STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
We have a response to the allegation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. As we've been hearing this morning, Israeli human rights groups now make that charge against their own government, and they're not alone. Earlier this month on NPR, we heard an Israeli American scholar of the Holocaust, who said he slowly came to that same conclusion. Omer Bartov said some Israeli statements and many Israeli actions show an effort to wipe out the people of Gaza.
OMER BARTOV: That is to destroy schools, universities, museums, everything - hospitals, of course, water plants, energy plants. In that way, to make it uninhabitable for the population.
INSKEEP: Bartov's statements prompted a dissent from John Spencer, our next guest. He's a U.S. Army veteran of the war in Iraq and now studies urban warfare at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. As the accusations against Israel have grown, he wrote that this was not genocide. So we called him to hear him make his case.
JOHN SPENCER: I'm a war researcher, so I study urban warfare for a living and have been doing that for a long time. So I've been going since October 7. I had already been studying warfare there. So I've been into Gaza now four times, embedded with the IDF. I've interviewed the prime minister three times, the chief of staff, the minister of defense - almost every echelon.
INSKEEP: Were you able also to talk with Palestinians as you were going in with the Israeli Defense Forces?
SPENCER: No, unfortunately, not. Just based on safety, really, issues. I'm embedded from a military lens. You know, I served myself. My research is how to conduct urban operations. So I was really studying what are the IDF doing - the tactics, techniques, procedures, the orders, the targeting process.
INSKEEP: Let's put some facts on the table that seem hard to dispute. There's been immense destruction in Gaza. The Israeli military has blown up whole neighborhoods. Tens of thousands of people are dead. We could argue over how many are combatants or noncombatants, but many are dead. Why is that not genocide?
SPENCER: Because that's - I mean, the Genocide Convention's only a few pages. You can read it.
INSKEEP: He says the legal definition of genocide depends on the attacker's intent. Israel's critics point to statements by officials after the October 7 attacks, like the one who called for total annihilation or erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth. Spencer points to less inflammatory statements and to Israel's efforts to replace some of the infrastructure it destroyed.
SPENCER: The prime minister, defense minister, the chief of staff saying, our fight is not with the people of Gaza. It is with Hamas. And all the mountain of evidence of what Israel is doing to preserve infrastructure, civilian life, to provide services - both medical. I mean, the number of field hospitals, the number of water pipes, the amount of aid. All of these things are contradictions.
INSKEEP: Do you think there's a single well-functioning hospital in all of Gaza?
SPENCER: Yeah. I mean, I think each one of them has to be looked in its own case. But of the seven different hospitals, most of them were immediately - after Israel surrounds them and evacuates them, picks the Hamas out of the crowd, and then lets them go back in, they go back into operating in some way.
INSKEEP: Why do you think food has been so desperately short in recent months in Gaza that when we interview people - and I've interviewed some of them - people say, I'm here, I'm living in a tent in the rubble with my family, and I get, at best, one meal a day. I get some bread. That's all I've got?
SPENCER: Yeah, and there's more than one reason, and this is the problem. Israel attempted the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation effort to try to rest the grasp of Hamas, depending on who's...
INSKEEP: They blamed Hamas for being connected too closely to United Nations efforts and said they'd set up their own. OK.
SPENCER: Yeah, and Hamas - I mean, I'm sure nobody would deny that Hamas was taking the aides, the armed guards on top of the trucks, and that Hamas was purposely wanting there to be a humanitarian crisis. There was a thousand trucks worth of supplies waiting in the last two weeks to be picked up and couldn't be, according to the United Nations, because of Hamas.
INSKEEP: Why do you think the Israeli effort to replace that food distribution system has worked so poorly?
SPENCER: I don't think it's worked poorly. Of course, there are people who have been in desperate need of food, but the numbers don't support - I mean, they were giving out a million to 2 million meals a day in four distribution sites, and then also had a community program where community leaders could come pick it up and bring it to vulnerable sites. I wouldn't say it's been effective. It wasn't enough. But even they, you know, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is a U.S.-Israel foundation, the leader of that sent multiple letters to the United Nations saying I will pick up this food that is sitting here. I will deliver it with my security contractors, and the United Nations said no.
INSKEEP: But when you say 1 million to 2 million meals a day, that sounds impressive until I remember that there are 2 million people in Gaza. So that is less than one meal per day, per person.
SPENCER: So each box of meals has multiple days' worth of meals in it. But it is undeniable that there was a food shortage in areas in Gaza. That is clear, but there wasn't from effort from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation or even Israel.
INSKEEP: Do you not think that there are people in Israel's government who would like the land for Israel and for the Palestinians to leave?
SPENCER: Absolutely. So they try to make people like Smotrich or Ben-Gvir...
INSKEEP: Some of the ministers. Yeah, go on.
SPENCER: Yeah. I mean, that's like taking Marjorie Taylor Greene's comments and saying that's the U.S. position. I mean, that's not the war cabinet. What usually happens in war is, yes, you do move in, and you occupy that ground and until you find somebody else to govern it.
INSKEEP: Israel has not seemed that interested in finding someone else to govern it.
SPENCER: Right. And this has been - I've been critical of that as well, as in - but you're right because Israel can't get past step one, which is returning the hostages and disarming Hamas. So how do you plan for somebody else to govern in Gaza if there isn't step one and step two done?
INSKEEP: If you looked overall at Israel's performance in Gaza and you were talking to a critic of Israel who said, OK, you don't agree with the term genocide, but what about less sweeping terms like ethnic cleansing or war crimes, would you find evidence of that?
SPENCER: No. Well, war crimes, there's always soldiers doing the wrong thing. And this is where you have - like when I served, had soldiers doing the wrong thing and you have a military justice system. I rail against, as a veteran myself, that every bad event is a war crime. But of course, there are soldiers who have done the wrong thing in Gaza, and those people need to be held accountable.
INSKEEP: John Spencer, scholar at West Point. Thanks very much.
SPENCER: Thanks for having me.
INSKEEP: He's been cited by Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in defense of Israel's approach to Gaza. Yesterday, Netanyahu issued a statement saying his country is fighting a just and moral war. He has also said there is no starvation in Gaza. President Trump dismissed that claim yesterday, referring to images of starving people and saying, quote, "you can't fake that."
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