In the flood of accusations levelled at Israel since October 7th, four words get thrown around constantly, and understood correctly almost never: “Genocide,” “Apartheid,” “War Crimes,” and “Proportionality” — GAWP. Virtue-signalling activists, filmmakers like the two behind “NAZA,” B-grade celebrities, and musicians with fading careers have all climbed aboard the GAWP bandwagon, repeating accusations they have never bothered to test against the law or the facts.

It is worth pausing to ask what these terms actually mean, and whether they apply to the conduct of the IDF. I write with the added perspective of having served in an IDF PALMAR medical extraction unit since the start of this war, watching firsthand, through the soldier’s eyes, what is happening on the ground. What I have witnessed does not resemble genocide, does not resemble apartheid, does not resemble war crimes, and does not resemble a disproportionate response. It resembles something closer to the opposite: a democracy fighting, under enormous restraint, against an enemy that has openly declared its intent to destroy it.

International law defines war crimes with specificity: deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure such as airports or nuclear facilities; tunnelling into another state’s territory to murder or kidnap civilians; using protected sites like schools, hospitals, and mosques to store munitions or launch attacks; breaching agreed ceasefires; recruiting child soldiers; using civilians as human shields; and firing rockets indiscriminately at civilian populations. Read that list again. Nearly every item on it describes Hamas’s own conduct, not Israel’s.

The protected status of a school or hospital is not unconditional. both Colonels John Spencer, the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, and Richard Kemp CBE, former British commander of forces in Afghanistan, have explained that when a military has credible reason to believe such a site is being used to store weapons or fire on soldiers, it legally........

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