In September 2026, four acts gave up their spots on Ed Sheeran’s stadium tour after Sheeran dropped Macklemore for saying two words from the stage: Free Palestine. Finneas, Aaron Rowe, the Irish band Beoga, and the Danish band Lukas Graham have all walked. Macklemore had introduced his song Hind’s Hall, named for Hind Rajab, a six-year-old killed in Gaza waiting for rescue in a car with her dead relatives. Robert Kraft, who owns Gillette Stadium, had barred him from performing there, and Macklemore says Sheeran told him Kraft rallied other stadium owners into an ultimatum: keep Macklemore and lose the venues.
Ed Sheeran apparently doesn’t want to take sides on the whole “is genocide bad” conversation.
It feels obvious to me that what’s happening to the people of Gaza is a genocide. There is more suffering in the world than any one person can take on, and the ways to actually reduce it are not all within reach. Some levers are easy to pull, some are almost impossible to move even when the choice in front of you is between people dying and someone’s profit, and no one can fix it all. What I try to do, as a person and as the founder of this publication, is find the ones I can actually reach that reduce the most suffering while being achievable, and put my attention there.
I’ve posted several pieces on divestment campaigns to move government and union funds away from the companies currently committing war crimes. I’ll make sure to cover that again soon and am working behind the scenes to create a legislative push in all 50 states and with every major union to have mass divestment and contract discontinuation from the companies attacking democracy and murdering innocents en masse.
Thankfully, there have been people doing incredible work on this subject. Qasim Rashid, a human rights lawyer, and the journalist Wajahat Ali have both written about Gaza with a steadiness I admire and have been open about what saying so has cost them. Rashida Tlaib kept at it through a House censure. Naomi Klein has investigated and weighed in from inside the Jewish community. They are more qualified than I am and they have done this work better than I can, and at a moment when it matters this much, watching them do that so well has been a genuine relief. It’s part of why I felt I could finally write this. The ground didn’t need me to break it, only to add what I can, which is what follows.
Here’s how I want to do that. I have beliefs about Gaza that I think are true, and I want to know whether they are. The way to find out is to look at the evidence and rate it: who produced it, by what method, how independent they are from the various sides, and how well it survives the other side’s best objection. That’s also the way I try to get closer to the truth on any subject, and I’ve never shown the whole process before. This piece does.
Before the evidence, a word on how this article is built. In 2016, four Cornell researchers studied about 18,000 arguments across a million replies on the Reddit forum r/ChangeMyView, where people invite strangers to change their minds, to see which comments actually worked. The finding: what changes a mind is calm, sourced, and built from information the reader didn’t already have, rather than the reader’s own frame handed back to them. Calm mattered literally, on a scale where “librarian” rated low and “terrorism” high, the winning comments sat at the calm end. I’ve written this piece to match it.
So let’s begin.
Genocide has a legal definition. It was written in 1948, in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The first part is a list of five acts: killing members of a group; causing them serious bodily or mental harm; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births; and forcibly transferring the group’s children to another group.
The second part is intent. The acts have to be committed with intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part, as such.
Nearly every serious argument about Gaza is about the second part. The number of dead is contested only at the margins. The question is whether the killing was done to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a group or was the result of a war against Hamas fought without restraint and in a crowded place.
The fact is, a government committing genocide rarely writes down that destroying an entire ethnic group is the plan, so courts let you infer intent from the pattern of conduct.
In its March 12, 2026 filing defending Israel, the United States asked the court to throw out that inference and demand something close to an intentional confession: that civilian deaths in urban combat can’t show intent on their own, and that only conduct explainable by nothing but genocide counts.
That is a reading of the law built to benefit Israel, and it’s close to unmeetable, because almost no genocide in history came with the perpetrator announcing it as such.
The Netherlands and Iceland, filing in response and within the same week, asked the court for the opposite, a reading that lets intent be inferred from conduct as it usually is.
Now the evidence, from the most independent and rigorous to the least, with the objection you’ll hear at each rung, answered.
The first rung is the count of the dead.
The Gaza Health Ministry’s count reached 73,789 killed as of September 15, 2026, and the Associated Press describes the ministry’s records as detailed and generally viewed as reliable by UN agencies. The ministry is part of the Hamas-run government. That’s the first objection you’ll hear, and independent methods have tested it.
A team led by Zeina Jamaluddine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine used capture-recapture, a statistical method that estimates a total from the overlap between separate lists, and put deaths from traumatic injury between October 7, 2023 and June 30, 2024 at 64,260 against the ministry’s 37,877, an undercount the authors put at about 41 percent. The study appeared in The Lancet in January 2025.
In February 2026, a team led by Michael Spagat of Royal Holloway, University of London, with fieldwork by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, published the war’s first population survey in The Lancet Global Health, covering 2,000 households and 9,729 people.
The UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, chaired by Navi Pillay, who presided over the international tribunal for Rwanda and later served as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, reported on September 16, 2025 that Israel had committed four of the five acts in the Convention and that statements by senior officials together with the pattern of conduct established intent to commit genocide. The commission asked the International Criminal Court to add genocide to the arrest warrants issued in November 2024 for Netanyahu and Gallant.
The third rung is human rights organizations.
Amnesty International published a 296-page report on December 5, 2024 and concluded there was sufficient basis to find that Israel had committed and was continuing to commit genocide, with three of the five acts and the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.
