The New York Times Finally Admits Israel Is Committing Genocide In Gaza.

After , years of denial, the New York Times finally admits the obvious.

New York Times Finally Calls Gaza A Genocide.

Since Ocotber of 2023, the New York Times, America’s so-called “paper of record,” has refused to call the Israeli genocide in Gaza what it is: a genocide.

This finally changed today, with the paper publishing an article by the well-respected Israeli-American professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, Omer Bartov, titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”

Bartov began writing the article by acknowledging that when Israel began to destroy Rafah in 2024, it meant they were acting on their genocidal rhetoric that they began spewing in October of 2023.

He wrote:

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.”

Bartov documented the openly genocidal rhetoric used by Israeli officials writing, “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.’”

He noted that Israelis’ conduct in Gaza has matched this openly genocidal rhetoric, with the goal clearly being the erasure of Palestinian life from the Gaza Strip.

As he put it “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.”

He wrote that his “inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people”.

Despite acknowledging that he was reluctant to acknowledge the fact that Israel was committing genocide, he wrote that it was the only conclusion he could come to, writing “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.”

Omer Bartov also argued that the denial of the Gaza genocide will make it harder for any genocide in the future to be stopped, writing “The continued denial of this designation by states, international organizations and legal and scholarly experts will cause unmitigated damage not just to the people of Gaza and Israel but also to the system of international law established in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, designed to prevent such atrocities from happening ever again. It is a threat to the very foundations of the moral order on which we all depend.”

He documents how Israeli conduct in Gaza is designed to prevent the re-establishment of Palestinian life in Gaza, writing:

In fact, the systematic destruction in Gaza not only of housing but also of other infrastructure — government buildings, hospitals, universities, schools, mosques, cultural heritage sites, water treatment plants, agriculture areas, and parks — reflects a policy aimed at making the revival of Palestinian life in the territory highly unlikely.

According to a recent investigation by Haaretz, an estimated 174,000 buildings have been destroyed or damaged, accounting for up to 70 percent of all structures in the Strip. So far, more than 58,000 people have been killed, according to Gazan health authorities, including more than 17,000 children, who make up nearly a third of the total fatality count. More than 870 of those children were less than a year old.

More than 2,000 families have been wiped out, the health authorities said. In addition, 5,600 families now count only one survivor. At least 10,000 people are believed to still be buried under the ruins of their homes. More than 138,000 have been wounded and maimed.

Gaza now has the grim distinction of having the highest number of amputee children per capita in the world. An entire generation of children subjected to ongoing military attacks, loss of parents and long-term malnutrition will suffer severe physical and mental repercussions for the rest of their lives. Untold additional thousands of chronically ill persons have had little access to hospital care.

He also acknowledged that Israel’s main goal in Gaza is not to “defeat Hamas” but to ethnically cleanse its Palestinian population, writing:

The horror of what has been happening in Gaza is still described by most observers as war. But this is a misnomer. For the last year, the I.D.F. has not been fighting an organized military body. The version of Hamas that planned and carried out the attacks on Oct. 7 has been destroyed, though the weakened group continues to fight Israeli forces and retains control over the population in areas not held by the Israeli Army.

Today the I.D.F. is primarily engaged in an operation of demolition and ethnic cleansing. That’s how Mr. Netanyahu’s own former chief of staff and minister of defense, the hard-liner Moshe Yaalon, in November described on Israel’s Democrat TV and in subsequent articles and interviews the attempt to clear northern Gaza of its population.

He also documented that the Israeli ethnic cleansing plan is similar to the way many historical genocides have started, including in Namibia, the Armenian genocide, and the Nazi Holocaust. As he wrote, “Some might describe this campaign as ethnic cleansing, not genocide. But there is a link between the crimes. When an ethnic group has nowhere to go and is constantly displaced from one so-called safe zone to another, relentlessly bombed and starved, ethnic cleansing can morph into genocide. This was the case in several well-known genocides of the 20th century, such as that of the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa, now Namibia, that began in 1904; the Armenians in World War I; and, indeed, even in the Holocaust, which began with the German attempt to expel the Jews and ended up with their murder.”

He criticized Israel for using the memory of the Nazi Holocaust to justify the modern Holocaust in Gaza, instead of using it as a lesson in the importance of stopping genocide. He wrote, “To this day, only a few scholars of the Holocaust, and no institution dedicated to researching and commemorating it, has issued a warning that Israel could be accused of carrying out war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or genocide. This silence has made a mockery of the slogan ‘Never again,’ transforming its meaning from an assertion of resistance to inhumanity wherever it is perpetrated to an excuse, an apology, indeed, even a carte blanche for destroying others by invoking one’s own past victimhood.”

