When humanitarian agencies misuse the word “genocide” to malign Israel, they erode its meaning, cheapen the suffering of genuine victims and erode trust.

By Marika Sboros

Who would ever have imagined the forked tongues with which some of the most recognisable names in global humanitarianism speak about genocide?

There was a time when the word, genocide, travelled slowly across the globe carrying weight and gravitas. It moved truthfully with the solemn pace of courts, bewigged judges, historians and survivors of genuine genocide.

Genocide is weighted with meaning from the ashes of the crematoria of the Holocaust by Nazi Germany during World War II. It was meant to be a rare word, precise in depicting the “Crime of Crimes” that forced its invention in the first place.

Today, the word shoots across continents like falling stars on steroids. Its casual misuse by groups carrying the halo of humanitarian speaks volumes about the moral moment of our time.

Leading this linguistic debasement are Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) that started in France, Oxfam GB in the UK and South Africa’s home-grown Gift of the Givers.

All do vital, often heroic work to deliver food, medicine, shelter and logistics where governments fail and disasters fall. All share aggressive political advocacy and gratuitous use of the word, genocide, against Israel and Jews who support it.

In Gaza, these groups have made genocide a linguistic weapon in Israel’s war against Hamas since the terror group’s horrific attack against civilians in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

They do so in a wider, global struggle over law, language and the moral credibility of the global humanitarian mission since that day.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MFS)

MSF’s fall from the grace of medical neutrality has been particularly precipitous.

The group’s humble origins began in 1971 with just 13 idealistic physicians and journalists from the medical journal, Tonus. All declared commitment to témoignage, the French word for “bearing witness” to human rights abuses and atrocities.

Their guide for their early, self-funded interventions was a revolutionary manifesto prioritising victim care over national sovereignty.

From this scrappy foundation evolved the giant global network that MSF is today, and that won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1999 for its famed impartiality in conflict zones.

MSF claims still to “bear witness”. Critics see significant, potentially terminal degradation in its communications that prioritise highly charged legal and political accusations over objective, humanitarian reporting.

NGO Monitor has come out with a blistering, comprehensive report that charts MSF’s transformation, post October 7, into a global source of disinformation and demonisation targeting Israel. It reveals how the charity joined other influential NGOs in an intensive advocacy campaign framing the Israeli response as “genocide” based on “manipulated and distorted evidence to support a predetermined conclusion”.
It shows how MSF effectively erased Hamas’s “weaponisation” of hospitals and clinics and the
“exploitation of schools, mosques and other civilian facilities for terror”.

MSF’s refusal in January to comply with Israel’s request to provide staff lists for vetting speaks volumes. The request is not unusual in active conflict zones. By refusing it and shielding potential terrorists from scrutiny, MSF is prioritising the security of compromised members over the universal laws of war and civilians.

It has effectively created convenient vacuums for terrorists involved in rocket production, sniper activity and more to hide behind a medical badge.

In February, MSF suspended all non-critical operations at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, the largest in the region, after admitting to a total breakdown of medical neutrality. Its internal reports confirmed a pattern of “unacceptable acts,” including masked and armed gunmen roaming hospital corridors and intimidating and arbitrarily arresting patients.

Crucially, MSF acknowledged “suspicion of movement of weapons” within the facility. Hamas predictably claimed that the masked gunmen were civilian police.

However, the admission substantiated long-standing intelligence that Hamas was exploiting the hospital as a military headquarter, thereby stripping the medical site of protected status under international law.

A recent article by two medical doctors in the Times of Israel is even more damning. The authors, one a formerMSF Secretary General, give alarming examples of terrorist infiltration within MSF’s Gaza staff and operations.

They highlight instances of multiple MSF-affiliated healthcare workers who were members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Evidence includes MSF staff photographed in Hamas uniforms alongside senior terrorist commanders.

The authors refer to the case of Fadi Al-Wadiya, an MSF staffer who was a PIJ rocket manufacturing expert for over 15 years. Al-Wadiya was no exception.

They describe a chilling, “centralised regime” in Gaza in which Hamas regulates NGOs (non-governmental organisations), such as MSF, through designated “guarantors”. These are senior officials who liaise with the terror group’s security services to influence operational decisions.

The authors, say that MSF’s deputy head of Gaza leadership served as a Hamas-approved “guarantor”.

