In January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) released an order effectively stating that some of Israel’s actions in Gaza may amount to genocide. Many others, including Amnesty International, The Lemkin Institute and a United Nations Special Committee, have already concluded that Israel has committed genocide. 

These findings have not been accepted by Israel or its supporters. Instead, they’ve engaged in genocide denial. In doing so, they’ve replicated many of the sorts of arguments used by Holocaust deniers, and for similar reasons.

I won’t bother addressing cruder examples of Gaza genocide denial here, such as that Gazans allegedly look too well fed or happy, or that Israel could have killed all Gazans if it wanted to. Instead, I’ll focus on the sort of denial that has entered mainstream Canadian media, presented as serious news and analysis.

It’s been impossible for all but the most deranged of Israel’s supporters to claim no Palestinian civilians are being killed in Gaza. As such, they’ve sought to distort/downplay what has happened, which if done when discussing the Holocaust is considered a form of genocide denial punishable by up to two years of prison in Canada.

Mainstream sources on Holocaust denial, including the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), state that disputing the fact that around six million Jewish people were killed is a form of Holocaust denial. This method of denial also happens to be how mainstream deniers generally try to dispute findings of genocide in Gaza.

They do so in three main ways: attacking the source of the most commonly cited death count, arguing certain types of deaths should not be counted and using incomplete data to try to cast doubt on the total number of fatalities.

The Source

Some outlets explicitly claim that Gaza’s Ministry of Health’s death count is intentionally misleading because Hamas is the government. They point to Hamas’s ideology and status as a designated terrorist entity in Canada to say anything coming from it is suspicious. In doing so, they try to take advantage of polls finding widespread Canadian disapproval of Hamas. Other outlets that attempt to be more subtle effectively do the same by adding some version of ‘Hamas-run health ministry’ when mentioning the source of the death count in order to signal to readers that it’s supposedly politicized and untrustworthy. This practice is never seen elsewhere. And it’s not justified here either given that the ministry is made up of a wide-range of Palestinian medical professionals, who deny their findings are dictated by Hamas.

Holocaust deniers have historically done the same thing by claiming that the overall death count and particular cases of mass slaughter or death camps were inflated or even staged by the Allies. 

In both cases, the deniers also claim that the party/parties behind death counts want to make the perpetrators look bad, and that therefore their numbers are intentionally inflated. In the case of Gaza, they’ll point to Hamas’s adversarial relationship with Israel. With regard to the Holocaust, the Museum of Tolerance states, “Holocaust deniers argue that Nazi Germany was the victim of a conspiracy, contrived by the Allies to brand Nazi Germany the villain of World War II. They maintain that the U.S. and Great Britain concocted wild atrocity stories about the Nazis to cover up their own war crimes.”

This line of attack effectively argues that the only victims and opponents of genocide that can be trusted are those who do not have an adversarial relationship with the party responsible for the killing. In practice, this means no victims or opponents of genocide can be trusted. 

Regardless, the numbers in both cases have been found to be trustworthy by third-party sources.

Many independent organizations have long track records of working with Gaza’s health ministry to monitor mortalities, and have consistently found its numbers to be trustworthy. In October 2024, Le Monde reported, “Like most humanitarian organizations, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights considers the government source to be reliable. ‘We have been working with the Palestinian Ministry of Health for many years, particularly during previous conflicts. Our assessments are very close to theirs, and in some cases, we even had higher figures,’ its spokesperson assured Le Monde. The assessments carried out by the UN over the last 15 years are more or less similar to the ministry’s figures.”

Academic journals have concluded that there is no evidence of inflated mortality counts. And as the UN commissioner’s spokesperson noted, some have estimated mortality counts far higher than what the ministry has reported. For example, a January 2025 study from The Lancet estimated that the ministry actually under-reported deaths by about 41 per cent from October 2023 to June 2024.

The Nature Of Deaths

Some outlets have alleged that many of Gaza’s dead weren’t killed by Israeli violence, but succumbed to other causes such as starvation, disease and existing medical conditions, and that therefore their deaths shouldn’t be counted. 

