Wikipedia editors say Israel committing genocide in Gaza, not just ‘allegations’

One of the main entries on the war has been renamed “Gaza genocide,” dropping the critical words “allegations of.”

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The editors of Wikipedia have changed one of its main entries on the Israel-Hamas war to reflect the view that Israel is committing mass murder in the Gaza Strip.

Instead of the title “Allegations of genocide in the 2023 Israeli attack on Gaza,” the open-content online encyclopedia now calls its article on the Arab death toll in the ongoing war, “Gaza Genocide.”

Ynet described “a vote after months of debate” on the subject, with “the deciding editor, Joe Roe, not[ing] a loose consensus for changing the title.”

The article uses numbers of deaths cited by Hamas, which does not differentiate between combatants and non-combatants and whose statistics have been questioned by experts who say their data is unreliable, at best.

In discussing the IDF’s actions in the war, it makes heavy use of known anti-Israel media sources, such as Qatar-based Al Jazeera, whose articles are cited a whopping 74 times, and British paper The Guardian (27 times).

When parsing the details of the charge of genocide, including the case brought by South Africa against Israel in the International Court of Justice, it almost exclusively references reports from the United Nations and human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the Jewish Voice for Peace that have proven themselves time and again as having a blatantly anti-Israel bias.

The lengthy article repeats the condemnations of Israel of many so-called human rights experts and scholars, as well as politicians and public figures.

It also has a long section calling out many specific countries’ governments for their “complicity” in the supposed Israeli war crimes.

In the entire article, there are only a few sentences containing any defense of Israeli actions or a rejection of the genocide charge.

Pro-Israel Wiki writers as well as outsiders have long held that coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is usually prejudiced against the Jewish state.

This is especially true following the Hamas invasion of Israel and massacre of 1,200 people on October 7, which sparked the ongoing war.

Following an intensive analysis of Wikipedia content and interviews with Israeli editors, the World Jewish Congress stated in a March report that “the state of the articles dealing with the conflict is alarming in its lack of neutrality.”

Anyone registered on the English-language site can create an article for publication and registration is not required to edit articles. Oversight is entrusted to a restricted number of users, who have above them administrators in an Arbitration Committee, to whom complaints can be addressed.