After Hamas invaded Israel two years ago to behead babies, rape women, torture men, burn people alive, and take hostages, they gleefully promised to do so repeatedly.

Israel sought to prevent that. They went into Gaza to root out the barbarians from their underground tunnels. In the process, some people got killed.

Sometimes that was because Hamas put civilians in harm’s way. Sometimes they did so for the purpose of hiding behind them, as when they set up their military headquarters in civilian hospitals. Sometimes they did so for the very purpose of getting the civilians killed in order to increase the overall body count.

Israelis often went out of their way to avoid civilian casualties. Sometimes they issued warnings to civilians about an upcoming military mission, even though they thereby lost the element of surprise and also endangered their own soldiers. Israel literally tried to protect the enemy’s people more than the enemy themselves did. 

Tragically, civilians did die, despite the efforts of the Israelis and due in part to the counter-efforts of Hamas. Hamas sees civilians as expendable propaganda tools in their war on the Jews.

As Hamas intended, the worldwide Left took this Hamas propaganda and ran with it. They seized on the casualty figures to claim that Israel was conducting a “genocide” against the Gaza residents.

Let’s apply some simple math to that claim.

Hamas reports that Israel killed over 60,000 Gazans out of a population of over 2,000,000. (That figure from Hamas is clearly overstated, but even if it’s a fraction of that, it’s a tragedy.) Let’s accept Hamas’ overstated figure for purposes of this discussion.

To judge this purported “genocide,” we need to know the net reduction in population. In the gold standard of genocides, the population of Jews in Europe was reduced by two-thirds in the Holocaust – about six million people were murdered. To this day, the Jewish population in Europe is less than half what it was in 1939, while the overall population of Europe has nearly doubled.

Back to Gaza. The birthrate in Gaza is very high, about 3.9. That means women in Gaza have an average of 3.9 children over their lifetimes. That produces a doubling of the population about every 20 years. (For comparison, the birthrate in the United States and most of Europe is less than 2.0 – which results in an ever-declining population.)

Given this birthrate of 3.9, how many births occurred in this Gazan population of 2,000,000 over the two-year period since Hamas started this war?

You can do the math (exponential equations, anyone?) or you can ask AI to do it. The answer is around 140,000.

In summary, even if you accept Hamas’ exaggerated figure of 60,000 deaths, the 140,000 births in Gaza more than offsets that. In fact, it means that the population of Gaza increased by a net of about 80,000 over the last two years.

As genocides go, the Israelis’ “genocide” of the Gazans was conducted ineptly and failed miserably. It’s almost like the Israelis didn’t even intend a genocide.

In contrast, the Gazans and their Leftist colleagues on American college campuses and elsewhere are fond of chanting “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.” (Chants have always been a specialty of the Left.)

That river is of course the Jordan River east of Israel, and that sea is the Mediterranean west of Israel. If the Israelis were expelled from the River to the Sea, they would be exterminated.

It’s the Left that is seeking a genocide – the second in less than a century.