EXCLUSIVE -- Urban Warfare Expert John Spencer: Gaza ‘Genocide’ Libel Against Israel Is ‘Greatest Lie in Modern History’

Three years after Hamas-led terrorists carried out the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust — murdering some 1,200 people in southern Israel and dragging 251 hostages into Gaza — renowned urban warfare expert John Spencer says an information war has recast Israel as the aggressor and accused it of genocide thus delivering “the greatest lie in modern history.”

Speaking exclusively to Breitbart News ahead of Wednesday’s third anniversary of the October 7, 2023, massacre, Spencer — a retired U.S. Army major, chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Madison Policy Forum and one of the world’s leading scholars of urban and subterranean warfare — offered a sweeping assessment of the conflict, its conduct and its consequences after three years spent closely studying the war, including eight trips into Gaza.

At the center of Spencer’s assessment is what he describes as an extraordinary inversion of October 7: the country subjected to a deliberately planned massacre has increasingly been cast as the aggressor, while the nature of the attack that began the war has receded from view.

“I truly believe it’s a disinformation campaign of twisting reality to make the one that’s being attacked be the attacker, the oppressed be the oppressor, the victims be the aggressor,” Spencer said.

Spencer stressed that the distinction begins with the intent behind October 7 itself. He pointed to orders attributed to then-Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar governing what terrorists were to do and how their actions were to be recorded, along with written instructions he said were carried into Israel detailing how to make the killings more gruesome, including burning homes.

“It isn’t just a bunch of crazy people doing crazy things,” Spencer said. “They planned to do that.”

The problem, Spencer argued, is that the years since have increasingly collapsed the distinction between deliberate murder and civilian deaths during warfare — even where a military is operating under the laws of armed conflict against an enemy embedded among civilians.

As an example, Spencer contrasted “a baby that is strangled to death with a man’s hands” with the “horrific tragedy of collateral damage,” including civilians he said Hamas forces to remain in combat areas.

“People are trying to make them the same — as if all deaths are the same, they’re all just bad,” he said. “But they’re not.”

That distinction between intent and effect runs through Spencer’s assessment of the Gaza war — from Hamas’s strategy of operating among civilians to Israel’s conduct in fighting it — and ultimately underpins his rejection of the accusation that Israel is committing genocide.

From Hamas’s Strategy to the ‘Genocide Lie’

Hamas, Spencer argued, did not merely embed terrorists, weapons, command infrastructure and its vast tunnel network throughout Gaza’s civilian population to shield its military capabilities from attack. Its strategy, he said, also sought to ensure that Israeli operations produced Palestinian civilian casualties that could then be used to generate international pressure to halt the war before Hamas was destroyed.

“It isn’t just that Hamas wants shields so that it won’t be attacked,” Spencer said. “It wants the attack to happen. It wants and needs the deaths of its children, according to its own words.”

For Spencer, that goes directly to the distinction at the heart of the genocide debate: “Will matters. Intent matters, and actions matter.”

Spencer has been warning about that strategy almost from the outset of the war. Weeks after October 7, he told Breitbart News that Hamas sought to “create their own civilians’ deaths and get the world to react,” using the resulting international pressure to prevent Israel from destroying its military capabilities.

“And it is working,” he warned in November 2023.

By April 2024, Spencer was warning that the world was “playing into Hamas’s strategy” by pressuring Israel to stop while the terrorist organization remained capable of surviving the war.

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Three years after the massacre, he argues that the strategy has produced an even more profound inversion: the devastation of a war Hamas initiated is now being used to accuse the country it invaded of genocide.

“The genocide lie is the greatest lie in modern history,” Spencer said.

Spencer’s objection is not that Gaza has escaped enormous death and destruction. It is that those effects, however horrific, do not themselves establish genocide, which requires an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

“Genocide has no number associated with it, on purpose,” Spencer said. “Genocide is an intent to destroy, in whole or in part. There’s no number. It’s: What are you trying to do?”

Spencer described the argument built primarily around casualty figures and images of devastation as “effects-based analysis” — judging intent from the visible result of a military campaign while stripping away who was targeted, why structures were struck, how civilians died and how the enemy itself operated.

“You take the biggest number you can find and say, ‘I don’t care about the context,’” Spencer said of that approach. “It isn’t the number.”

That context, Spencer argued, includes a battlefield Hamas spent nearly two decades preparing for exactly such a war, constructing tunnels, explosives and fortified positions while embedding military infrastructure throughout densely populated civilian areas.

