A four-panel chart is spreading on social media. In Cambodia in 1975–1979, in Rwanda in 1994 and for the world's Jewish population during the Holocaust, the population curve falls steeply, and above each drop sits a red box labelled "genocide". In the fourth panel, Gaza 2000–2025, the line rises to 2.2 million, with a large yellow "NO GENOCIDE" across it. The argument: where the population is growing, there cannot be a genocide.
The chart has three flaws. It measures something the legal definition of genocide does not take into account. It leaves out recognised genocides during which the population kept growing. And its wartime figures for Gaza are not measurements but a pre-war projection: according to estimates by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), the population of Gaza has fallen during the war. We were unable to trace who created the chart. The same argument, however, was already debunked in December 2024 by the Australian newsroom AAP FactCheck and the US website PolitiFact.
The Genocide Convention does not ask about population size
Genocide is defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which Czechoslovakia adopted in 1951. Under its Article II, genocide means acts "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such". The Convention lists five such acts: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, imposing measures intended to prevent births, and forcibly transferring children to another group.
Genocide is therefore determined by two things: what is done to the group and with what intent. Anyone who kills people on a large scale, destroys their conditions of life or prevents them from having children, and does so in order to destroy the group, meets the definition. The Convention says nothing about a threshold number of victims or about a decline in population. It also makes attempted genocide and direct and public incitement to commit genocide punishable.
The courts have confirmed this in practice. In its appeal judgment in the Krstić case in 2004, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia recognised the murder of seven to eight thousand men and boys from Srebrenica as genocide. According to the tribunal, the targeted "substantial part" of the group was the roughly 40,000 Bosnian Muslims of the enclave, not all Bosniaks. The tribunal also wrote that even the perpetrator's failure does not rule out genocidal intent. The UN Commission of Inquiry sums this up in its legal analysis with the sentence that "intent to destroy" does not mean that destruction must actually occur.
Mass killing in itself need not be genocide. Where the intent to destroy the group as such is missing, international law speaks of crimes against humanity, such as extermination. The courts do look at the scale of killing: in its 2015 judgment in Croatia v. Serbia, the International Court of Justice also took into account how many victims there were compared with the size of the targeted group, and it infers intent only when this is the only reasonable conclusion from the overall conduct. The number of victims is thus one of the indicators of intent. The total population, which besides those killed also includes newborns and people who have left, is not one of those indicators.
Recognised genocides that do not show up on the population curve
If the chart's test held, every genocide would have to reduce the population. World Bank data, which the chart itself cites, show the opposite.
In 2014, Islamic State fighters in Sinjar, Iraq, killed around 3,100 Yazidis and abducted 6,800, mostly women and children, according to a study in the journal PLOS Medicine. In 2016, the UN Commission of Inquiry described this as genocide in its report "They came to destroy", and in November 2021 the Higher Regional Court in Frankfurt convicted a former Islamic State member, the Iraqi Taha Al-J., of the crime for the first time. Meanwhile, Iraq's population grew from 35.3 million in 2013 to 38.5 million in 2016.
The same holds for Myanmar. During the army's so-called clearance operations in 2017, more than ten thousand Rohingya were killed, according to the UN fact-finding mission (the mission described the estimate of ten thousand as conservative), and almost 725,000 had fled to Bangladesh by August 2018. The mission recommended that the army's leadership be prosecuted for genocide, and the case of The Gambia v. Myanmar is now before the International Court of Justice. Myanmar's total population nevertheless continued to grow. In Guatemala, a UN-backed truth commission described the killing of the Mayan Ixil in 1981–1983 as acts of genocide. The country had 6.9 million inhabitants in 1980 and 7.6 million in 1984.
The other three panels of the viral chart show cases in which the perpetrators murdered a large part of the entire population, or in which refugees were also counted in the drop. According to the World Bank, Rwanda's population fell by 2.3 million between 1993 and 1995. According to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the genocide claimed around 800,000 lives and more than two million people fled to Zaire, Tanzania, Burundi and Uganda. A large part of the drop on the curve thus consists of refugees, and as they returned, the population recovered to its pre-war level within four years.
In Cambodia, around 1.7 million people, about a fifth of the population, died under Khmer Rouge rule in 1975–1979. In its 2018 judgment, however, the internationally backed ECCC tribunal recognised as genocide only the killing of the Vietnamese minority and the Muslim Cham. It assessed most of the victims, Khmers killed by their own regime, as crimes against humanity. The viral chart thus uses as its model of genocide a case in which, legally, only a smaller part of the killing was genocide.
The Holocaust panel shows the world's Jewish population according to the Jewish Virtual Library: 16.7 million in 1939 and 11 million in 1945. Nazi Germany and its allies murdered six million Jews out of the roughly 9.5 million who, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, lived in Europe in 1933. The word genocide was coined by the lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944 for the crimes of Nazi Germany, and the 1948 Convention was a response to the Holocaust. But very few genocides have struck such a large part of the group.
Acts in which less than one per cent of a group died have been recognised as genocide
The comparison shows how varied the scale can be. In Rwanda, around three quarters of the Tutsi were killed; in Sinjar, less than one per cent of the Yazidis. Both were recognised as genocide, because the perpetrators wanted to destroy the group.
