Whether Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza constitutes genocide is one of the most emotionally charged and legally complex debates of our time. On a recent episode of Piers Morgan Uncensored (July 24, 2025), a distinguished panel—including genocide scholar Omer Bartov, Israeli-American journalist Emily Schrader, Palestinian-American journalist Omar Baddar, and commentator Shaiel Ben-Ephraim—wrestled openly with this fraught topic, offering viewers a window into both the evidence and the stakes of the conversation.
The Core of the Debate: Genocide vs. Ethnic Cleansing
Host Piers Morgan set the table with a critical distinction. Ethnic cleansing, he explained, is the forced removal of a population from a certain area, effectively to make room for another group. Genocide goes further: it is the deliberate destruction—by killing or other means—of a group “as such.” The legal threshold, as established by the 1948 United Nations Convention, is the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
Omer Bartov, one of the world’s leading genocide scholars and a former IDF soldier, summarized it succinctly: “In genocide, what you’re trying to do is destroy that group as a group wherever it is.” Making a society’s future impossible, through mass displacement, starvation, or systematic destruction, can fulfill that definition—even if not all members are killed.[1]
Omer Bartov’s Shift: From War Crimes to Genocide
Bartov recounted his evolving views. Initially, in late 2023, “it appeared to me that the IDF was already carrying out war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity—but I did not think at the time that there was enough evidence to say that this was a genocidal campaign.” By spring 2024, the evidence convinced him otherwise: the scale and pattern of destruction, the use of starvation, and Israeli officials’ statements suggested a strategy aimed at permanently depopulating Gaza.
Bartov cited:
- Systematic destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure—schools, hospitals, water, and power plants
- Displacement and concentration of the population near the Egyptian border, with no way out
- Use of starvation and siege as tactics
- A staggering humanitarian toll: at least 60,000 dead, including 17,000 children, over 130,000 wounded[1]
He argues the ultimate goal appears not just military victory over Hamas, but making Gaza uninhabitable, effectively erasing Palestinian life there.
The Arguments: Panel Perspectives
Emily Schrader disputed the genocide characterization. She stressed the lack of premeditation, a critical point in legal definitions, and insisted Israel’s campaign was a response to the October 7 Hamas attack. Civilian casualties, she argued, are not enough to prove intent to destroy a group, and statements from politicians without direct power over military decisions do not meet the legal bar. She also blamed ongoing starvation on poor aid distribution by Hamas and the UN, not deliberate Israeli policy.
Omar Baddar and Shaiel Ben-Ephraim offered a starkly different view. Baddar pointed to the explicit, public language of Israeli officials and the widespread targeting of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. He cited documented incidents of Israeli soldiers shooting civilians seeking food, and reports of deliberate starvation as a tactic. Shaiel, himself initially a supporter of the war, described his changed view after seeing a lack of strategy to replace Hamas or seriously protect civilians, instead seeing evidence of a calculated attempt to depopulate and destroy Gaza as a functioning society. Both described a “creeping genocide”—openly justified by some Israeli leaders and made possible by the impunity created by international political cover, especially from the United States and Europe.[1]
Legal and Moral Stakes
Bartov underscored that the legal burden for genocide does not require complete annihilation—intent and systematic degradation of the group’s survival prospects are key. He warned that the ongoing inaction of international actors and failure of accountability threatens to undermine the very system of international law built after World War II. If world powers protect an ally even against clear documentation and mounting consensus among genocide experts, the credibility of the entire legal order is at risk.
The Piers Morgan Uncensored debate laid bare not just the horrific reality on the ground in Gaza but also the immense complexities—legal, moral, and political—that shape whether the world sees, names, and responds to it as genocide. As the panelists made clear, what’s at stake extends far beyond legal semantics; it reaches into the core of how the world defines and enforces humanity’s gravest prohibitions.
At a time when evidence mounts and legal thresholds are debated by experts, it remains for international institutions, governments, and civil societies to judge and act—or risk seeing the promise of “never again” become yet another broken maxim of history.[1]
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