Israel hasbara genocide in Gaza

Let’s Start With the Number Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

More than 75,000 Palestinians have been violently killed since October 7, 2023. That is not a pro-Palestinian talking point. That is the finding of a peer-reviewed study published in The Lancet Global Health, one of the most respected medical journals on the planet. A household survey of nearly 10,000 individuals found the true death toll was 34.7% higher than official Gaza Ministry of Health figures — meaning the official numbers are actually conservative, not inflated.

Women, children, and the elderly made up 56.2% of those killed. That is not a war against Hamas. That is a war against a civilian population.

And yet, every day, you turn on the TV and see Israel playing the victim.

What Is Hasbara — and Why Does It Matter?

You need to understand one word: hasbara.

It is a Hebrew term that literally means “explanation with manipulation of facts.” In practice, it is Israel’s state-sponsored, professionally coordinated propaganda machine. It shapes the conversation, controls the narrative, and makes sure that no matter what Israel does, the world keeps questioning the other side.

Hasbara is not new. It has been running for decades. After October 7, 2023, it went into overdrive.

Here is how it works in practice:

Victimhood framing: Every Israeli response, no matter how disproportionate, is presented as self-defense against an existential threat. The occupier becomes the victim. The people living under military siege for 18 years become the aggressors.
Emotional manipulation: Israel saturated TV screens and social media with images from October 7 while suppressing, flagging, and removing Palestinian documentation of Israeli atrocities.
Labeling critics as antisemites: Any person, journalist, academic, or politician who dares criticize Israeli policy gets called antisemitic. This is a calculated silencing tactic, not an honest accusation.
The “human shields” lie: Whenever a hospital, school, or refugee camp gets bombed, Israel claims Hamas was using it as a military base. This claim has been used so many times, for so many different targets, that it has become a running joke among human rights lawyers.
Paid digital ads and influencer networks: Israel has run paid Google and Facebook ads targeting global audiences to push pro-Israel narratives, often through third-party organizations that hide direct links to the Israeli government.

A detailed academic study published in 2025 found that Israel’s hasbara strategy “constitutes a more adaptive, emotionally manipulative and digitally embedded system of narrative control,” one that is specifically designed to override critical thinking with emotional responses.

It is not organic. It is not grassroots. It is a machine built and funded by a government committing what the United Nations itself has now called genocide.

Yes, the UN Called It Genocide. Officially.

On September 16, 2025, an independent United Nations fact-finding commission released a detailed report concluding that Israel’s war on Gaza meets the criteria for genocide as defined by the UN Genocide Convention.

This was not a fringe NGO. This was the United Nations.

The report documented:

The killing of tens of thousands of civilians, the majority women and children.
The systematic destruction of vital infrastructure.
Severe restrictions on humanitarian aid used as a weapon of war.
Statements by Israeli leaders that the commission interpreted as genocidal intent — an essential component in the legal definition.

Human Rights Watch called it genocide. Amnesty International called it genocide. B’Tselem — an Israeli human rights organization — called it genocide.

Even a former Israeli army official told journalists that the army itself accepted a death toll of over 70,000 Palestinians.

At this point, denying the word “genocide” is not a position based on facts. It is a position based on politics.

The ICJ Case: South Africa vs. Israel

In December 2023, South Africa filed a formal case against Israel at the International Court of Justice — the highest court of the United Nations — accusing Israel of violating the Genocide Convention.

The court’s initial ruling in January 2024 found it plausible that Israel’s actions could constitute genocide, and ordered Israel to take all measures to prevent genocidal acts. Israel ignored it.

The court later ordered Israel to ensure food supplies reached Gaza, where famine was already spreading. Israel ignored it again.

The court ordered Israel to halt its offensive in Rafah. Israel launched its Rafah offensive anyway.

South Africa filed a 500-page detailed submission in October 2024. Israel’s response was filed in March 2026. Oral hearings are expected in 2027.

The case is still going. And South Africa made clear that even a Gaza ceasefire would not stop it: “We cannot go forward without the healing that needs to take place,” South African President Ramaphosa told parliament.

The Ceasefire That Is Not a Ceasefire

In October 2025, a ceasefire agreement was announced for Gaza. The world sighed with relief. The cameras moved on. Israel kept killing.

From October 10, 2025 to February 10, 2026, Israel violated the ceasefire at least 1,620 times. That is not a typo.

According to the Gaza Government Media Office, those violations included:

Shooting at civilians 560 times.
Military vehicle incursions into residential areas 79 times.
Bombing and shelling attacks 749 times.
Demolition of civilian properties 232 times.
Detention of 50 Palestinians from Gaza.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of “continuing to violate” the ceasefire and said over 500 Palestinians had been killed since the truce began.

After the start of the ceasefire’s second phase in January 2026, at least 125 more Palestinians were killed and 272 wounded in Israeli attacks — documented by Anadolu Agency.

