Hamas is guilty of genocide inflicted on the Palestinians in the Gaza-Israel war following its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. It is doing so by engineering the death of Palestinians and destruction of their structures via both oppression and extortion, which it then attributes to Israel. Consequently, Hamas, in first place, bears responsibility for the suffering of Gazan Palestinians.
While this view is unconventional, a set of facts underlies the premise that Hamas is responsible for Palestinian genocide. These facts emerge from a detailed documented history of Arab and Muslim (and others’) antizionism.
By definition, antizionism rejects the existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish state. Built into this rejection is the rejection of the two-state solution. The existence of an antizionist state and a Zionist one is a problem, not a solution.
Antizionism precedes the establishment of Israel. Arab states rejected the plan of partition of British Mandate Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, adopted by a United Nations General Assembly resolution on Nov. 29, 1947, leaving as victims not only Israelis, but also Palestinians. That victimization continues to this day.
The victimizers include the reluctant Arab states who have concluded peace agreements with Israel yet fail to unequivocally condemn antizionism. They replicate antizionist propaganda at international institutions and refrain from confronting antizionism at home.
The initial purpose of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was, as its name states, relief and works. Relief was meant to address the immediate plight of those who had left, fled or were expelled from British Mandate Palestine following the Arab states’ rejection of the UN partition plan and their 1948 invasion of Israel. UNRWA works were meant to integrate the eligible population into the territories to which they had come.
Except for Jordan, the governments of the states to which UNRWA refugees came did not provide refuge. Contrariwise, UNRWA became a captive instrument of antizionists: those eligible for UNRWA registration were neither locally integrated nor resettled, an otherwise standard refugee solution. Instead, they and their descendants were confined to camps and indoctrinated in an antizionism that blamed the existence of Israel for the misery that the host states inflicted on them.
Hamas, which seized control over the Gaza Strip when Israel withdrew and evacuated its citizens from it in 2005, took this enforced misery of Palestinians to an extreme. The Hamas Covenant 1988 states that “death for the cause of Allah [is] its most sublime belief.” Hamas’s goal is achieving Islamic supremacy over the land of Israel. The means – causing the mass killing of Palestinians for which the blame could be shifted to Israel.
Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack was an apex of unrelenting execution of these means. Decades-long tunnel construction underneath civilian sites had turned the Gaza Strip into a gigantic civilian-shielded underground fortress and launch pad for this attack.
After the Oct. 7 provocation, and Israel’s inevitable response, Hamas either prevented Palestinians from fleeing Israeli attacks or fled those attacks with Palestinian civilians. Hamas blurred the distinction between civilians and combatants, failing to wear uniforms, blending within the civilian populations and using civilian structures for military purposes. Hamas diverted humanitarian aid to themselves, glorified martyrdom and claimed that Palestinian deaths that it had engineered were necessary sacrifices.
The Genocide Convention states that acts causing serious harm to members of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, if committed with the intent to destroy the group, in whole or in part, constitute genocide. Hamas has caused serious harm to Palestinians. That harm was caused in pursuit of the ideology of antizionism. By blaming Israel for the deaths of Palestinians that Hamas had caused, Hamas aimed to discredit, demonize and delegitimize the existence of Israel.
There is a legal distinction between intent and motive. For Hamas, the motive is antizionism. The intent is to cause the destruction of Palestinians in sufficient numbers by placing them in the way of the Israeli forces so that the volume of Palestinian deaths would serve antizionist propaganda. This destruction of Palestinians is an intermediate objective where the ultimate objective is the destruction of Israel, to be replaced by an Islamist state. The proper conclusion is that Hamas is attempting to commit, with intent, a double genocide, of both Jews and Palestinians.
David Matas is an international human rights lawyer based in Winnipeg, and senior honorary counsel to B’nai Brith Canada. Dr. Noemi Gal-Or is a public international law lawyer based in Vancouver.
