JERUSALEM — In 2023, days after the October 7 terror attack on Israel, President Joe Biden told the international media he had “no confidence in the numbers that the Palestinians [were] using” for their civilian death counts. Fast forward a few months to March, 2024, and Biden was calling for a “red line” on the war in Gaza, telling MSNBC, “You can’t have another 30,000 Palestinians dead as a consequence of going after [Hamas]” — incurring the ire of defenders of Israel who said the 30,000 death count was pure Palestinian propaganda.
So what’s going on?
Politics.
The numbers killed in Gaza matter because a growing swell of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel voices in governments around the world, from the European Union and United Nations to even America, are telling Israel to cease fire, stop advancing in Gaza, halt shooting and killing terrorists and quit the mission of eradicating Hamas — at least for a time — because, the line of argument goes, too many innocent Palestinian civilians are needlessly dying.
The Gaza health ministry said in February the number of killed Palestinians stood then at 30,035 — and major media quickly jumped at the statistic, citing it as the truest tell of the innocents Israel’s military had killed during its mission to rout and destroy Hamas. But the Gaza health ministry is a Hamas-run agency.
Trusting its numbers is like trusting communist China to accurately report is government-sponsored persecution of Uyghurs. Uyghurs? What Uyghurs?
Knesset member Ohad Tal, a member of the Security and Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a sit-down interview in his Jerusalem office that not only are the numbers of killed coming from the Palestinians not to be trusted, but that Hamas terrorists are “also contributing to their own numbers” of dead.
“Look at the videos coming out of Gaza,” he said.
“Hamas people are shooting their own people in the heads,” he said. Why?
“We designated safe zones in Gaza,” Tal said. “We told population to go there. Hamas people were shooting their own people in their heads” to prevent them from entering safe zones, and to prevent them from reaching supplies sent by Israelis and foreign governments into the region.
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