[soldthat]

A significant number of non-combatants have been killed in every single war that has had a significant number of casualties. Ever.

The fantastical utopian war is Israel is expected to wage, where only militants get killed doesn’t exist. The closest thing in history we have to that is Israel’s beeper operation against Hezbollah, but that is a one-off that isn’t easily repeated.

[defrost]

That's one single criteria, another is the espression of intent, there are more.

See, for example:

  By May 2024, the Israel Defense Forces had ordered about one million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah — the southernmost and last remaining relatively undamaged city of the Gaza Strip — to move to the beach area of the Mawasi, where there was little to no shelter. The army then proceeded to destroy much of Rafah, a feat mostly accomplished by August.

  At that point it appeared no longer possible to deny that the pattern of I.D.F. operations was consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised that the enemy would pay a “huge price” for the attack and that the I.D.F. would turn parts of Gaza, where Hamas was operating, “into rubble,” and he called on “the residents of Gaza” to “leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere.”

  Mr. Netanyahu had urged his citizens to remember “what Amalek did to you,” a quote many interpreted as a reference to the demand in a biblical passage calling for the Israelites to “kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings” of their ancient enemy. Government and military officials said they were fighting “human animals” and, later, called for “total annihilation.” Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Parliament, said on X that Israel’s task must be “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.” Israel’s actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group.

  My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.

  This is not just my conclusion. A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide. So has Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty International. South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

~ I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.

Israel born, Zionist raised, Jewish, former IDF soldier, Genocide Scholar, Holocaust historian Omer Bartov

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/opinion/israel-gaza-holoc...

And there are others, equally qalified, that hold the same opinion.

You might want to take it up them given your narrow focused single topic account dedicated to just opinionating "Gaza is not a genocide".

I suspect you'd not even acknowledge it's genocide adjcent and argue all wars carry the same elements despite evidence to the contrary.

I personally see little chance of an interesting thoughtful discussion developing here.

[tguvot]

"army ordered civilians to evacuate from warzone so it's genocide" is not as great argument as you think.

if army had prevented civilians to leave city and then bombed it to the ground, you would have something to talk about.

[defrost]

If you care to take the time to read critically and carefully you'll note it's not _my_ argument.

It's one part of the greater case made by several Jewish holocaust and genocide scholars.

They each have the same general approach of having multiple criteria and going through weightings for / against each factor.

The argument I would make is that this is not some casual quick ill considered process that would conclude every war is a genocide and that all participants in WWII would be considered as committing genocide - as was asserted by the green account I was responding to.

To address your singular observation ... their argument isn't simply based on that single order, it's in conjunction with statements of intent and an entire body of orders.

If you're interested in replying to these arguments then a small amount of effort should find you points of contacts and names for the people advancing the assertion that the current Israeli administration is practicing genocide with respect to Gaza.

I'd suggest and urge you to read their arguments in full before doing so, I've merely quoted a short extract from an opinion piece written by a single person.

IIRC there's a weighty body of submissions put forward when presentations were made to the UN.

[tguvot]

there are no statements of intents with exception of mistranslated and partial hebrew quotes.

i read arguments in full. it mix of cherry picked news, mistranslated/irrelevant quotes and total avoidance of "uncomfortable facts" that go against the narrative.

you surely read on the other side few of 400 page long documents that debunk it ?

[muwtyhg]

Could you be more specific in your criticism? As an observer of the conversation, I see the OP making a bunch of substantiated claims/observations and your response is "that's cherry-picked or misleading" but you never refuted a single specific thing they mentioned.

[ceejayoz]

> "army ordered civilians to evacuate from warzone so it's genocide" is not as great argument as you think

The trick, though, was to keep doing it, over and over, expanding the area each time, so people never stop having to evacuate, or give up and stay in place to die.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c299pl8j8w7o

"More than three-quarters of Gaza's territory have been designated as evacuation zones by the Israeli military since the war against Hamas began in October, an analysis by BBC Arabic has found."

At a certain point, it becomes plain old ethnic cleansing.

[FunnyUsername]

How could relocation within the same territory be ethnic cleansing? By that logic, I was ethnically cleansed by our fire department due to an approaching wildfire. Ethnic cleaning also wouldn't imply genocide anyway.

[ceejayoz]

> How could relocation within the same territory be ethnic cleansing?

So the Warsaw ghetto wasn't ethnic cleasing because they stayed in Poland?

> By that logic, I was ethnically cleansed by our fire department due to an approaching wildfire.

Did they leave people of certain ethnicities out of the evacuation?

[FunnyUsername]

> So the Warsaw ghetto wasn't ethnic cleasing because they stayed in Poland?

I suppose you have a point, my framing was off. But the IDF asking people to leave a dangerous area is much closer to a fire evacuation than a ghetto where residents are broadly denied freedom of movement.

> Did they leave people of certain ethnicities out of the evacuation?

Neither did. IDF couldn't care less about someone's skin color either, just that they're in a dangerous area. Jews would have been asked to leave just like anyone else, had they not already been ethnically cleansed from Gaza in 2005.

[tguvot]

so not genocide ?

"doing it over and over again", you mean war moves around and not restricted to same 1 square kilometer.

and what kind of ethnic cleansing it is, if all population remains in gaza.

the trick is, to shift goalposts. if you bomb city with population: genocide. if you order people to evacuate it's ethnic cleansing.

if you want to see how ethnic cleansing actually looks, i'll suggest to take a look at what azeri did a while ago.

[ceejayoz]

There's no single agreed upon definition. Many of them include ethnic cleansing as a form, using wording like "the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_definitions

> if you want to see how ethnic cleansing actually looks, i'll suggest to take a look at what azeri did a while ago.

Gaza saw 90% displaced, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Nagorno-Karabakh_... says 99%. With 288 deaths, versus at least 60k in Gaza. I'm inclined to see them both as ethnic cleansing? And shitty?

[tguvot]

here we go. you finally used (by mistake, but we won't count this against you) appropriate verb: "displaced". population in gaza is displaced but still in gaza.

While on the other side population of Nagorno Karabakh was ethnically cleansed from Nagorno Karabakh and had to leave to Armenia.