The Oct. 7 Question The Human Rights Crowd Never Asked

Three years after Hamas terrorists stormed southern Israel and slaughtered roughly 1,200 people, one veteran investigator says the world’s human-rights establishment has dodged an obvious question: was Oct. 7 itself a genocide?

Gerald Posner, the lawyer-turned-bestselling author of many books, including “Case Closed,” which examines the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and made the book a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history, says yes — and that the international bodies quick to brand Israel genocidal never bothered to check.

“A legal standard is only worth the name if it is applied to every party,” Posner writes in a lengthy new analysis titled “The Genocide Case Against Hamas.”

Posner notes that the UN Commission of Inquiry, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars all ran the 1948 Genocide Convention against Israel. None ran it against Hamas.

Posner first knocks down the claim that terror groups can’t commit genocide. The convention explicitly covers “private individuals,” he points out, and courts have convicted non-state actors before, including a Rwandan militia leader and, in 2021, an ISIS fighter tried in Frankfurt for genocide against the Yazidis.

Hamas fits the ISIS mold “more closely than the usual framing suggests,” he argues.

A single day is enough, too. Duration has never been the legal test, he notes. The heart of genocide is “special intent,” the aim to destroy a group as such. Posner says Hamas supplied the evidence itself.

He cites the group’s 1988 charter, which invokes a religious call to kill Jews hiding “behind stones and trees.” He also cites Hamas official Fathi Hammad’s 2019 rallying cry to attack Jews everywhere, and military chief Mohammed Deif’s Oct. 7 order for supporters without guns to grab “a cleaver, an axe.” Weeks later, politburo member Ghazi Hamad vowed to repeat the massacre “again and again.”

Hamas’ supposedly kinder 2017 policy document was a “rebrand” that never repealed the original charter, he contends.

Words alone aren’t enough, so Posner looks at Hamas’ conduct. Two-thirds of the dead were civilians. Gunmen went house to house through more than 20 communities. At Kibbutz Be’eri, about one in 12 residents was murdered. Recovered documents ordered the terrorists to kill as many people as possible and named a school and youth center as targets.

Posner points to the UN envoy’s findings of rape and gang rape at multiple sites, and to the Rwanda tribunal precedent that treated sexual violence as an act of genocide. He also cites a recorded call in which a terrorist bragged to his parents about killing Jews with his own hands.

While critics say the numbers are too small, Posner counters with Srebrenica, a small town in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, where courts measured the killings against the targeted local community rather than the whole people. Measured that way, deaths in the Gaza border kibbutzim run close to Srebrenica’s one-fifth. And under that case, a killer’s intent is “limited by the opportunity,” so, Posner argues, Hamas killed until the IDF stopped it.

During the Bosnian War, it was a Muslim-majority enclave the UN had declared a “safe area,” guarded by a small Dutch peacekeeping force. In July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces killed about 8,000 Bosnian men and boys. International courts later ruled the massacre a genocide.

The ICC sought to charge Hamas leaders with extermination, not genocide, which Posner calls the “safer ground.” With Yahya Sinwar, Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh dead, he points to Israel’s planned military trials of roughly 300 Nukhba fighters and to cases abroad as remaining routes to a court.

Posner ends with a dare: “First, show me a military rationale,” adding, “Hamas attacked army bases on October 7. Its defenders will argue those attacks were legitimate targets under the laws of war. Explain then why the same operation also sent terrorists into more than 20 residential communities, with written instructions to ‘kill as many people as possible’ and to target a school and a youth center, if the object was military. Show me that the killing of infants and the elderly in their homes served any military purpose.”

“Second, show me that Hamas’s 1988 Covenant was only rhetoric,” he continues. “Hamas says its 2017 document replaced the charter’s call to kill Jews with a struggle against ‘the Zionist project.’ If that is true, explain why the conduct on October 7 looked like the 1988 text and not the 2017 one. Explain why a terrorist called his parents to boast, ‘Your son killed Jews.’”

“Third, show me that Hamas’s leaders were misunderstood. … Fourth, show me that the killing of civilians was not the plan. … Fifth, on sexual violence, let the investigation finish,” he wrote.

He concludes, “That is the standard. It is the same one I set for the case against Israel. The only difference is that no one has yet been willing to apply it here. And until that happens, my conclusion stands: there is a solid case for genocide against Hamas in the October 7 attack.”

More from this network:
Domains for Sale · GOTPeople.org · TheDSAPlatform · The Truth About Socialism

Donate to GOTPeople.org