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We've Got to Stop Believing Hamas' Lies about Civilian Deaths in Gaza


(Telegraph-UK) Isaac Schorr - The global news media would have you believe that the Israel Defense Forces fighting in Gaza have gone far beyond anything that could be justified in response to the barbaric Hamas assaults on Israel last October, in which more than 1,000 men, women and children were murdered in the most horrifying ways. It is completely unreasonable to believe the terrorists of Hamas on the matter of how many people Israel has killed. Yet that is precisely what the media and everyone else does. The Hamas figure is not a fact: it is terrorist propaganda. As the renowned military historian Lord Andrew Roberts noted in the House of Lords earlier this month, we would not believe Vladimir Putin or ISIS on casualties inflicted by their enemies: there is no reason to treat the rapists, torturers and murderers of Hamas any differently. Roberts went on to point out that it's estimated that more than 9,000 of the dead were not innocent civilians but active Hamas fighters - and even Hamas admits that its dead fighters are included in the total. If one then accepts the Hamas-concocted death toll for the sake of argument and makes allowance for the fact that Hamas and its allies are also killing Gazans, the IDF are killing less than two civilians for every Hamas fighter they take out. Roberts said, "I speak as a military historian. Less than 2:1 is an astonishingly low ratio for modern urban warfare where the terrorists routinely use civilians as human shields. It is a testament to the professionalism, ethics and values of the Israel Defense Forces." The UN has assessed that a more normal ratio in urban combat would be 9:1. There is probably no other army in the world which could operate in Gaza as surgically as the IDF is doing. Students of history and statecraft understand that evil on the scale of Hamas - which charged over a border to murder, rape, torture and burn alive men, women, and children for the crime of being born Jews - must be wholly destroyed, rather than tolerated. They are able to distinguish between the bombs that fell on Dresden and those that fell on London.
2024-02-21 00:00:00
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