War is atrocious and almost always involves significant numbers of civilian casualties, but is often accepted as a "necessary evil" at least to some extent. Any individual war is judged on a case by case basis, and can be found to be just or unjust to various degrees.
On the other hand, a genocide is by definition purely atrocious and can never be justified in any way. There are international laws about how warfare is allowed to be conducted (there are specific "war crimes" because war *itself* is not seen as a crime) but there are of course no rules about "how a genocide can be conducted" because it can never be allowed.
The more I inform myself about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the less I'm convinced that Israel as an entity, or Israelis as a population, have ever had genocidal intentions, and I think they still don't. Some extremists among them do, but they are being kept in check far better than extremists on the Palestinian side, who are instead elected as leaders and making all the decisions.
It really seems like the core problem is Islamic extremist ideology, mixed with Arab supremacism, which Palestinians were never able to root out of their society. I'm asking myself what else Israel could have done in response to Oct 7th, and the only thing that comes to mind is: Completely wall off Gaza and not let anything or anyone in or out anymore. Which would have also been classified as a genocide, because it would have led to mass starvation. If they only walled off the Israeli border, and stopped controlling their waterways and Egyptian border, then it's to be assumed that Iran and some other powerful states would have allowed Gaza to build a stronger and stronger military and carry out attacks even larger than Oct 7th. No matter what Israel does, they lose, either by allowing their own destruction, or causing mass death among Gazan civilians in one or another way.
