OPINION:
Recently, on his YouTube show Zeteo, Mehdi Hasan directly and explicitly asked Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, why he hadn’t charged Israel with genocide.
The answer: “It would be a reckless prosecutor to move simply because of clamor. You move based upon evidence.”
So the ICC’s chief prosecutor, on the flagship show of the genocide narrative’s most energetic media advocate, maintained that the evidence for Israeli genocide is unfounded.
Visibly flustered, Mr. Hasan pressed him. Hasn’t there been evidence in Gaza? Mr. Khan wouldn’t budge.
The filing speaks for itself. There is no evidence.
What makes this especially significant is that Mr. Khan is no friend of Israel. He rushed to prosecute Israeli leaders after Oct. 7, 2023. He handed Israel’s enemies a propaganda gift before the bodies of Hamas’ victims were even counted
If ever there were a prosecutor on Earth motivated to make a genocide charge stick against the Israeli government, it is Karim Khan.
Mr. Hasan pushed back that “pretty much every expert” says it’s a genocide. Mr. Khan didn’t blink.
“I will not move,” he said. “It would be a reckless prosecutor to move simply because of clamor.”
Clamor. That’s all there is.
Mr. Khan is not alone in his conclusion that there was no case of genocide. Alice Wairimu Nderitu, the Kenyan jurist who served as the United Nation’s Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, explicitly stated that Israel’s operations in Gaza did not meet the definition.
Interestingly, the U.N. later declined to renew her contract, essentially firing its own expert for refusing to perpetuate the genocide propaganda.
And there is my own experience. In the summer of 2025, I was fresh off the plane from leading a senior congressional delegation to Israel. The “genocide” push was at a fever pitch as rumors of famine in Gaza circulated
A family member asked me, pointblank, if I believed the Israelis were intentionally starving the Gaza residents. Her mind was already made up, but she wanted to put me on the record.
“No,” I replied. “I not only don’t believe it, I know for a fact it is not true.”
I had just traveled to the Gaza border, a couple of miles from the Erez aid crossing point. The senior Israel Defense Forces leader for humanitarian aid to Gaza met me there. He provided evidence that the Israelis allowed 600 aid trucks into the strip every day.
The Gaza population could comfortably survive on 300 trucks.
What happened to all the aid? Hamas. The terrorist organization was stealing the aid and selling it on the black market at inflated prices.
The tragic truth is that any Gaza residents going hungry were doing so because their “government” stole their aid and profited from it.
That’s not very convenient for the genocide narrative.
None of this is a coincidence. The genocide charge was never a legitimate legal argument. It was always a political weapon, deployed to delegitimize the one successful democracy in the Middle East and to erode the American alliance that has sustained it.
The strategy is obvious. Brand Israel a genocidal state and the U.S.-Israel alliance becomes indefensible. Every campus protest, faculty letter, celebrity pronouncement and sympathetic news segment is both a byproduct and advancement of that goal.
But the argument is empty. The prosecutor says so. The U.N.’s own genocide expert said it before losing her job over it.
The damage, however, has been devastating. For two years influencers irresponsibly hurled “genocide” to generate viral content, and no one bothered to fact check. They believed it.
Few American alliances have proven as strategically durable or as morally grounded as the one with Israel. It has outlasted every war, every crisis, every change of government on both sides.
It would be a tragedy if this critical partnership finally broke due to a bogus charge that even its most motivated prosecutors cannot substantiate.
• Joan Leslie McGill is executive director of the U.S.-Israel Education Association (USIEA), where she leads efforts to educate and engage policymakers on the strategic importance of the U.S.-Israel relationship.
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