At least 272 times. That’s how often Doctors Without Borders accused Israel of “genocide” in social media posts following the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. Beyond the obviously disproportionate emphasis, the NGO, known in French as MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières), added its considerable voice to a political campaign in which the label genocide is reinterpreted uniquely for Israel, and in which the evidence is cynically manipulated.

As this and many other activities demonstrated, MSF has abandoned its mission of medical neutrality in joining virulent anti-Israel campaigns and abdicated its credibility, as a new detailed research report from NGO Monitor documents.

MSF repeated the false genocide accusation obsessively in press briefings, via actions by regional branches, and across social accounts. At least 272 times. It did not apply the label to Russia’s war in Ukraine nor to massive and indiscriminate regime bombing in Syria. Its focus cannot even be attributed to the centrality of Israel and Gaza in Western media; MSF all but ignored Hamas’ taking of Israeli hostages, referencing them as primary subjects in only three posts across all its international feeds – less than 1.1% of its “genocide” accusations.

To further anti-Israel narratives, MSF egregiously violated its claims of “strict adherence to humanitarian principles, independence, and medical ethics” following the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. This would be concerning on its own, but it is especially horrific coming from a long-respected medical aid group.

“Genocide” is a consequential term. Coined by Jewish scholar Raphael Lemkin in the shadow of the Holocaust to denote its unprecedented evil, the label has rightly been sparingly employed, necessitating thresholds of mass carnage and, according to Lemkin, the “intent to destroy.”

In the Gaza conflict, there is clearly no intent on the part of Israel, other than to prevent Hamas from perpetrating another October 7-like calamity. Nevertheless, from the earliest moments of the Israeli response, MSF advanced increasingly defamatory labels for Israeli actions while consistently whitewashing Hamas’ crimes. MSF’s first social media post hours into the Hamas invasion – as hundreds of terrorists were still rampaging across southern Israel, murdering civilians, carrying out sexual atrocities, and taking hostages – was an unverified accusation that Israel had caused the death of a nurse and an ambulance driver, dryly referencing a backdrop of “escalation between Israel and Gaza.”

Its press release on October 8 attempted to focus attention on Israeli aggression and Gazan victimhood – again, as Hamas terrorists were still present in Israel. The statement included a casualty count provided by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health, and only briefly mentioned the Israeli death toll, without addressing the Hamas assault.

MSF’s role as a primary source of misinformation came to an early head on October 17, when a large explosion occurred in the vicinity of Gaza’s Al-Ahli hospital. Within a very short time, the NGO issued and intensely promoted a press release quoting Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, an MSF doctor who called the event “a massacre,” and who was paraded across Western media as an expert eyewitness to this ostensible example of “Israeli brutality.” In further MSF-arranged interviews, he used the event to accuse Israel of “systematically destroying Gaza’s health infrastructure,” and called it the moment he decided that Israel’s military campaign “stopped being a war, and became a genocide.”

But subsequent government analyses by the United States, Canada, and France, as well as an investigation by the New York Times, concluded that the damage to the hospital was minimal and had been caused by a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket. Yet MSF never retracted or amended its claims, so that anyone using its reports and posts would continue to conclude that Israel was to be blamed for a “massacre.”

This trend of knee-jerk Israel demonization mounted as the war continued. In an open letter to the UN Security Council on December 4, 2023, MSF International President Christos Christou accused Israel of “incessant and indiscriminate warfare,” and argued that “subjecting an entire population to collective punishment is a war crime under International Humanitarian Law” – assertions far beyond the purview of this ostensibly medical NGO. In October 2024, MSF accused Israel of “unmitigated slaughter” without acknowledging Hamas’ exploitation of medical facilities (documented in depth by NGO Monitor).

And in December 2024, MSF graduated to “genocide.” The NGO published a report entitled “Life in a Death Trap,” framing Israel’s campaign to return its hostages and eliminate the Hamas threat as “crushing an entire population under bombs and rubble,” “ethnic cleansing,” and attempting “to unravel the very fabric of society in Gaza.”

MSF did acknowledge that it “do[es not] have legal authority to establish intentionality,” a core requirement for any finding of genocide. No matter, MSF decided: “our firsthand observations…are consistent with the descriptions provided by an increasing number of legal experts and organizations concluding that genocide is taking place in Gaza.” The only legal body MSF referenced, though, was the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – and MSF’s version markedly misrepresents the ICJ’s provisional ruling, which did not actually make any determination on whether genocide had occurred.

MSF was founded in order to provide medical assistance to those most in need. Its recent behavior, however, has undermined that goal, stripping away the organization’s benevolent facade. Humanitarians do not ignore the actions of terrorist organizations. And humanitarians do not spread heinous allegations of “genocide” against the victims of hardened and unrepentant terrorist groups.

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Prof. Gerald M. Steinberg is founder and president of the NGO Monitor research institute.

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War Propaganda Is Bad Medicine From This Medical NGO