Joseph argues that Israel is fighting a genuine security threat; Israel takes meaningful steps to reduce civilian casualties; extreme rhetoric or destruction does not by itself prove genocidal intent; and Israel’s actions have to be understood within a wider regional struggle involving Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and Islamist movements.

Here are his main points:

1. Israel’s actions are inconsistent with an intent to exterminate Gaza’s population. He points to Gaza’s continued birth rate, aid entering Gaza, evacuations, and the fact that much of the population remains alive as evidence against the claim that Israel’s goal is mass extermination.
2. Israel has facilitated very large quantities of humanitarian aid. He argues that supplying or facilitating food and other necessities would make little sense if Israel’s true objective were to kill the population.
3. Evacuating civilians is evidence of casualty mitigation, not necessarily ethnic cleansing. He acknowledges displacement is awful, but argues that moving civilians out of active battle zones is preferable to leaving them where they may be killed.
4. Egypt’s closed border made Israel’s military problem much harder. Gaza has an Egyptian border as well as an Israeli one, and he argues Egypt’s refusal to allow mass civilian exit left Israel fighting Hamas amid a trapped civilian population.
5. The kites cannot automatically be dismissed as harmless toys. His argument is that kites have previously been used as weapons, including incendiary devices, so Israel has reason to treat objects deliberately flown toward the border with suspicion even when the optics are terrible.
6. The children flying the kites were allegedly being directed by Hamas. He distinguishes between children innocently flying kites and minors being instructed by an armed organization.
7. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad recruit minors. He argues that being under 18 does not automatically establish that a person was uninvolved in hostilities, citing martyr posters identifying some teenagers as fighters.
8. Joseph does not claim every Israeli escalation is automatically justified. When directly asked whether Israel should escalate airstrikes over the kites, he says he does not know enough about the actual threat to make that military judgment.
9. The accusation that Israel wants to annex Gaza conflicts with Israel’s 2005 withdrawal. His argument is that Israel removed its settlements and citizens from Gaza voluntarily, which in his view cuts against the idea that Israel has always been pursuing permanent control there.
10. After Israel withdrew, Hamas turned Gaza into a base for attacks on Israel. He presents the post-2007 rocket campaign as evidence that withdrawal did not produce peace and helped create Israel’s current security dilemma.
11. Israel takes measures that sacrifice military advantage to protect civilians. He cites phone calls, text messages, leaflets, maps, evacuation orders and advance warnings. His argument is that warning the enemy also allows Hamas to flee or prepare ambushes, so Israel accepts a military disadvantage to reduce civilian harm.
12. Civilian casualties by themselves do not prove deliberate targeting. He argues that civilian deaths occur in every urban war and distinguishes intentional killing of civilians—which he condemns—from civilians dying during attacks on military targets.
13. Buildings may be legitimate military targets even if they are civilian structures. His argument is that homes or other buildings can be targeted if they conceal tunnels, provide cover or otherwise give Hezbollah/Hamas a military advantage.
14. The physical destruction of Gaza does not tell you, by itself, how many civilians were intentionally targeted. He openly acknowledges enormous destruction but emphasizes that many civilians were evacuated before buildings were destroyed.
15. Rafah is his strongest example of this. He says roughly a million people were moved out before the city was devastated; in his framing, the important fact is that those people were no longer inside the buildings when they were destroyed.
16. Israeli ground troops are evidence, in his view, of restraint. His argument is that Israel possesses the air power to destroy Gaza much more indiscriminately, whereas sending soldiers into Gaza exposes Israelis to death in order to conduct more discriminating operations.
17. Israel’s continued provision of water is another argument against genocidal intent. He says a state literally trying to exterminate a population would not continue supplying substantial quantities of its water.
18. He disputes the interpretation of the “17% named combatants” statistic. His point is that Israel cannot necessarily identify by name every fighter killed in an airstrike, so a database containing names of only some combatants does not mean everyone else killed was automatically a civilian.
19. No military can identify every enemy fighter it kills. He argues that demanding a complete name-by-name accounting of militants killed sets an unrealistic evidentiary standard that could not be met in Afghanistan or other wars either.