Such advocacy boosts critics who say that MSF has become a partisan actor using its Nobel-winning brand to shield extremist elements in Gaza intent on annihilating Israel and all Jews who inhabit it.

Oxfam GB

In the UK, Oxfam GB provides a different, no less revealing case study as the most “storied institution”.

Founded in 1942 as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief (hence the acronym), its mission was to persuade the British government to allow food relief to starving Greek villagers under Nazi occupation.

More than 80 years later, Oxfam is a global confederation of 21 affiliates, led by Oxfam GB. Just as MSF has done, Oxfam GB has drifted into slightly different humanitarian work after October 7: combustible political activism against Israel.

Then came Dr Halima Begum, British-Bangladeshi academic, development expert and Oxfam GB’s first woman-of-colour CEO in December 2024.

Begum’s academic pedigree is impeccable. She has a BSc in Government and History and an MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics. Her PhD from Queen Mary University of London is in Political and Human Geography. In 2024, she received an honorary Doctor of Letters from the university.

She was reportedly brought in to “decolonise” Oxfam GB. Her tenure ended abruptly in late 2025 after a leadership review, which she has called an orchestrated “witch-hunt”.

Begum did not go quietly. She set off a whistleblowing flare on her way out. The fallout sent shockwaves through Oxfam’s global confederation and the NGO world. 

She quickly launched a legal offensive against her former employer. In her Employment Tribunal filing and high-profile Channel 4 interview in February 2026, Begum claims an incriminating “institutional whiteness” and “toxic antisemitic culture” infecting Oxfam GB’s heart.

Her core allegation is the “Gaza exception”. She says that Oxfam GB prematurely and ideologically began promoting the “genocide” slur against Israel in Gaza to appease its activist wing.

She ascribes this to “toxic” internal pressure specifically targeting Israel while ignoring other areas, among them El-Fasher in Sudan. That’s despite UN investigators finding clear “hallmarks of genocide” in the Sudanese sand.

Begum also claims that the environment that Oxfam GB created for Jewish staff was hostile and left them feeling “unsafe”.

Oxfam rejects all Begum’s allegations and says its use of the term, genocide, followed formal, legal “review”.

The dispute set off an inquiry by the UK Charity Commission that is examining whether Oxfam GB’s advocacy crossed the legal boundary separating charitable work from political campaigning.

Under British law, charities’ activities are required to align with stated humanitarian purposes, not partisan or ideological agendas. Whether Oxfam GB crossed that line is for regulators to determine.

The controversy raises broader questions about the humanitarian sector’s relationship with political advocacy and truth-telling.

Gift of the Givers

South Africa’s Gift of the Givers presents a different but no less compelling case.

Founded in 1992 by medical doctor Imtiaz Sooliman, the charity has an impressive reputation as the African continent’s most effective disaster-relief organisation.

Gift of the Givers is acknowledged globally for rapid deployment, low administrative overheads and ability to operate in difficult conflict zones. It has delivered billions of South African Rands in aid in more than 47 countries, including Bosnia, Somalia, Syria, Haiti and Yemen.

Its longstanding presence in Gaza since 2009 has drawn claims (routinely and hotly denied by Sooliman) that its donations meant for humanitarian aid sometimes found their way into Hamas’s coffers by default or design.

Critics argue that Sooliman’s public statements often blur lines between humanitarianism and political advocacy. They cite his public rhetoric at anti-Israel rallies, including antisemitic tropes of “Zionists” (the anti-Israel lobby’s code word for Jews) who “rule the world with money and fear,” and regular genocide references.

To casual readers, Sooliman’s implication is unmistakable: Israel is committing the “Crime of Crimes” in Gaza.

He may feel emboldened under cover of his contacts at the highest levels of South Africa’s ruling ANC (African National Congress) government, particularly in DIRCO (Department of International Relations and Cooperation).

Sooliman appears oblivious to the heaviest of ironies in DIRCO leading the country’s lawsuit it launched at the International Criminal Court (ICJ) against Israel on a genocide charge just weeks after the horror of Hamas’s genuinely genocidal attack on October 7.

Gift of the Givers has thrown its weight behind the lawsuit.

Dr Ivor Chipkin has exposed the political and moral hypocrisy behind the lawsuit in a prescient article in the South African Journal of International Affairs in November 2025.

Chipkin is an academic political scientist specialising in public administration, public policy and governance in post-apartheid South Africa. He lectures in public policy at the University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science and is co-founder and director of the New South Institute, a Johannesburg-based think tank focused on government and public-sector reform.