Holocaust deniers have done the same thing, pointing to the spread of diseases in concentration camps to claim that even whatever false number of Jewish dead they put forward can’t be attributed solely or even primarily to the Nazis.

If this logic were to be accepted in the case of the Holocaust, it would mean that the official death count would drop significantly as the Holocaust Encyclopedia states that between 800,000 to one million Jewish people “were murdered through deliberate privation, disease, brutal treatment, and arbitrary acts of violence.” It would also mean that perhaps the most well-known victim of the Holocaust, Anne Frank, would not be counted as such.

Of course, this logic should not be and is not accepted, with reputable organizations correctly pointing out that the Nazis were responsible for creating the conditions that led to the spread of these diseases and their enhanced lethality. 

The same is true in Gaza, given that even in relatively normal periods it has been described as an open-air prison occupied and controlled by Israel, which deliberately inflicts conditions to reduce the quality of life for its inhabitants. Of course, things have gotten exponentially worse since Oct. 7, 2023.

A wide-range of international organizations place the blame on Israel for these conditions. For example, Amnesty International concluded, “Israel imposed conditions of life in Gaza that created a deadly mixture of malnutrition, hunger and diseases, and exposed Palestinians to a slow, calculated death.” 

Incomplete Data

Some of those attempting to undermine the Gaza death toll will argue that the Ministry of Health has not yet provided fully complete data. For example, as of September 2024 it had provided the name, age, gender and ID numbers of 34,344 dead Gazans, and not the entire 41,957 in its official count at the time. 

Holocaust deniers have done the same thing by pointing to the fact that not all victims have been identified or that some of those that were named were named in error. 

Again, no reputable source accepts the claim that the Holocaust death toll should be lowered from where it stands because not every single person that was killed has been identified by name. This is for good reason. And the same should be true in Gaza, which becomes especially evident when examining why the ministry has had trouble collecting some data at this point.

In the aforementioned study from The Lancet, the authors write, “The escalation of Israeli military ground operations and attacks on health-care facilities severely disrupted the latter’s ability to record deaths electronically. These challenges compelled the [Ministry of Health] to rely on less structured data collection modalities, particularly when hospitals were under siege or experiencing telecommunication blockades. This might have led to incomplete and geographically biased reporting, as seen in other conflict zones where prolonged warfare complicates casualty tracking.” 

The study notes that these deficiencies mean the reported number of deaths is actually lower, not higher, than what the real one will be.

The similarities between Gaza genocide and Holocaust deniers extend to their motivations for denial and the reasoning for their belief that victims are lying. 

The Museum of Tolerance states, “Most Holocaust deniers want to wash away the stain of Nazism in an attempt to make Nazism an acceptable political alternative today.” Those who deny the Holocaust are not third-party observers concerned about historical accuracy, but rather have an ideological motivation to distort or deny the truth.

The same is true of those who deny the Gaza genocide. Supporters of Israel recognize that the state being found guilty of genocide would do irreparable harm to its image and further isolate it internationally. In fact, even the ongoing events at the ICJ have done considerable damage. As such, they have a vested interest in denying genocide claims regardless of the facts. This is made especially clear when examining claims from Zionists that not only is the state not guilty of genocide, but it has actually waged a typical or even particularly humane military campaign.

There are also remarkable similarities in why those who deny the Gaza genocide and the Holocaust believe victims are lying.

The Anti-Defamation League states, “Many deniers, drawing on tropes about Jews being greedy and deceitful, claim that Jews invented the Holocaust ‘story’ in order to manipulate global powers and gain support for the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.” 

Some of those who deny the Gaza genocide have done the same, arguing that Palestinians are lying or at least exaggerating in order to help gain international support to realize their dream of an independent state and/or to destroy the Israeli one. This view should be treated with the same derision as its Holocaust-denial counterpart, and yet it is instead accepted by some outlets as a serious talking point.

Unlike the Holocaust or any other genocide, the Gaza genocide has been live streamed for an international audience every day since it began, making it impossible to claim the widespread slaughter is not occurring. It’s particularly disturbing, then, that with all of the real-time proof, and decades of careful debunking of Holocaust denial, the mainstream press has entertained these arguments in a new form.