And while the report admits that Israeli president Isaac Herzog holds a largely ceremonial role, Amnesty treats his words as important enough to highlight in its executive summary, which highlights Herzog as the foremost example of an official who, supposedly, regards Palestinian civilians as “the enemy to be destroyed.”
According to Amnesty International, rhetoric by these officials “points to the existence of an intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, as such.” They “appeared to call for, or justify, genocidal acts.” They were “apparently calling for or justifying the destruction of Palestinians in Gaza.”
But a look at the source material makes clear that Netanyahu, who just after the Oct. 7 massacre cited a well-known biblical passage about the killing of ancient Israelites, was referring to Hamas as a brutal enemy of the Jews. Gallant, too, is guilty of no more than maligning the Hamas attackers. And Herzog’s words just after Oct. 7, a bitter expression of frustration about support for Hamas in Palestinian society, were wrested from a briefing in which he spoke repeatedly about adhering to international law and protecting Palestinian civilians. Amnesty brazenly manipulated these statements — manipulated their audience — in order to manufacture support for its “genocide” slur.
Gallant on Hamas “Animals”
Two days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, as Yoav Gallant announced a total (albeit short-lived) blockade on Gaza, the defense minister declared: “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”
A child’s bed in Kibbutz Nir Oz stained with blood after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre.
It was an obvious reference to Hamas — and not a particularly unique one. As truckloads of Israeli corpses continued to stream into forensic centers while tiny Israeli children were hidden away as hostages, President Joe Biden called Hamas “animals,” described their violence as “brutality,” and charged them with “pure unadulterated evil.” The American defense secretary cited the group’s “bloodthirsty” cruelty. Relatives of hostages referred to Hamas as “human monsters” and “savages.” El Savador’s president called the group “savage beasts” and “animals.” Albania’s minister of foreign affairs described the terrorists as “beasts.” Estonia’s foreign minister later condemned Hamas’s “inhuman” terror. And so on.
To Amnesty, though, Gallant’s words were no less than evidence of genocide. When the defense minister said the army was fighting animals, they insist, he didn’t mean Hamas, but rather had “referred to Palestinians” collectively. The report continues: “His use of dehumanizing language implied that Palestinians were ‘subhuman’ and therefore undeserving of basic necessities.”
A child’s bedroom in Kibbutz Be’eri after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre.
Even if we were to assume, for the sake of argument, that Gallant’s meaning was unclear, a look at the record would quickly resolve any ambiguity. One day after he spoke the words condemned by Amnesty, for example, Gallant used the same phrase while addressing soldiers gathered near the ruins of Israeli villages. “You saw what we are fighting against,” he said after referencing Hamas’s atrocities. “We’re fighting human animals. This is the ISIS of Gaza. This is what we are fighting.”
Amnesty acknowledges that this statement was about Hamas. But to protect its predetermined conclusion from inconvenient facts, the group absurdly insists that the identity of the “animals” Gallant viewed the country as fighting had changed overnight. The report even insinuates that Gallant’s latter words were an ex post facto attempt to tie the phrase “human animals” to Hamas:
In a meeting with soldiers a day later, then Minister of Defense Gallant used the phrase “human animals” again, this time directing it at Palestinian fighters, prompting Israeli explanations that his previous words had been misinterpreted, and that they were directed at Palestinian fighters responsible for the killing of Israeli civilians. (Emphasis added throughout)
Unfortunately for Amnesty, Gallant had been consistent, before and after the comment Amnesty condemns as a reference to all Palestinians, in characterizing who Israel was fighting.
- On Oct. 7, 2023: “The Hamas terrorist organization made a grave mistake this morning and launched a war against the State of Israel. IDF troops are fighting the enemy at every location.”
- Again on Oct. 7: “Today we have seen the face of evil. Hamas launched a criminal attack, without distinction between women, children, and the elderly. It will realize very quickly that it made a grave mistake.”
- On Oct. 8: “Hamas has become ISIS in Gaza. In this war we are fighting against a murderous terrorist organization that harms the elderly, women, and babies. We will fight it as we fight criminal terrorists, and we will win.”
- Again on Oct. 8: “We will exact a very heavy price from Hamas. He will pay for what he did.”
- On Oct. 9: “The Defense Minister emphasized that the main goal is the elimination of all Hamas targets,” the Knesset Channel reported.
- Also on Oct. 9, Amnesty’s quote: “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”
- On Oct. 10: “You saw what we are fighting against. We’re fighting human animals. This is the ISIS of Gaza.”
- Also on Oct. 10: “Today we focus on destroying the ‘ISIS’ of Gaza and defending our citizens.”
- And again on Oct. 10: “We will subdue Hamas.”
Amnesty’s spin — that “human animals” is a genocidal reference to all Palestinians — is unsustainable and unserious.