His focus in the article is the “peculiarity” of South Africa’s decision to charge Israel with the “Crime of Crimes” at the ICJ “while treating Hamas (at least in front of the ICJ) as largely blameless.”

Chipkin ascribes this double standard to an “organic crisis” facing the ANC, related to the ANC’s fading “revolutionary” character and the lawsuit’s likely effects on South Africa’s foreign policy. None of it bodes well for the country or the ruling party. 

By Chipkin’s reckoning, the crisis lies in South African president Cyril Ramaphosa’s inability to give “revolutionary meaning to ANC politics domestically.” Instead, Chipkin says that Ramaphosa has vainly attempted to “build its revolutionary credentials on the international stage as a vanguard of anti-imperialism and the struggle against colonialism.”

The ICJ lawsuit and Ramaphosa’s appointment of Naledi Pandor, a Muslim convert with extremist views, as foreign minister, “signal” that strategy, Chipkin writes.

He examines in graphic detail the legal basis for the lawsuit’s genocide claim. He finds it wanting on so many levels that “not only must the observer ask why South Africa did not seek any court order against Hamas, but why it did not even try.”

Sooliman should not be surprised that critics see similar gaps in his genocide claims against Israel.

Along with MSF and Oxfam GB, Sooliman uses the genocide accusation as advocacy to mobilise outrage, donations and political pressure.

Yet the genocide claim is a highest-order legal accusation which none of these organisations has the legal, moral authority to make. Doing so before an unequivocal legal ruling (expected in 2027) is not rhetorical flourish.

It is moral inversion and historical revision.

Genocide is not a slogan and the legal threshold for a finding is deliberately high.

Under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, it requires proof of specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

Determining such intent is not the purview of activists, charities or social-media campaigns. It belongs to the ICJ and the International Criminal Court (ICC) that were created to examine evidence, test witnesses and weigh competing legal arguments.

They are not meant to operate on rhetoric, miasma and press releases. And despite the best efforts of the anti-Israel lobby, the scaffolding against genocide claims aimed at Israel remains strong and intact:

Jews were the primary victims of the crime that inspired the word, genocide; the Nazis murdered six million Jews in the Holocaust; the modern State of Israel emerged partly from world recognition that Jews needed a place where such annihilation could never happen again; the October 7 attack by Hamas had all the hallmarks of true genocidal intent; Hamas, PIJ and other terror groups have “the same genocidal message in the DNA of their charters – the extermination of the Jews.”

All that history should impose a degree of humility on those accusing Israel of genocide while ignoring Hamas’s blatant genocidal intent on October 7, and its public promises to repeat it “over and over until Israel is annihilated.”

That humility is absent, most likely because of the existential burden Jews face as targets of the “world’s oldest hatred” (Jew hatred).

British author, humourist and Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobson identified it 12 years ago when he asked rhetorically:

“When will Jews ever be forgiven for The Holocaust?”

His answer: “Never.”

In a flurry of columns for The Observer in the UK after October 7, Jacobson vents his fury at “progressives” who downplayed the barbaric mass murder and rape Hamas perpetrated on the day and exaggerated Israel’s response.

He points out that “genocides don’t leaflet the populations they want to destroy with warnings to stay out of harm’s way.”

That leaves Israel looking very good at war and very bad at genocide.

Jacobson’s latest book, Howl (Jonathan Cape, 2026) is a novel based on October 7, with a delicate balance of humour and horror that only he could get just right. It allows readers who would weep even more, the respite of occasionally being able to laugh after October 7. 

Humanitarian organisations present themselves as guardians of moral clarity and defenders of international law. But law and morality depend primarily on truth and truth telling requires restraint.

When humanitarians use forked tongues to stretch the truth about genocide, they erode its meaning, cheapen the suffering of genuine victims and erode trust.

If everything is genocide, then nothing is genocide.

Truth-telling is not a pastime. It is the foundation of humanitarianism. Without it, even the most well-intentioned humanitarian charity turns into a storyteller – and not always a truthful one.

About the writer:

Marika Sboros is a South African freelance investigative journalist with decades of experience writing fulltime for the country’s top media titles on a wide range of topics. She started her career as a hard-news reporter in the newsroom of the now defunct Rand Daily Mail, a campaigning anti-government newspaper during the worst excesses of the apartheid era. She commutes between South Africa and the UK.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).