Netanyahu Admits Israel Has Killed 13,000 Civilians… and Silence?
Mehdi’s Monday Memo on counting crimes at home and abroad
Thirteen thousand.
That’s the minimum number of Palestinian civilians killed by the Israeli military in Gaza since Oct. 7 according to… wait for it… Israel’s own prime minister.
Believe it or not, Benjamin Netanyahu offered that estimate in an interview with the German newspaper Bild on March 10:
Netanyahu also gave his own death estimates. Some 13,000 Palestinian fighters had been killed, he said, while the civilian death rate was estimated at 1-1.5 for every combatant. That would put the total killed — fighters and civilians — at at least 26,000.
A pretty big admission, wouldn’t you say? After months of arguing over the “Hamas-run” Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty figures, despite the latter being endorsed by both the Lancet medical journal and Israeli intelligence, Israel’s own prime minister comes out and says the death toll is 26,000 (only a few thousand lower than the Gaza Health Ministry’s at the time) and declares “at least” half of those killed are civilians. In fact, if you go with Bibi’s upper estimate, the 1:1.5 death rate, then you get a whopping civilian death toll of 19,500.
Yes, almost 20,000 Palestinian civilians killed in less than six months. Noncombatants. Innocents.
Yet three weeks later, and not a peep from much of the U.S. and the UK media. No ‘breaking news’ chyrons on CNN or MSNBC referencing the prime minister’s shocking estimate; no front-page headlines or outraged op-eds in the New York Times or the Washington Post. The news agency Reuters did cover Netanyahu’s remarks but chose to make the headline about 13,000 “terrorists” killed, not 13,000 civilians.
Netanyahu’s numbers, rather conveniently of course, understate the civilian death toll while overstating the Hamas death toll. Think about it. For a 1:1 death rate, in which 13,000 out of 26,000 dead Palestinians are deemed to be “terrorists,” you basically have to assume that every Gazan male killed by Israel since Oct. 7 was a Hamas fighter.
Every. Single. One.
Nevertheless, Israel’s defenders like to point to this bogus 1:1 terrorist-to-civilian death rate and claim that “world leaders should be applauding the IDF’s precision-strike capabilities.”
This is utter nonsense. The award-winning writer and Marine veteran Phil Klay, writing in The Atlantic last week, observed that “even if we accept the IDF’s claim that 12,000 of the roughly 29,000 Gazans reported dead by February 20 were enemy fighters, that would still mean that for every 100 Israeli air strikes, the IDF killed an average of 54 civilians. In the U.S. campaign in Raqqa, the American military caused an estimated 1.7 civilian deaths per 100 strikes.”
On Sunday, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on the “kill zones” inside of Gaza, where any Palestinian “who crosses into them is shot”:
The Israeli army says 9,000 terrorists have been killed since the Gaza war began. Defense officials and soldiers, however, tell Haaretz that these are often civilians whose only crime was to cross an invisible line drawn by the IDF.
Is it any wonder that experts have lined up to denounce Israel’s terror tactics in Gaza, which have caused the deaths of thousands of innocent men, women, and children? U.S. military historian Robert Pape called Gaza “one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history.” Former UN Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Andrew Gilmour said we are witnessing “probably the highest kill rate of any military killing anybody since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.”
In an exclusive online town hall with Zeteo paid subscribers on Friday evening, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese lambasted the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza, which she has described as a genocide, and told me that “there is plenty of evidence of war crimes.”
You can watch my full interview with Albanese here.
Trump is no friend of cops
On Saturday, thousands of people attended the funeral for fallen NYPD Officer Jonathan Diller, who was shot and killed as he approached an illegally parked car in Queens last week.
Diller has become a cause célèbre on the right, with conservative media outlets using his tragic death to attack President Biden and the Democrats for being ‘soft’ on crime. A cynical Donald Trump even received a fawning front-page cover from the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post after he attended a wake for Officer Diller.
And Republican Sen. J.D. Vance (Ohio), a Trump sycophant who is now in the running for the V.P. slot, tweeted how “Joe Biden has promoted a culture that places criminals above victims and predators over cops. Donald Trump offers a different path. America gets to choose in November.”
Sorry, who are we kidding here? Pro-cop Trump “offers a different path” to pro-criminal Biden? Really?
Vance is right about one thing: America does get to “choose in November.” Between a quadruple-indicted candidate who incited a mob to attack police officers at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, injuring and maiming at least 140 of them in the process, and who has since pledged to pardon and release from prison the men and women who were convicted for attacking those cops, and a candidate… who didn’t do any of that and who has presided over a historically low murder rate in this country.
Tough choice.
What I am watching
A leaked video of right-wing Republican Rep. Tim Walberg of Michigan telling a town hall audience that the United States “shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid” for the Palestinians and calling instead for a nuclear strike on Gaza. “It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick,” Walberg can be heard saying.
Do you think this GOP representative will face any consequences for his genocidal remarks?
Anti-Palestinian racism and dehumanization have been utterly and shamefully normalized in our politics.
What I am quoting
“It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.” - comedian and critic George Carlin
Where I have been interviewed
Chris Cuomo and I had a long back-and-forth on his podcast last week, debating a bunch of topics including how seriously we should take the threat of fascism from a Trump second term and how we can resolve the crisis in Gaza.
***Reminders***
Thank you again for all your support for this new media endeavor. Zeteo, though, is still in soft-launch mode. Our shows, and full content and list of contributors, won’t be released until mid-to-late April.
In the meantime, have you watched our recent sit-down interview with South African Foreign Minister Dr. Naledi Pandor? Or our Zoom town hall with UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese? Or our fun trailer for Zeteo?
Don’t forget 2/3 are women and children - not terrorists. A very important item for him to ignore.
The Gaza Representatives say that 32,000 Civilians have been killed in Gaza. Netanyahu is not even in Gaza but he claims that it's only 13,000. Thirteen thousand is too many Civilians to be killed unless you're trying to wipe out the population.