Children of Light and Children of Darkness
Amnesty likewise manipulated another of Gallant’s references to the fight against Hamas.
“This is a war between the children of light and the children of darkness,” the defense minister said on Oct 15, 2023, using a common Israeli idiom to describe the fight against evil. It is a “racist and dehumanizing” metaphor, Amnesty counters.
Video of Gallant’s words in context shows otherwise. After praising the bravery of soldiers who on Oct. 7 rushed into Israeli villages to fight off Hamas gunmen, he continued:
There is a war here that is a war between the children of darkness and the children of light. We are at the edge of a culture that doesn’t accept our existence here, savages, predators, who murdered our soldiers, our children, our citizens. The fighters here, together with their friends, together with the air force, and intelligence, and the navy, will eliminate the Hamas organization. There won’t be a situation where they kill Israeli citizens, children and women, abduct them, and we sit quietly. We will reach all the terror infrastructure. We will reach all the tunnels. We will reach all the Hamas operatives. And until we eliminate them, we will not complete the mission.
This will be a powerful war. It will be a deadly war. It will be a precise war. And it will be a war that will change the situation forever.
Perhaps Amnesty was thrown off the trail because it can’t imagine viewing Hamas, whose ethos led to the worst slaughter of innocent Jews since the Holocaust, as a force of darkness. (Amnesty does, however, imagine that to even say Oct. 7 was the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust is to “dehumanize Palestinians.”) Still, the context of Gallant’s words make clear that his war against the children of darkness is the war against Hamas. So much for Amnesty’s racism charge.
Netanyahu on the Children of Darkness
Benjamin Netanyahu, too, referred to a war between the children of light and children of darkness. And Amnesty characterizes this, too, as a “racist and dehumanizing” metaphor and “an apparent reference to Palestinians in Gaza,” as a whole.
Yet here again, Netanyahu’s broader remarks leave no doubt about his actual meaning, and reveal Amnesty’s bad-faith spin. On Oct. 16, 2023, the prime minister said:
This is a moment of genuine struggle against those who have risen up against us to destroy us. Our goal is victory – a crushing victory over Hamas, toppling its regime and removing its threat to the State of Israel once and for all.
There are many questions about the disaster that befell us ten days ago. We will investigate everything thoroughly. We have already begun to apply immediate lessons. However, now we are focused on one goal: Uniting our forces and storming forward to victory.
To this end, determination is required because victory will take time. There will be difficult moments. There will be pitfalls. Sacrifice will be necessary. But we will win because this is our very existence in this region, in which there are many dark forces.
Hamas is part of the axis of evil of Iran, Hezbollah and their minions. They seek to destroy the State of Israel and murder us all. They want to return the Middle East to the abyss of the barbaric fanaticism of the Middle Ages, whereas we want to take the Middle East forward to the heights of progress of the 21st century.
This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle. We saw this in the horrors that the reprehensible murderers perpetrated in Kibbutz Be’eri, in Kfar Aza, in the other communities of the area adjacent to the Gaza Strip, and in the killing field of young people at a festival in Re’im.
Many people around the world now understand who stands against Israel. They understand that Hamas is ISIS. They understand that Hamas is the new version of Nazism. Just as the world united to defeat the Nazis and ISIS, so too will it unite to defeat Hamas.
Netanyahu was no less clear in a Nov. 3, 2023, letter that stated in part:
In their name and on their behalf, we have gone to war, the purpose of which is to destroy the brutal and murderous Hamas-ISIS enemy, bring back our hostages and restore the security to our country, our citizens and our children.
This is a war between the children of light and the children of darkness.
A war, in other words, on Hamas.
Netanyahu on Amalek
Under the subheading “Calls for the Annihilation of Gaza,” Amnesty states that Benjamin Netanyahu “referred on at least three occasions to the biblical story of the total destruction of the people of Amalek….”
The prime minister’s words are evidence of Israeli “genocide,” Amnesty argues, because by invoking Amalek Netanyahu supposedly called for “the total destruction of Gaza, making no distinction between civilians and Hamas as a military target.”
It is a strident conclusion by Amnesty. But even more so, it is a bizarre one, because the very report that decisively casts Netanyahu’s words as a call for indiscriminate destruction also describes those words as ambiguous:
[Netanyahu’s comments] generated much debate about the intent implied in his words. In the context of proceedings before the ICJ, South Africa claimed that the speech referred to verses in the Bible that presented God’s command to kill all the people of Amalek. Israel argued that it invoked a passage ordering Jews never to forget the evil acts of their enemies.
And again:
It is unclear from these statements alone whether Prime Minister Netanyahu intended only to refer to the verses of the Bible that are an injunction to remember the acts of the people of Amalek, or also to allude to those passages that call for the people of Amalek to be attacked and for none of them, not even children, to be spared.