“There’s never been an urban battle in history where the enemy prepared the ground for 20 years, making every piece of it so difficult for you to enter — the explosives, the tunnels, all of that,” he said.

After eight trips into Gaza during the war, Spencer said what he has personally observed directly contradicts the portrayal of an Israeli military seeking to maximize civilian deaths.

“They’re actually trying to do the exact opposite of what they’re being accused of doing,” he said.

He pointed to the IDF’s use of warnings and advanced technology to identify terrorists and reduce civilian harm, as well as Israel’s provision of food, water, electricity and vaccinations to the population of territory controlled by the enemy it was fighting — measures Spencer described as extraordinary in wartime.

Spencer pointed in particular to the documentary NAZA, which scrutinizes Israeli targeting and civilian-casualty calculations, arguing that it illustrates how measures intended to enforce the laws of war can themselves be presented as evidence of wrongdoing.

“They’re calculating how much collateral damage is permitted by law, and then doing more than anybody has ever done in history to limit it,” Spencer said.

Spencer argued that those additional precautions have also slowed Israeli operations and, paradoxically, helped prolong the very war whose length and devastation are then cited against Israel.

He said the measures helped turn the campaign into a prolonged “house-by-house, block-by-block battle that nobody has ever dealt with.”

‘You’ll Get More Hamases’

For Spencer, validating that model would create an incentive far beyond Gaza: terrorist organizations would learn that embedding military capabilities among civilians, maximizing the political impact of civilian casualties and flooding the information space with images of the resulting devastation can make it increasingly difficult for Western militaries to defeat them.

“If you allow all these things — the numbers and all of that — to become the standard, not only will you get more Hamases, you’ll eventually get no laws and a gruesomeness and brutality in war, whether it’s a terrorist organization or not,” Spencer warned.

“That is a very dark place that I don’t want to see happen.”

Social media, Spencer argued, has supercharged that strategy by allowing emotionally powerful images and casualty figures to spread globally with little of the battlefield context needed to understand them.

“It’s a dangerous world when the opposite of the truth becomes reality just because it goes viral,” he said. “There’s no limit to where that can go.”

Stronger in Israel — More Worried About Jews Abroad

Yet the information war has produced a striking paradox. Three years after October 7, Spencer believes Israel is more vilified internationally even as it has emerged dramatically stronger militarily and strategically.

“Despite the information war, Israel is stronger today than it’s been in a generation,” Spencer said. “All of its enemies are either destroyed, in rubble or on their knees, and they have none of the capabilities that they had on October 6.”

Spencer pointed to a regional landscape transformed since October 7: Hamas devastated as a military force, Hezbollah’s leadership and capabilities severely degraded, the Assad regime gone in Syria, and Iran and its network of regional proxies dealt devastating blows.

He also cited Israel’s economic resilience and surging international demand for Israeli defense technology tested during the war.

“Israel as a nation is safer today than it was on October 6 by every metric, and it’s stronger,” Spencer said.

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“Once again, somebody tried to wipe them off the face of the earth, and they just made them stronger.”

But Spencer said Israel’s growing military strength has left him with another concern: the consequences of the information war for Jews living far beyond the battlefield.

“I’m actually more scared for American Jews than I am for Israel as a nation,” he said.

He expressed similar concern for Jews in Canada and Britain, arguing that the same misinformation and accusations that have recast Israel as the aggressor have spread far beyond the Middle East and contributed to an increasingly hostile environment for Jewish communities across the West.

His warning carries particular weight on the anniversary. Israel’s National Security Council warned Tuesday of a heightened threat of terrorist attacks against Israelis and Jews abroad around October 7, pointing in particular to threats from Iran and its proxies, Hamas and global jihadist elements.

‘The World Saw It and Still Villainized Israel’

For Spencer, however, the third anniversary ultimately returns to the event that set everything that followed in motion — and to an enemy that did not seek to conceal its brutality, but wanted the world to witness it.

“Never forget how gruesome that day was, and that Hamas wanted the world to see how gruesome it was in its warped Islamic jihad against the Western world,” he said.

“I’ve seen a lot of evil in all of my studies, and I’ve never seen that type of evil,” Spencer continued. “And I’ve never seen evil want its message to be broadcast like that.”

“The Nazis tried to hide what they did. Hamas wanted it shown around the world,” he said. “The world saw it and still villainized Israel — the victims.”

Yet three years after the attack, Spencer said Hamas had failed to leave Israel weaker.

“No matter what,” he concluded, “Israel came out of it stronger.”