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The Israeli policy of genocide against the Palestinian population is not restricted to Gaza and is older than Hamas. Hamas is, in fact, a direct and deliberate consequence of that policy, its antecedent Islamist networks having been actively fostered in Gaza by Israel during the occupation to create a separate, conflicting, and less internationally-sympathetic (particular to both the West and neighboring Arab regimes) center of Palestinian resistance from the more secular Arab-nationalist groups dominating the PLO, in order to both make local resistance less effective and reduce international diplomatic resistance to Israel’s displacement and eradication of the Palestinian population.
Also, what IDF is doing is not genocide. Please don't misuse the word. Genocide is systematic killing of people of a certain origin, which has happened during the Holocaust and multiple other times in history, but it's not what's happening here. A huge number of innocent Palestinians have been killed, yes, but it's not due to systematic killing based on origin. The population of Gaza has grown from 650k in 1990 to 2.2M in 2023; if there was actual genocide happening (and Israel most definitely has the capacity to kill every single person in Gaza), the numbers would have gone down, not up.
A total aside here. I wonder for how much longer this kind of speech will be tolerated? I‘m sure jjaksic believes this and is not actively trying to be hateful (or at least I hope so), but when it comes to other genocides we don’t usually tolerate genocide denial, and correctly mark it as hate speech. I wonder what makes the Gaza genocide different?
One reason could be that the Gaza genocide is ongoing, and history has yet to judge it, but I doubt that. Denying an ongoing genocide is much much worse than denying past one. Another possible reason is that we give people slack because of the lax information environment. If so I hope we stop that. Victims of genocide deserve better, and we should not be considering the reason people say such hateful things.
Truth of the matter is that it's very challenging to fight an army of 40k terrorists who are intentionally mixed with civilians in order to maximize civilian casualties. How would you deal with a terrorist organization like that? I don't think anybody has a good answer.
> Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous
The term makes no distinction on how the cleansing is achieved, be it forced relocation or genocide, both meet the definition equally.