In other words, they declare with certainty that Netanyahu called for annihilation — that he intended genocide — based on a statement whose meaning they admit to not understanding. Such is the substance of Amnesty’s report.
And it gets worse, because Amnesty’s ambiguity is as fake as its certainty. The report feigns ignorance about which biblical verse Netanyahu quoted even though the truth is plainly revealed – where else? – in the Bible.
In its footnotes, Amnesty links the two possible meanings for Netanyahu’s words to two possible biblical sources. A verse in the Book of Deuteronomy, they assert, merely “order[s] Jews never to forget the evil acts of their enemies.” A verse in the Books of Samuel, by contrast, “presented God’s command to kill all the people of Amalek.”
So which verse could Netanyahu have been referring to?
The report relays one of the prime minister’s quotes as follows: “‘Remember what Amalek did to you.’” With countless searchable Bibles online, it doesn’t take an intrepid researcher to find that isn’t from the Books of Samuel.
Indeed, Amnesty’s other example is printed in the report as follows:
‘Remember what Amalek did to you’ (Deuteronomy 25:17).
Mystery solved. Netanyahu had quoted the verse that, in Amnesty’s own reading, is a call for Jewish remembrance and not wanton killing.
That doesn’t stop Amnesty from further flailing. Here, they attempt to salvage their argument by pointing to two completely meaningless “discrepancies”:
It is unclear from these statements alone whether Prime Minister Netanyahu intended only to refer to the verses of the Bible that are an injunction to remember the acts of the people of Amalek, or also to allude to those passages that call for the people of Amalek to be attacked and for none of them, not even children, to be spared. The official English language translation of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech on 28 October 2023 suggested that the quote referred to the injunction to remember. However, Amnesty International’s comparison of this translation with the official Hebrew transcript of the speech, on the one hand, and the video recording, on the other, revealed two discrepancies. A parenthetical phrase mentioning the exact verse from the Bible implied in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s reference to the story of the people of Amalek (Deuteronomy 25:17) was added to the English translation despite not featuring in the speech or its transcript in Hebrew. Meanwhile, a sentence referring to a “command” was omitted from the translation despite the fact that Prime Minister Netanyahu clearly said it, raising questions as to whether the Israeli authorities were intentionally attempting to remove an ambiguous term that could be relevant to an inference of intent.
The full sentence removed from the translation reads: “We were commanded”. As a result, a more accurate translation of the relevant passage of the speech would have been: “Remember what [the people of] Amalek did to you. We were commanded. We remember and we fight.” While the word “command” features in the verses of the Bible relating to the order to kill all the people of Amalek, it is not present in those ordering Jews to remember.
Again: Netanyahu’s quote is from Deuteronomy. It does not appear in Samuel. The suggestion that an (accurate) parenthetical citation somehow changes the source of the quote betrays not only a lack of integrity on Amnesty’s part, but utter desperation. (Remember: all of this is meant as evidence of genocide.)
And what of Amnesty’s Talmudic parsing about the word “command”? The word does appear in the relevant chapter of Samuel. But this is hardly the Jewish-themed subterfuge that Amnesty suggests. The passage from Deuteronomy is one of Judaism’s 613 commandments. The passage from Samuel is not.
Bible aside, only seconds after Netanyahu referenced Amalek in one of the statements cited by Amnesty, the prime minister added: “The IDF does everything to avoid harming non-combatants. I again call on the civilian population to evacuate to a safe area in the southern Gaza Strip.” Amnesty, which insists that Netanyahu’s reference to Amalek was a call to make “no distinction between civilians and Hamas,” concealed that part of the prime minister’s speech.
Herzog on Palestinian Civilians
In the executive summary of Amnesty’s report, the authors allege that Israeli president Isaac Herzog “call[ed] for the destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, using racist and dehumanizing language that equated Palestinian civilians with the enemy to be destroyed.” His remarks, the report adds, “implied that all Palestinians in Gaza were legitimate targets that could be either directly eliminated through military attacks or denied access to essential services and humanitarian aid.”
Here, for a change, the offending statement actually was about Gazan civilians. It is relayed in the executive summary as follows:
In a widely publicized statement made at a press conference on 12 October 2023, President Isaac Herzog held all Palestinians in Gaza responsible for Hamas’s attacks: “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved.” While he maintained that his words had been misinterpreted, the slogan “there are no uninvolved civilians” was later scrawled near settlements in the occupied West Bank, demonstrating the statement’s spread.