Israel also continued blocking food, medicine, and shelter materials from entering Gaza — a deliberate use of starvation as a weapon of war.

And while all of this was happening, Israel was playing the victim on television.

Your Tax Dollars Are Paying for This

If you are a U.S. American reading this, you need to know something uncomfortable: you are paying for this genocide.

Since October 2023, the United States has committed over $21.7 billion in military aid and arms transfers to Israel. That includes weapons, ammunition, aircraft parts, and direct military financing pulled from emergency U.S. stockpiles in the Middle East.

In January 2026, the U.S. House of Representatives approved $3.3 billion in additional military aid to Israel as part of the Fiscal Year 2026 appropriations act. On the same day, three new F-35I fighter jets landed at an Israeli air base.

In January 2026, the U.S. State Department also approved $6.67 billion in arms sales to Israel, including 30 Apache attack helicopters — the same helicopters Israeli forces use to fire on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

The Quincy Institute’s analysis is blunt: “Without U.S. money, weapons and political support, the Israeli military could not have committed such rapid, widespread destruction of human lives and infrastructure in Gaza.”

The U.S. has also repeatedly used its veto power in the UN Security Council to block resolutions calling for a ceasefire or independent investigations of Israeli war crimes. Every time the world tried to stop the killing through international institutions, Washington stepped in to protect Israel from consequences.

This is not just political support. Legal scholars argue this constitutes complicity in genocide.

Now Israel Is Dragging the Region Into a Wider War

As if Gaza was not enough, the Israeli government — enabled, armed, and protected by Washington — decided to push further.

In late February 2026, U.S. and Israeli forces launched “Operation Epic Fury,” a massive military campaign against Iran. The justification? Stopping Iran’s nuclear program and “Iranian aggression.” The real motivation, according to critical analysts and international legal experts, was to deliver a regime-change strike designed in Tel Aviv and executed with American planes and bombs.

The result has been predictably catastrophic for the region:

Iran’s civilian population has absorbed thousands of casualties from strikes on military, industrial, and infrastructure targets.
U.S. bases in Qatar, Bahrain, and the UAE have been struck by Iranian retaliatory missiles.
Gaza is now more exposed than ever. With global attention consumed by the Iran war, Israel has tightened its grip on Gaza’s crossings, limited humanitarian aid further, and escalated airstrikes — killing six Palestinians, including two children, in a single night in early March 2026.
International pressure on Israel over ceasefire violations has dropped to near zero, because “the political bandwidth required to pressure Israel on Gaza crossing closures or ceasefire violations simply does not exist right now,” as analysts at The Nation described it.

War in Iran is, in other words, serving a very convenient function: it is making the world forget Gaza.

The Pattern That Never Changes

Here is what Israel always does, and has always done:

Commit a violation — settlement expansion, bombing a refugee camp, assassinating a political leader, starving a population.
Claim it was self-defense or a response to a threat.
Activate the hasbara machine — flood media with talking points, accuse critics of antisemitism, produce a counter-narrative.
Play the historical victim — invoke the Holocaust, invoke October 7, invoke any historical trauma to frame every critique as an attack on Jewish existence rather than on specific government policy.
Wait for the world to move on.
Repeat.

Academic research on Israeli victimhood discourse has noted that “feelings of victimization provide justification for violence” and that 84% of Israeli Jews believe the Hamas attack on October 7 justifies current military actions in Gaza — even as those actions have killed over 75,000 people, destroyed 90% of Gaza’s infrastructure, and been labeled genocide by the United Nations.

A government can be the victim of an attack on one day and the perpetrator of a genocide the next. Both things can be true. The tragedy of October 7 does not erase the tragedy of Gaza. It does not justify 75,000 dead. It does not give any state the legal or moral right to starve 2.3 million people.

The World Is Watching — And Starting to Act

Despite all the hasbara, despite all the vetoes, despite all the political cover from Washington, the tide is turning.

Major international human rights organizations have formally called Israel’s actions genocide.
The United Nations itself has made the same determination.
South Africa’s ICJ genocide case is proceeding, undeterred by ceasefires or political noise.
Global boycott movements are growing, hitting Israeli-linked companies and supply chains.
Younger generations in the United States and Europe are breaking decisively with pro-Israel establishment positions, seeing through the hasbara in ways previous generations did not.

Israel can bomb Gaza. It can fire cluster munitions at civilian neighborhoods in Tel Aviv — and yes, it has done exactly that in response to Iranian strikes, using the same weapons it condemned when used against its own people. It can escalate wars across the region and blame everyone else. But it cannot control what 8 billion people can see with their own eyes.

The cameras are rolling. The data is published. The court cases are moving forward.

History is being written right now. And the people writing it are not the ones running the hasbara machine.

Roger Acuna is a Senior Digital Marketing Strategist and the author of The Acuña Angle at RogerAcuna.com. He writes on geopolitics, media literacy, and the intersection of power and narrative.