Let’s check in on the situation in the Levant. The Israeli military is once again bombing Gaza City, flattening a high-rise apartment building as it prepares to fully seize the northern areas it is simultaneously striking with famine. Defense Minister Israel Katz¹ says he has opened “the gates of hell.” The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports “strikes on tents, schools, buildings, health facilities, and people seeking aid” across the Gaza Strip.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, is “facilitating Israeli annexation” of the West Bank, according to a recently fired U.S. State Department official. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has announced plans to annex 82 percent of the territory, reiterating — he actually said this, according to Haaretz — that “in no possible situation will they have the chance of democracy or have rights.” And in case anyone is confused about where the president stands on this, the U.S. is responding to all of this by sanctioning not Israel but three Palestinian organizations for the crime of cooperating with the International Criminal Court’s investigations into Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials.

So how are the people who have supported this war for the last two years dealing with these mounting atrocities? By trying to disqualify categorizations of genocide and mass starvation on hyper-technical grounds, of course!

The reasons for doing this are obvious to anyone who peeks outside their AIPAC-funded bubble. Even Trump recognizes that Israel “may be winning the war, but they’re not winning the world of public relations“ — a world to which he is preternaturally attuned. So when organization after organization, including some inside Israel itself, keeps coming to the same horrific conclusion that the nation-state most associated with survivors of genocide is itself committing genocide, there are only two options: Either stop the killing and hold your leaders accountable, or try to argue your way out of it. No points for guessing which most of the defenders are choosing.

A few weeks ago I showed how right-wing outlets including the Washington Free Beacon and Bari Weiss’ Free Press were outright lying when they claimed the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, had lowered its standards in order to declare the Gaza City Governorate in Phase 5 Famine — the most severe starvation category. Since neither are serious journalistic outlets, neither has corrected their stories. (Bad news for the hundreds of journalists at CBS News who may be about to be placed under the supervision of Ms. Weiss.)

When the independent Famine Review Committee ratified the IPC’s classification — making Gaza the first site outside of sub-Saharan Africa to achieve a Phase 5 Famine designation since the IPC was founded in 2004 — the pro-Israel and genocide-denying media spheres went into overdrive. They looked for anything that could discredit the report, from cherry-picking underlying data in a sub-annex to finding old tweets decrying human-rights abuses against Palestinians from one of the report’s seven authors.

In addition to repeating the lie about “eased” malnutrition standards² , these would-be muckrackers homed in on the lack of reliable mortality data coming out of the devastated Gaza Strip. This wasn’t hard to do, since the FRC said it clearly in its own report:

Moreover, and at the risk of getting too technical, the Famine Review Committee’s actual designation for Gaza Governorate was “Famine with reasonable evidence.” (This is as opposed to “Famine with solid evidence” — a classification which, as the name implies, must include an even more robust evidentiary basis.) The IPC responded to its critics by explaining (again) that “reasonable evidence” applies when there is clear evidence that two of the three famine thresholds—in this case, food insecurity and acute malnutrition—have been reached, and analysts reasonably assess from the broader evidence that the threshold from the third outcome—in this case, mortality—has likely been reached.” (my emphasis added)

In other words, according to the IPC’s preexisting standards, a specific number of verified malnutrition-related deaths was not necessary to make the jump from Phase 4 Emergency to Phase 5 Famine with reasonable evidence. The fact that huge numbers of Gazans are quite obviously starving, in concert with the accumulated evidence of malnutrition and food insecurity, and a presumption of mass mortality based on limited evidence, was enough for the experts to say that the most severe category, Famine, was probably happening. They have done this before, for instance, at a large refugee camp in Sudan’s Darfur region last year.³

This did not stop the deniers from making up a minimum number of dead Palestinians they believe had to have been tallied up for the Famine designation to be legitimate. (Of course, when high death tolls are reported out of Gaza, those same deniers discount them as being inflated, Hamas propaganda, or both.)

A similar game is being played with the International Association of Genocide Scholars, which made international headlines this week when it announced its members had passed a resolution determining that Israel was indeed committing genocide in Gaza. Such a declaration carried significant weight: The IAGS is not only considered the leading professional organization studying genocide and crimes against humanity, but was founded disproportionately by American and Israeli Jewish scholars of the Holocaust. (Other recent resolutions by the IAGS have weighed in on genocides of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, Kurds in Iraq, Rohingya in Myanmar, and Uyghurs in China.)

Cue the trolls. First, the Times of Israel ran a report citing IAGS member Sara Brown — an IAGS member and genocide scholar who is also a regional director of the pro-Israel American Jewish Committee. Brown claimed that the resolution didn’t count, because less than 30% of IAGS members voted on it, and because the group hadn’t held a “virtual town hall” to debate the measure. The IAGS responded by noting that the voting rate — 28% — was well within the normal range on such resolutions (normally between 25% and 34%). Nor are town halls required; in the past, per the IAGS, they have “typically been hosted by resolution authors as educational sessions for historical events about which members might have little knowledge.”

Dissatisfied with these facts, Salo Aizenberg of the pro-Israel propaganda shop “HonestReporting.com” tried a different tactic. He signed up for an IAGS membership — proving, in his estimation, that the organization was a farce. On the face of things, this wouldn’t actually prove the point, without saying something about Aizenberg himself. He describes himself as an “independent scholar who writes about antisemitism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” — words which, in a dialog box at least, sound a lot like the profiles of Helen Fine, Claude Lanzmann, and others who were among the IAGS’s founders.

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