The words Amnesty quotes here, and the somewhat longer comments excerpted elsewhere in the report, were part of an unscripted response to a question from the press. By now it might not come as a surprise that Amnesty failed to quote inconvenient words from the prepared portion of Herzog’s briefing:
We are not retaliating. We are targeting. We are targeting the enemy in order to uproot the capability of the enemy to carry on with its campaign of destroying Israel — trying to destroy it as part of an empire of evil which has its claws all around us, from north with Hezbollah, from the south, from Hamas and Islamic Jihad. … So Hamas has carried out war crimes, crimes against humanity. It has chosen to conduct its war its war against Israel hiding, as always, within populated areas, using the population as a shield, using mosques, shops, houses, anything of civilian life as their center of activity. And that is why we’re operating to uproot this infrastructure. We are very cautious in the way we operate. The IDF uses all the means at its disposal in order to reduce harm to the population. For example, many resources are invested in gathering intelligence and in trying to locate the enemy separately from civilian population, in evacuating the civilian population from the center of the battle, in warning citizens, in monitoring [the] humanitarian situation. But Israel will defend its people, and will do whatever it takes, with an iron fist, to change the reality.
These remarks decisively refute Amnesty’s charge that Herzog called “for the destruction of Palestinians in Gaza,” that he “equated Palestinian civilians with the enemy to be destroyed,” or that he cast them as “legitimate targets.”
Indeed, already in his response to the reporter’s question, Herzog clarified, “We are working, operating militarily according to the rules of international law, period.” It was one of several references by Herzog to Israel’s commitment to international law.
And he had another opportunity to clarify when a journalist asked about the apparent friction between some of his words:
I’m a little confused. Because on one hand you say that Israel abides by the rules of war and is very careful to avoid the loss of civilian life in the Gaza Strip. But at the same time you seem to hold the people responsible of Gaza responsible for not trying to remove Hamas …. And therefore by implication that makes them legitimate targets.
Herzog immediately interjects: “No, I didn’t say that. I did not say that. I want to make it clear.”
Amnesty acknowledges this rejoinder, explaining that “President Herzog clarified at a later point in the press conference, in response to a question by another journalist, that he did not say that, by implication, all Palestinians were legitimate targets.” But they are clearly unmoved, as the report uses nearly the exact same language to insist the opposite: Herzog “implied that all Palestinians in Gaza were legitimate targets.”
It is absurd indifference to the facts. But such is the substance of Amnesty’s report.
Having proven nothing, Amnesty again throws words at the problem. The report insists that it doesn’t matter if Herzog repeatedly clarified his words. Why? It’s hard to say. Per Amnesty:
These explanations, however, failed to address the clarity with which the original statement implicated Gaza’s civilian population, with President Herzog fully aware that it would be broadcast by the world’s media. Amnesty International examined the dissemination of his statement through video clips from the press conference that were posted on social media and found that it spread across different platforms, thereby suggesting that it reached a wide audience. One of the posts that Amnesty International traced had achieved 7.1 million views on X by 30 June 2024. While the post would have undoubtedly been shared as an example of incitement against Palestinians by voices critical of Israel, the slogan “there are no uninvolved civilians” was later scrawled in public places along bypass roads that connect Jewish settlements to each other, on watchtowers used by Israeli soldiers and other infrastructure.
It is a mess of commentary. What does “fail to address the clarity” even mean? Does this purported failure somehow undo Herzog’s clarity when saying, “I did not say that. I want to make it clear”? Was he unclear when he spoke plainly and pointedly about Israeli efforts to protect civilians?
Agnes Callamard, now Amnesty International’s secretary general, insisted in 2013 that Shimon Peres told the New York Times that Israel murdered Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. He did not. Callamard has not deleted or appended a correction to her social media post.
And if the president was “fully aware” that his response to one question would be broadcast by the world’s media, why wouldn’t he reach the same conclusion about his clarifying response to a subsequent question, let alone his prepared remarks about protecting civilians?
Does the viral spread of one social media post somehow show that Herzog intended to disseminate his harsher words, but not his statements about protecting civilians? Even as Amnesty treats the online spread of the comment as damning evidence, it obliquely hints at the fact that the quote was widely disseminated precisely because anti-Israel activists wrested it from its context and shared it as supposed evidence of bad-will. (The viral social media post Amnesty mentions is from an openly pro-Hamas account.) How does graffiti on a watchtower change the fact that the online spread of the quote was largely by anti-Israel propagandists?
With Herzog’s words, as with those of Gallant and Netanyahu, Amnesty is simply flailing — and in flailing to prove genocide, it draws attention to how spectacularly it is failing to prove genocide. It is striking that this report, with its warped analysis about the intent betrayed by these leaders, represents Amnesty’s best shot. After months of preparation — countless man-hours, copious pages and footnotes, and untold expenditure — we’re presented with verbose mumbles about why Deuteronomy might actually be Samuel; why Jewish texts embraced by respected Holocaust museums are actually genocidal slurs; why criticism of Hamas dehumanizes ordinary Palestinians, and why it’s best we ignore inconvenient comments naming Hamas as the war’s target and Gaza civilians as those who should be protected.
Such is the substance of Amnesty’s report.