In an appeal for donations from November in the Austrian weekly newspaper Falter, Amnesty International chose the banner “we call genocide by its name.” Amnesty’s recently published report about the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 puts their claim to the test.

The report came out over a year after the organisation’s report accusing Israel of genocide and just a few days after a similar report recording the attack by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on the Zamzam displaced persons camp in Sudan, which occurred between 11 and 13 April 2025. Amnesty has provided no explanation why it took more than two years to compile a document based almost entirely on video footage that was available from 8 October 2023.

Reporting by the Free Press suggests the delay may have been the result of opposition within the organisation. High-ranking Amnesty representatives worried in internal communications from August 2025 about “the real risk the report could be used to divert attention from the current crisis [in Gaza] or justify ongoing genocide”.

In keeping with protocol established by other human rights organisations, Amnesty accuses Hamas and other Palestinian “armed groups” of crimes against humanity, but carefully avoids the term “genocide” in all references to October 7. Each of the over 30 occurrences of the word in Amnesty’s report refer exclusively to Israel and serve only to remind potentially disappointed readers that the story’s main villain – while temporarily set aside – has not been forgotten.

Yet, a genocide report about October 7 would have been so much easier to produce. The terror attack featured all the hallmarks of genocide that Israel’s conduct in Gaza lacked.

Genocidal Rhetoric

While Amnesty in its report about Israel instrumentalised out-of-context citations and bad faith interpretations to make it seem like leading Israeli politicians had said things they did not actually say, on the Hamas side no such intellectual dishonesty would have been required.

Genocidal and dehumanising rhetoric is so ubiquitous that it is difficult to find a Hamas official who has not engaged in it. We need not look any further than the preamble of Hamas’s founding charter:

Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.

Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.

Article 7 of the charter leaves no room for doubt what the obliteration would look like:

[…] the Islamic Resistance Movement [Hamas] aspires to the realisation of Allah’s promise […]: ‘The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’

[…] the Islamic Resistance Movement [Hamas] aspires to the realisation of Allah’s promise […]: ‘The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’

The sentiment is frequently reflected in speeches by leading Hamas members. For example:

• Fathi Hamad, member of the Hamas Political Bureau and former interior minister, said in 2018: “We are looking forward to […] the cleansing of Palestine of the filth of the Jews” and to the establishment of an Islamic caliphate “once the nation has been healed of its cancer – the Jews.” A few weeks later he called on Muslims to kill “Zionist Jews” wherever they find them.
• Yahya Sinwar, Hamas leader and principal architect of October 7, said in 2017: “Over is the time Hamas spent........
  

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