Reports from several news outlets across the world after Netanyahu’s speech in Congress asserted that what he said to US lawmakers on this past Wednesday was full of distortions and fabricated lies.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a long speech in US Congress and touched on several issues, including the war in Gaza, the rising tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, and the challenge of Iran for Tel Aviv.
On the war in Gaza, for example, the Israeli Prime Minister promised to achieve “total victory” against Hamas and denounced American opponents of the war in Gaza as “idiots.” He also told US lawmakers that Israel will settle for “nothing less” than total victory over Hamas, and described a vision for postwar Gaza seemingly at odds with the terms of a peace deal advocated by the Biden administration.
But it took less than a day for several news outlets across the world to call Netanyahu’s bluffs in his Wednesday speech and clearly prove how the Israeli Prime Minister lied so frequently mostly about the war in Gaza.
A quick review of a number of these reports from the Guardian the Washington Post, the Al-Mayadeen, and CNN, highlights four major issues about which Netanyahu lied to US lawmakers on his Wednesday speech.
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Israel killed lowest number of non-combatants in Gaza in the history of urban warfare!
Netanyahu said in this regard that “despite all the lies you’ve heard, the war in Gaza has one of the lowest ratios of combatants to non-combatant casualties in the history of urban warfare.” This is a big lie.
The death toll in Gaza now has reached nearly 40,000, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, a figure that has been confirmed by the United Nations as well.
To prove the accuracy of the numbers, Gaza’s Health Ministry has repeatedly publicized lists of the dead, including their Israeli-issued identification numbers, The majority of the dead — tens of thousands of them– have been women and children, and not every man killed has been a combatant.
But this is not the whole picture of how many Palestinian civilians were killed during the past nine months by the Israeli forces. Many of the dead likely remain buried under Gaza’s sprawling rubble fields, or were summarily buried at makeshift sites by Israeli forces. The being counted, the death toll can go being the official figures.
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Israel has done a great job in preventing civilian harm during the war!
“I suggest you listen to Col. John Spencer. John Spencer is head of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point. He’s studied every major urban conflict, I was going to say ‘in modern history,’ he corrected me, ‘no, in history.’ Israel, he said, has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history, and beyond what international law requires,” Netanyahu said on Wednesday. But this is also a claim far from the truth.
Besides the fact that Spencer is a military analyst, he is a well-known pro-Israeli partisan, which questions his neutrality. More than that, Netanyahu’s claims, which Spencer endorsed, are at stark odds with repeated appeals for Israel to do more to mitigate civilian harm in Gaza, including from the Biden administration which has for months said that Israel should do more to not only avoid additional deaths, but to improve the humanitarian situation throughout the Strip.
The UN has also strongly criticized the conditions at what Israel considers “safe zones.” James Elder, a UNICEF spokesperson, said July 16 that “under international law, the place where you evacuate people to must have sufficient resources for survival. However, these safe zones are tiny patches of barren land, or street corners, or half-built buildings, with no water, no facilities, no shelters from the cold and the rain.”
