Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. didn’t mince words on Fox News on Monday night, declaring that the world is looking in the wrong direction — at Israel — if it wants to find a genuine genocide unfolding in the Middle East.
Kennedy, whose father was assassinated by a Palestinian, noted that Jewish and Christian populations have been quietly erased across Arab nations for decades.
“If you look at the Middle East, there is an ongoing genocide against Jews and Christians in all the nations in the Middle East,” he pointed out. “In 1948, there was [sic] a million Jews in the Middle East in the Arab countries. Today, there’s about 15,000 left. 20% of the population was Christian, now it’s 5%.”
“In Israel, in contrast, there were 150,000 Palestinians in 1948,” he explained. “Today, there’s almost two million; 20% of the population. If Israel wanted to commit a genocide against Palestinians, they could do it in a minute. It’s doing the opposite. Palestinian population is growing enormously around Israel. There are no Jews in Jordan. There are no Jews in Gaza. The number of Christians in Gaza has dropped by about 80% over the past 10 years. If you want to see where a real genocide is happening, it’s not in Israel. It’s happening in all the nations around it.”
US Secretary of Health RFK Jr.:
If Israel wanted to commit a genocide against Palestinians, they could do it in a minute. That’s doing the opposite. The Palestinian population is growing enormously around Israel.
If you want to see what a real genocide is, it’s not happening in… pic.twitter.com/i4tAUgsNoU
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) June 30, 2026
In the roughly 30 years after Israel declared its independence in 1948, approximately 850,000 to 900,000 Jews fled, migrated, or were expelled from Arab countries (and around one million if you include non-Arab Muslim nations like Iran and Turkey).
The underlying numbers on Christian persecution are grimly real and well-documented.
In Iraq and Syria, ISIS waged a campaign against religious minorities so brutal that the State Department, the U.N., and the European Parliament all formally branded it genocide. Churches were leveled, ancient Assyrian and Chaldean communities were gutted, and hundreds of thousands of Christians fled Mosul as militants offered them a grim choice: convert, pay a medieval-style tax, or die. Iraq’s Christian population has cratered from about 1.5 million before the 2003 war to a sliver of that now.
Yazidis fared even worse. Save The Children reported, “The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) killed, captured, and displaced all 400,000 Yazidi people living in Sinjar on 3 August 2014 in a genocide that disproportionately affected children. About 10,000 Yazidis were killed or abducted, half of all those executed were children, according to a report by multi-national researchers in the journal PLoS Medicine.”
Egypt’s Coptic Christians, among the oldest Christian communities on Earth, have endured a relentless string of attacks, from the 2017 Palm Sunday church bombings that killed dozens to a deadly ambush on a busload of pilgrims the same year. Watchdog groups say Minya Governorate, a region in upper Egypt, has become a flashpoint for sectarian violence, with Coptic churches forced to shutter under threat and intimidation.
And in Nigeria, advocacy organizations estimate that more than 37,500 people have died since Boko Haram’s insurgency erupted in 2009, with Fulani militant violence adding thousands more victims — a toll some rights groups insist is driven chiefly by religious hatred, even as Nigerian officials and other observers dispute that characterization.
Kennedy sees the picture clearly: the true erasure of ancient minority communities is happening outside of Israel’s borders, not within them.
