Question: Given an ongoing military occupation that began in 1967—illegal under international law—and a campaign that, in just the past two years, has killed tens of thousands of the occupied population by a military that denies the other side any meaningful capacity for self-defense, please identify the ways in which the following New York Times article engages in Genocide Denial:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/10/world/middleeast/hostages-god-gaza-tunnels.html

“Finding God, and Nietzsche, in the Hamas Tunnels of Gaza How Omer Shem Tov, who was 20 years old and not particularly religious when taken hostage, survived 505 days in captivity.”

Analysis: Stages of Genocide Denial in the New York Times Article

1. Question the Scale

The article entirely omits the death toll of Palestinians in Gaza, despite tens of thousands having been killed in the past two years. This silence functions not as a neutral omission but as a strategic erasure, leading readers to internalize a narrative where mass death has not occurred or is not relevant.

Absence of scale = denial of genocide.

3. Blame the Victims

By focusing on Hamas as captors and portraying the tunnels as the origin of evil, the article places moral responsibility squarely on the Palestinian side. The broader context of siege, starvation, and bombardment is left unmentioned, implying that Palestinian suffering is either self-inflicted or irrelevant.

Victims of genocide are recast as aggressors.

4. Highlight Counter-Violence

The piece focuses entirely on the experience of an Israeli hostage and the violence of Hamas. This selective framing amplifies Palestinian violence while ignoring Israeli airstrikes, mass civilian killings, and destruction of infrastructure. The reader is left with a distorted sense of who the primary agents of violence are.

Disproportionate focus on resistance tactics to obscure state violence.

5. Assert Political Motivations

By presenting the hostage narrative as a deeply human, apolitical experience of spiritual transformation, the article implies that criticism of Israel—or even contextualizing the massacre in Gaza—would be politicizing the story. This is itself a political maneuver: preserving the image of Israel as morally upright while rendering Palestinian voices and suffering suspect or illegitimate.

Any challenge to the genocidal power structure is implicitly framed as ‘political bias.’

10. Rewrite History

The historical context of Gaza’s isolation, the 1967 occupation, and decades of settler-colonial expansion are all erased. The tunnels are not presented as a survival mechanism under siege but as a symbol of barbarism. History is rewritten to begin with Hamas violence rather than with Israeli displacement, blockade, or bombardment.

Historical origins of the conflict are replaced with a decontextualized moral fable.

Conclusion

The New York Times article employs at least five distinct stages of Genocide Denial:

Through selective storytelling, moral framing, and the strategic omission of mass death, the article functions as a subtle yet powerful example of how elite Western media upholds genocidal narratives—not through overt denial, but through narrative laundering that conceals reality under the guise of human interest.