Human Rights Watch published a 179-page report on December 19, 2024 and found that Israel had deliberately deprived Gaza of water, which HRW called the crime against humanity of extermination and an act of genocide.
B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel are both Israeli organizations, and both published their findings on July 28, 2025. B’Tselem concluded that Israel’s policy toward Palestinians in Gaza had shifted from repression and control to destruction and annihilation; PHRI’s legal and medical analysis found three of the acts, including conditions of life calculated to destroy the group. Guy Shalev, PHRI’s director and the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, called the conclusion painful.
The fourth rung is scholars.
The International Association of Genocide Scholars, a body of about 500 academics that includes Holocaust specialists, announced on September 1, 2025 that a resolution stating that Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide had passed with 86 percent of those voting in favor.
Omer Bartov is a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, he was born in Israel, and he served in its army. He wrote in the New York Times in November 2023 that what he was seeing did not yet rise to genocide. He changed his mind in stages over the following year, in the Guardian in August 2024, on CNN that December, then again in the New York Times on July 15, 2025, where he wrote that by May 2024, after the army ordered about a million people sheltering in Rafah to the beach at Mawasi and then destroyed much of the city, his conclusion had become that Israel was in fact committing genocide. A man who studies the crime for a living, who resisted the word against his own background and his own earlier judgment, followed the evidence to it anyway.
The last rung we will explore is governments and the officials who lead them, the least independent sources on either side. Their words appear in the UN commission’s report and in Amnesty’s as evidence of intent.
On October 13, 2023, President Isaac Herzog said at a press conference that “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible” and that civilians could have risen up against Hamas. When a reporter asked whether that made civilians legitimate targets, he said no, and in the same answer he said there were many innocent Palestinians and that Israel operates under international law. Israel’s defenders say he was describing Hamas-run Gaza as a state. The UN commission counted the statement as incitement.
On October 28, 2023, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a televised address about the soldiers entering Gaza, quoted the Bible: “Remember what Amalek did to you.” In the Book of Samuel, God orders King Saul to kill every Amalekite, including women, children, infants, and animals. Israel’s answer is that the sentence before the quotation named the murderers of October 7 as the enemy.
On the other side of the ledger sit Israel’s denials and the United States’ filing. Israel says it fights an existential war under international law, that Hamas hides among civilians, that Hamas diverts aid, and that the accusation itself is antisemitic. The United States told the court the genocide allegations are false.
A war against Hamas explains strikes on buildings where Hamas operated. It doesn’t explain a siege on the entire population ordered on October 9, 2023, a famine confirmed in August 2025 while food waited at the border, two million people pushed into less than half their land, or a finance minister saying starvation might be moral. The bodies that applied the legal test to that record found intent: the UN commission, Amnesty, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, and 108 genocide scholars. Human Rights Watch found the acts and stopped at intent. The people who say no are the Israeli government, and the United States government defending it. The best legal point on their side asks the world to withhold the label of genocide unless the Israeli government says so explicitly.
I said at the top that it feels obvious to me. Having walked the evidence, I’ll say it as a finding. The two sides are not equal in the evidence they can show.
It’s a genocide.
This article exists because orienting ourselves, even when we are certain, is critical to repairing this world. For my own writing, the value I can offer is clarity, even when the clarity is nothing more than credible sources assembled in a logical order. That’s what this piece is.
There’s a second reason. The work I’ve done professionally brought me close to murder, child abuse, domestic violence, and the people who committed those crimes, as well as their victims. I’ve spent my adult life studying human nature, from military law enforcement, to empathy disorders in incarcerated populations, to education and even behavioral rehabilitation in youth with conduct disorder. I’m also one of the people who lies awake at night thinking about the horrors in the world that we might not be able to stop. Sometimes sleep doesn’t arrive so easily.
Writing is part of how I handle that. It’s how I look for the piece of human suffering I can actually do something about, and then do something about it.
So much has changed over the last few years, as people have continued to discuss the genocide. More people can see this now. A stadium tour lost four acts in a week. A Holocaust scholar reversed himself in the New York Times. Two Israeli human rights organizations applied the genocide label about their own country. A man who calls it genocide was elected mayor of New York. Fewer people are on the fence than were a year ago, and that shift came from education and from the activists and writers who refused to stop explaining it, often against the platforms themselves: Human Rights Watch documented more than 1,000 removals or suppressions of peaceful pro-Palestine posts on Instagram and Facebook, and creators widely report their reach collapsing the moment they name it.
What hasn’t changed is the policy. The United States filed in March 2026 to defend Israel at the world court, and the weapons still ship. Opinion has moved faster than power has, and closing that gap is the work still in front of all of us.
We’re here to fight for freedom and justice, and I’m grateful to everyone doing that.
Robert Kraft said he barred Macklemore from Gillette Stadium over material shown from the stage in New Jersey and what Kraft called a history of “antisemitic rhetoric and imagery.” Macklemore says Sheeran told him that people Sheeran had spoken with found the words Free Palestine and the Palestinian flag hurtful. Kraft kept his stadium and Sheeran kept his tour. Finneas, Aaron Rowe, Beoga, and Lukas Graham gave up their tour dates because this moment demands those of us not under fire to be willing to accept consequences as free speech and human rights continue to be suppressed.
To borrow the spirit of poet and activist Tupac Shakur, whose music I admittedly enjoy far more than Macklemore’s:
Fuck Robert Kraft, fuck Ed Sheeran, fuck genocide denial, and fuck fascists too.
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
borderslynn 