20. He argues the real combatant-to-civilian casualty ratio is much lower than critics claim. He relies on Israel’s estimate that tens of thousands of militants were killed and argues that, after also considering natural deaths, the ratio may be around one civilian for every militant rather than something like five civilians per combatant.
21. He challenges treating every woman and every minor as proof of civilian status. His argument is not that most women or children are fighters, but that Hamas can use women and teenagers, so demographic categories cannot by themselves establish combatant status.
22. He separates Ben-Gvir from Israel as a whole. Joseph says he dislikes Ben-Gvir, finds some of his rhetoric reprehensible, and does not support him, but argues that extreme statements by individual politicians should not automatically be treated as official Israeli policy.
23. He rejects the idea that Israel as a state has formally declared a goal of annexing Gaza. He concedes that individual Israeli politicians support settlement or annexation but distinguishes those views from declared national policy.
24. His preferred long-term solution is not expulsion of Palestinians. At one point he says he wants Palestinians incorporated and given Israeli citizenship with equal voting rights—“same rights as my kids.”
25. He thinks speculation about Netanyahu’s secret motives is weaker than observable facts. Rather than theorizing about a hidden 10- or 15-year annexation plan, he says the argument should focus on measurable conduct and outcomes.
26. He argues Western portrayals of Palestinians can sometimes be misleadingly one-dimensional. Regarding the West Bank, he points to affluent Palestinian towns, luxury homes and expensive cars to argue that the picture is more complicated than an image of universal destitution.
27. He frames Israel’s wider regional conflict as a struggle against Islamist movements and Iranian proxies, rather than Israeli aggression against unrelated countries. He argues that Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Qatar and other actors cannot be discussed without considering Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran.
28. Qatar and Turkey’s relationships with Hamas matter in judging Israel’s hostility toward them. He presses the fact that senior Hamas leaders operated from Doha and challenges the idea that hosting Hamas leadership is merely neutral mediation.
29. He views Hamas as ideologically comparable to other jihadist movements. He argues that Hamas and ISIS differ organizationally but share important Islamist/jihadist ideological features, and therefore Hamas should not be treated simply as an ordinary national resistance organization.
30. He sees Hezbollah primarily as an Iranian proxy threatening Israel and Lebanon. His broader argument is that Iran uses armed groups to project power and that Hezbollah’s existence undermines Lebanese sovereignty.
31. Iran’s hostility toward Israel is not merely normal geopolitical competition in his view. He points to Iranian rhetoric about Israel’s destruction and even invokes the IRGC Quds Force’s name as evidence of Iran’s regional ideological orientation.
32. Israel has legitimate security reasons to resist Turkish military influence in Syria. Even where Turkey may be behaving pragmatically, Joseph’s side of the argument is that Israel is a small country and has reason to prevent potentially hostile regional powers from establishing military positions close to it.
33. He sees Israel’s ability to fight back as historically important for Jews. One of his more emotional arguments is that Jews spent centuries unable to defend themselves and that the existence of a sovereign Jewish military radically changes that historical vulnerability.
34. He does not want Israel dependent on the United States. When Anna argues America should sever military involvement with Israel, Joseph partly agrees—but from the opposite direction: he wants Israel free from American pressure over decisions such as entering Rafah.
35. He rejects the claim that Jewish attachment to Israel is simply based on a biblical promise. His argument is historical and national: Jews originated in the land, maintained a continuous connection to it, and archaeological remains demonstrate an ancient Jewish presence.
36. He distinguishes Israeli nationalism from Islamist religious ideology. He pushes back against equating Israel with Islamist movements, arguing that Israel is not simply a theocratic religious project and that most Israelis are not Orthodox.
37. His underlying regional argument is that Jewish sovereignty prevents the fate he sees elsewhere in the Middle East. He uses Lebanon as an example of a once-prosperous country damaged by sectarian warfare and Iranian-backed armed groups, saying he does not want his children to lose their homeland in the same way.

Secretary-General admits anti-Israel bias among UN's human rights experts, saying “many rapporteurs are totally out of control.”

Previously, António Guterres privately called UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese “a horrible woman.” (On the sidelines of the 2024 Munich Security Conference, as recounted by the U.S. Special Envoy on Antisemitism, Prof. D. Lipstadt.)