siiiigh. let's talk about genocide.
genocide actually can occur while the population goes up! even if it goes up faster than the non-genocided population! that's actually happening right now with the uyghur genocide (i think i've cited this before). for this reason, the comparison is disingenuous.
but the critical component is intent.
intent to destroy as a people group.
intent to destroy that, as far as I can tell, isn't fucking there at the level needed. as far as I can tell, one could make an equally good or better case for the bombing of dresden as a genocide. the scholarly debate, to the extent it exists, is on if it's a war crime.
let's look at the UN definition of genocide:
[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
committed with intent to destroy. That is the critical component. The death rate shows nothing about genocide without intent to destroy. In fact, this has been somewhat acknowledged, tacitly, by the attempts to broaden the definition of genocide and citing Palestinians' words as evidence of intent to genocide Palestinians without comment by major NGOs.
(a) Killing members of the group;
Which, considering that urban warfare sucks and the death rate seems to be lower than expected for urban warfare, doesn't really seem to be happening here. Yes, people are dying, but there just doesn't seem to be evidence they are dying because Israel is trying to destroy Gazans as Gazans/Palestinians. If they were, they wouldn't warn them to get the hell out of the way. They wouldn't even briefly float the idea of evacuating Gazans to other countries.
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Arguably there, but I don't think unusually or disproportionally so, nor with intent to destroy them. Gaza is more densely populated than New York City.
In point of fact, in 2023, the Palestinian child mortality rate was lower than the world average:
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
They have let in aid, they have set up aid checkpoints, they kinda fucking suck at this.
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Again, they suck at this. It's hard to tell from the scale, but Palestinian maternal mortality actually declined from 2022 to 2023, going from 17 to 16 (16, for reference, is the same as China and Iran, and lower than the US's). It's worth noting this is specifically maternal things, not (say) a mother dying from an airstrike.
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
In 2024, the IDF transferred 70 orphans from Gaza to...
...the West Bank. This is actually the only real evidence I could find of any child transfer by Israel in, admittedly cursory, searching; the results were mostly about the Bibas family.
For more, see this 300-page report from the Begin-Sadat Center concluding it is not a genocide.
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