He also called out Israel for weaponizing the memory of the Holocaust to justify genocide in Gaza by claiming that Hamas is Nazis and that all Palestinians are collectively guilty. As he put it “Israel, created in the wake of the Holocaust as the answer to the Nazi genocide of the Jews, has always insisted that any threat to its security must be seen as potentially leading to another Auschwitz. This provides Israel with license to portray those it perceives as its enemies as Nazis — a term used repeatedly by Israeli media figures to depict Hamas and, by extension, all Gazans, based on the popular assertion that none of them are ‘uninvolved,’ not even the infants, who would grow up to be militants.”

He sharply criticized those who claim people who accurately call the genocide in Gaza a genocide are “anti-Semitic”, writing, “Discrediting genocide scholars who call out Israel’s genocide in Gaza as antisemitic threatens to erode the foundation of genocide studies: the ongoing need to define, prevent, punish, and reconstruct the history of genocide. Suggesting that this endeavor is motivated instead by malign interests and sentiments — that it is driven by the very hatred and prejudice that was at the root of the Holocaust — is not only morally scandalous, it provides an opening for a politics of denialism and impunity as well.”

Israelis Admit Netanyahu’s “Humanitarian City” Is A Concentration Camp.

There has also been more and more admission by Israeli officials that the plan announced by Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz and supported by Benjamin Netanyahu to force 600,000 Palestinians, and eventually all of Gaza’s population into a so-called "humanitarian city” built on the ruins of Rafah in the South of Gaza amounts to building concentration camps used for ethnic cleansing.

An article written by the editorial board of Haaretz, a leading newspaper in Israel wrote “The support given by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the criminal plan being promoted by Defense Minister Yisrael Katz, involving the construction of a ‘humanitarian city’ on the ruins of Rafah, which would incarcerate all the enclave's residents, is a moral and historic nadir for the State of Israel and the Jewish people. No matter how they try in Israel to wrap this move with laundered epithets, they are talking about a concentration camp.”

The article went on to note, “It appears that in Israel, they believe that it's sufficient to attach the label ‘humanitarian’ to convert every act into a legitimate one. Just like the term ‘the most moral army in the world’, which is no longer connected to what IDF soldiers are doing, they're now trying to present a concentration camp to be used for the transfer of population as the most moral one in the world”.

The outlet also noted that these concentration camps will be used for a “second Nakba”, referring to the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that led to the creation of Israel in the first place.

The outlet wrote, “The Gaza war has no military or diplomatic objectives, other than unacceptable ones: a second Nakba and/or a ‘voluntary’ transfer of all Palestinians.”

This assessment was even shared by the former Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert.

The Guardian wrote , :

The ‘humanitarian city’ Israel’s defence minister has proposed building on the ruins of Rafah would be a concentration camp, and forcing Palestinians inside would be ethnic cleansing, Israel’s former prime minister Ehud Olmert has told the Guardian.

‘It is a concentration camp. I am sorry,’ he said, when asked about the plans laid out by Israel Katz last week. Once inside, Palestinians would not be allowed to leave, except to go to other countries, Katz said.

The paper also noted that Olmert admitted the point of this plan was to ethnically cleanse Gaza, writing “When they build a camp where they [plan to] ‘clean’ more than half of Gaza, then the inevitable understanding of the strategy of this [is that] it is not to save [Palestinians]. It is to deport them, to push them and to throw them away. There is no other understanding that I have, at least.”

New York Times Damage Not Undone.

While it is positive now that the New York Times is publishing articles telling the truth about Gaza, the paper still has blood on its hands.

This is not only for not publishing scholars or experts- until now- who correctly say there is a genocide in Gaza, but also for actively publishing propaganda to justify the genocide.

The worst example of this is when the New York Times laundered the “mass rape” claim in their now fully debunked story “screams without words”.

The United Nations Human Rights Council found that this claim was used “to mobilize support for the ISF military operations in the Gaza Strip and continue the war, referring to Hamas as ‘a rapist regime’ that has weaponized sexual violence as a means of terrorizing the Israeli population while ‘the international community remains silent.’”

It also found that the mass rape claims in part laundered by the New York Times were used to justify real mass rape of Palestinian detainees, writing “The Commission’s investigation shows that members of the ISF have been impacted by such messages (of mass rape which caused a) sharp increase in sexual violence against Palestinian women and men fueled by similar desire to retaliate”

While the New York Times finally publishing an article telling the truth about Gaza is a positive development, it still does not undue the damage the paper has done in covering up and even justifying the genocide.

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