Investigative journalist and author Gerald Posner released a new paper on Monday examining whether the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel meets the legal standard for genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention. Posner previously authored a legal primer titled Genocide for Dummies, examining whether Israel’s military campaign in Gaza met the genocide threshold under international law.
Now, he has turned his focus toward the actions of Hamas on October 7.
In his new analysis, titled "The Genocide Case Against Hamas," Posner addressed initial threshold questions regarding duration and non-state entities. He noted that the Genocide Convention does not require a prolonged campaign, explaining that a single act committed with the requisite intent can legally qualify, and that international tribunals and courts have previously established that genocide can be committed by non-state groups and individuals rather than governments alone.
To support this, Posner cited several historical examples, including the individual convictions of private individuals like Georges Rutaganda during the Rwandan genocide, the actions of the army of the Republika Srpska, a non-state entity, during the Srebrenica massacre, and the landmark genocide conviction of an ISIS member in Frankfurt for atrocities committed against the Yazidis.
The paper outlined the two core components required under international law: the actus reus, or guilty act, and dolus specialis, which is the special intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such. Posner explained that while mass killing, torture, and sexual violence clearly satisfy the prohibited acts under the convention, the more complex determination centers on proving special intent.
To evaluate intent, Posner examined both written records and public statements from Hamas leadership alongside the empirical evidence of what occurred on the ground. He highlighted explicit evidence from the 1988 Hamas Covenant, pointing to Article 7 and its quotation of a hadith calling for Muslims to fight and kill Jews, as well as statements from leaders such as Yahya Sinwar promising in 2022 to come in a “roaring flood” and Fathi Hammad calling in 2019 to “attack every Jew on the planet.”
Posner also cited recordings of participants during the attack, including a terrorist who boasted to his parents on the phone that he had killed 10 Jews with his bare hands. Posner contrasted these records with arguments raised by defenders of Hamas who point to a “Document of General Principles and Policies” published in May 2017, an updated text released to improve the group’s public image and present a fresher, less militant face.
Posner argued this 2017 text was merely a public relations rebrand driven by external pressures, such as Egypt designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization and Qatari hosts pushing for a softened public posture, noting that the document never formally repealed the 1988 covenant and that Hamas’s physical conduct on October 7 matched the earlier eliminationist rhetoric rather than a limited political dispute.
Proceeding to evaluate the empirical evidence of what actually happened, Posner examined the prohibited acts under Article II of the convention, focusing primarily on killing and causing serious bodily or mental harm.
Posner analyses Hamas violence against civilians
Posner analyzed the attack on more than 20 civilian communities, noting that at places like Kibbutz Be’eri, Kfar Aza, and Nir Oz, terrorists went house to house, set homes on fire, and executed families, with recovered-body data showing 80% of bodies at Be’eri had been tortured.
He argued that recovery data, recovered operational documents instructing fighters to “kill as many people as possible,” and targeted selections of Jewish communities demonstrate that civilian deaths were a central aim rather than an afterthought.
Addressing the Nova music festival, where 364 people were killed, Posner argued that, even if the site was found rather than pre-targeted, the subsequent hours of hunting survivors across open fields reveal the explicit intent carried by the attackers.
Furthermore, Posner addressed counter-arguments regarding non-Jewish casualties, such as foreign laborers and Arab citizens, noting that international jurisprudence, such as the rulings from the Rwanda tribunal, establishes that genocide does not require 100% of victims to belong exclusively to the protected group, provided the group itself was the object of the attack.
Posner then evaluated serious bodily and mental harm under Article II(b), analyzing extensive documentation of torture, mutilation, and conflict-related sexual violence.
Citing findings from UN Special Representative Pramila Patten and local crisis center reports, Posner outlined evidence of rape and gang rape committed systematically across multiple locations, noting that recovered instructions found on dead terrorists even included phrases in Hebrew demanding victims take off their pants.
Comparing these findings to the legal precedent where the Rwanda tribunal recognized systematic sexual violence as an act of genocide, Posner argued that these actions carried no military value other than harm directed at the group.
Can a single-day massacre count as genocide?
To test whether a single-day massacre can legally constitute genocide, Posner conducted a detailed comparison with the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. While acknowledging numerical differences, Posner applied the legal principle established in the Krstic case that genocidal intent and impact must be judged against the specific community within the perpetrators’ reach.
He pointed out that at the level of the individual communities attacked, such as Be’eri and Nir Oz, the proportion of residents killed or abducted matched or exceeded the community-level destruction seen at Srebrenica.
Posner contended that, while the Srebrenica massacre was an administrative operation conducted over days, Hamas’s inability to kill more people during a fast-moving, multi-hour raid is constrained only by opportunity under the Krstic doctrine, especially given explicit orders to maximize casualties.
Posner draws attention to international double standard
Posner pointed out how international bodies and human rights organizations applied the genocide framework exclusively to Israel while omitting any formal analysis of the October 7 attack.
He detailed how the International Association of Genocide Scholars issued an August 2025 resolution declaring Israel’s military actions in Gaza to be genocide while entirely ignoring its own earlier peer-reviewed policy brief by scholar Sara Brown, which had concluded that Hamas’s attacks constituted genocidal violence.
Posner similarly highlighted that the UN Commission of Inquiry scrutinized public statements by Israeli leaders like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant as direct evidence of genocidal intent, yet failed to apply that exact same standard to Hamas’s explicit charter provisions, Sinwar’s pledge to wipe out Israel, or Fathi Hammad’s call to slaughter Jews globally.
Furthermore, he noted that while Amnesty International and B’Tselem formally accused Israel of genocide, their reports on October 7 categorized the atrocities merely as war crimes or crimes against humanity without testing them against the Genocide Convention.
Posner argued that applying a standard selectively to one party while ignoring it for another invalidates the standard entirely.
Posner concluded by challenging critics with a falsifiable standard, demanding that anyone seeking to refute the conclusion of genocide must provide a valid military rationale for executing infants and the elderly, explain away the explicit house-to-house execution instructions, reconcile the 1988 Covenant’s eliminationist text with the physical reality of the massacre, and offer an alternative interpretation for leaders’ explicit public pledges to repeat the violence again and again.