In Gaza, 74,494 people were killed between 7 October 2023 and 21 October 2026, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, whose figures are used by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). That is about 3% of the pre-war population. The ministry is subordinate to the Hamas government, and Israel disputes its figures. An independent survey of two thousand households, published this year in the journal Lancet Global Health, however, arrived at a higher number: it estimated 75,200 violent deaths up to 5 January 2025. For the same period, the ministry reported 49,090, a third fewer. According to the study's authors, the age and sex composition of the victims matches the ministry's data.
The share of victims does not decide the matter either way. Less than one per cent in Sinjar does not rule out genocide, and three per cent in Gaza does not prove it. What decides is intent and the acts from which it can be inferred.
Even during the war, more children were born in Gaza than the ministry reported killed
Why can a population stagnate even when tens of thousands of people are dying? Because it also counts the children who are born. Gaza's population is very young: according to the PCBS, 47% of people are under 18. In 2022, according to the population register, 57,877 children were born there, around 160 a day.
The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) estimated that even during the war, about 180 women a day give birth in Gaza. From 7 October 2023 to the end of 2024, the Ministry of Health reported 45,541 people killed, roughly a hundred a day on average. In the overall total, births therefore exceeded the loss of life. The war nevertheless pushed the birth rate down sharply: in the first half of 2025, according to UNFPA, 17,000 children were born, compared with 29,000 in the same period of 2022, 41% fewer.
In addition, around 110,000 people had left Gaza via Egypt by July 2024, OCHA reported. These people, too, were subtracted from the population without having died. The total population thus mixes the born, the killed and those who left. Anyone who tries to read from it whether a genocide is taking place cannot see what is happening to the people.
The chart's wartime figures are not measurements but a pre-war projection
No census has taken place in Gaza during the war. The figures for 2024 and 2025 circulating on social media are based on projections calculated before 7 October 2023, as AAP FactCheck already showed for the figures from the CIA World Factbook database. In its pre-war projection, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics assumed that Gaza would keep growing by 2.7% a year, as in peacetime. This rising line is what the viral chart draws. We were unable to find that the Gaza Ministry of Health or the organisation Save the Children, which the chart gives as the source for 2023–2025, had published any population estimate.
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics has been revising its projection during the war. For mid-2023 it counted 2.23 million inhabitants of Gaza. By the end of 2025, according to its estimate, 2.13 million lived there. The bureau reports a decline of 254,000 people, or 10.6%. It calculates this, however, against the pre-war projection, that is, against how many people would have lived in Gaza without the war. Compared with the actual number in mid-2023, the decline is roughly a hundred thousand people, about 4%. The PCBS names killings, departures from Gaza and the fall in the birth rate as the causes. These estimates, too, are uncertain: according to the PCBS, around two million of the 2.2 million inhabitants have had to leave their homes, and nobody is able to count them.
The viral chart therefore does not show what happened in Gaza, but what was expected to happen without the war. Even a more cautious version of the same argument, used on X on 13 October this year by the British historian Simon Schama, rests on population size: from a decline of 4.55% he concluded that it is not genocide. The Convention, however, sets no threshold for a decline, and the genocide of the Yazidis affected less than one per cent of the group.
Who says it is genocide, and who rejects that
A binding decision will be made by the International Court of Justice in the case South Africa v. Israel. In January 2024, the Court found that Palestinians in Gaza have a plausible right to protection from genocide and ordered Israel to take provisional measures, including preventing acts under the Convention and enabling humanitarian aid. The then President of the Court, Joan Donoghue, later pointed out in an interview with the BBC that the Court had not thereby decided that a genocide was plausibly taking place. No judgment on the merits has yet been delivered, and under the timetable set in May 2026, South Africa is to file its next written pleading by November 2027 and Israel by May 2029. Twenty-one states have joined the case, among them Spain, Ireland and Belgium, but also the United States, which according to media reports argues in its submission that Israel lacks genocidal intent.
In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. They are for war crimes, among them starvation as a method of warfare, and for crimes against humanity. Genocide is not among them.
In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry, then chaired by Navi Pillay, concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. It found four of the five acts listed in the Convention and described genocidal intent as the only reasonable conclusion from the evidence as a whole, including statements by President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Netanyahu and then Defence Minister Gallant. The commission, in its new composition chaired by Srinivasan Muralidhar, stated in October this year that the genocide is continuing even after the ceasefire of October 2025. We wrote about the report in detail in the article UN investigators accuse Israel of exterminating Palestinians in the West Bank (in Czech).
The same conclusion was reached by Amnesty International in December 2024, by the Israeli organisations B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel in July 2025, and by the International Association of Genocide Scholars in September 2025, when 86% of the members who voted backed the resolution. Human Rights Watch was more cautious in its wording: it described the deprivation of water as extermination and as acts of genocide.
Israel rejects the accusation. According to its mission to the UN in Geneva, it seeks to destroy Hamas, makes efforts to harm civilians as little as possible and allows humanitarian aid. It accuses the commission of ignoring Hamas's crimes and relying on its data. The Israeli government also cites a study by the BESA Center at Bar-Ilan University, according to which there is no evidence of a systematic policy of killing civilians. Germany, which firmly rejected the accusation in January 2024, stated in September 2025, after the commission's report, that legal assessment is a matter for the courts, and in March this year announced that it would not intervene in the case before the International Court of Justice.
When the International Court of Justice decides, it will, in line with its case law to date, examine the statements of politicians and commanders, orders, the blockade of humanitarian aid, the destruction of hospitals and the pattern of attacks on civilians. It will look at what happened to the people in Gaza and why. It will not assess a population curve.
