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I am puzzled by your failure to accept the killing of tens of thousands of Gaza residents as genocide. Your definition seems to make it clear that genocide is: "a deliberate attempt 'to destroy, in whole or in substantial part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such'". Gaza is made up of Arabs, including Muslims and Christians. These are both religious and more importantly ethnic and national groups. Palestinians are an ethnic group different from the majority of Israelis, and finally a national group not allowed to have a nation. Israel continues to indiscriminately kill these people. What is that if not genocide?

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Thank you for allowing me to clarify. "Genocide" has two meanings, a legal one and a colloquial and weaponized one. The first, for which I supplied a formal definition, is operative only when an official body declares that it applies, and then it is operative only for that court. So far, to my knowledge, no court or official body has made a formal finding that Israel has committed "genocide."

But I don't want to split legal hairs here. The deaths of civilians in Gaza is terrible, as are the deaths of innocent people in any war. Their leaders, Hamas, are using them as human shields. Israel is pursuing Hamas under very complicated and difficult conditions (much as U.S. forces pursued Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan). I am convinced that the official policy of the IDF is to minimize civilian casualties in pursuit of their justified military aims, and thus there is no "deliberate" attempt to destroy any group except Hamas. You have certainly seen on the news that the ratio of civilians to fighters who have died is almost unprecedently low, and that many reports of Israeli strikes on civilians are incorrect or misleading (like the latest news out of Rafah, in which a precisely targeted IDF attack triggered a Hamas store of arms near civilians). I am sure that there are tragic mistakes and that some individuals may have gone beyond that, committing actual war crimes - this is always what happens during a war. Israel has said that they will investigate such crimes and I have no reason not to believe that they will. There are 2.2 million residents of Gaza and it appears that anywhere between 10,000-20,000 civilians have been killed. There is nothing here that suggests that a label of "genocide" is appropriate.

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We are at over 40 000 now, mostly civilians including many children. How high does the death toll have to climb before you call it killing a people? And Jewish settlement is next.

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“Mostly.” In most wars, the ratio of civilians to combatants killed is, according to the UN, about 10:1. What is it in this case?

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