Brian McDonald
Jerusalem — The Prime Minister of Israel said in a podcast that almost half of those killed in Gaza War are Hamas fighters, once again addressing the number of civilian victims it caused global outrage. Benjamin Netanyahu stated that the total number of victims is lower than that reported by authorities in the Palestinian territory.
According to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, at least 35,091 people have been killed in the territory during more than seven months of war between Israel and Palestinian militants.
Last week, the United Nations changed its estimate of the number of women and children believed to be among the civilians killed in the Palestinian territory, moving from numbers previously provided by the Hamas government in Gaza to numbers declared by the enclave’s Ministry of Health.
According to ministry figures, cited by the UN since May 10, around 13,000 women and children have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war on October 7, when Israel launched its attacks against Hamas in retaliation for the group terrorist attack. .
The estimate is significantly lower than figures provided by the Hamas administration in Gaza and previously cited by the UN, which said that almost 24,000 of those killed were women and children.
Speaking Sunday on the “Call Me Back” podcast, Netanyahu said the death toll in Gaza was around 30,000, and that Hamas fighters were responsible for nearly half that number. He insisted to podcaster Dan Senor that Israel “has been able to keep the ratio of civilians to combatants killed… (to) a ratio of about one to one.”
“Fourteen thousand fighters were killed and probably around 16 thousand civilians were killed,” he said. He provided similar numbers in March during an interview with Politico, at a time when the Gaza Health Ministry was reporting a death toll of at least 31,045, and again in an interview with Dr. Phil in early May.
Neither Israel nor Hamas has provided evidence demonstrating how they achieved their respective death toll estimates. The Hamas-run Gaza administration and Ministry of Health do not distinguish between civilian and combatant casualties in their war records.
The UN and a long list of countries, including the US, have expressed alarm at the number of civilian deaths in Gaza. United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk warned in a statement last month that children especially were “disproportionately paying the ultimate price in this war.”
Netanyahu’s latest comment came amid intensified pressure from Israel’s main military supplier, the US, over the Palestinian cost of the war. washington stopped the delivery of 3,500 bombsand president Biden warned he would stop supplying artillery shells and other weapons if Israel carried out a large-scale invasion of Rafahwhere around a million people are sheltered.
Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto/Getty
One USA State Department report released Friday that it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel used American weapons in ways inconsistent with humanitarian rights standards, but that the United States was unable to reach “conclusive findings.”
The war in Gaza was triggered by Hamas’ unprecedented terrorist attack on October 7, which saw the militants kill around 1,200 people and take around 240 others hostage. Around 100 of these captives are believed to still be alive and detained in Gaza. Israeli authorities believe more than 30 people are dead, but their bodies are still being held.
