Joe Biden Downplays Increasing Civilian Death Toll in Gaza
Jose Nino
|
On October 25, 2023, United States President Joe Biden declared that he has “no notion” that the Health Ministry in Gaza, journalists, and humanitarian organizations are telling the truth about the increasing number of civilian deaths in the Gaza Strip.
“What they say to me is I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war,” Biden declared on October Wednesday during a joint press conference with Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
“I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using,” the US president continued.
“Everyone uses the figures from the Gaza Health Ministry because those are generally proven to be reliable,” Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), said to the Washington Post on October 24. “In the times in which we have done our own verification of numbers for particular strikes, I’m not aware of any time which there’s been some major discrepancy.”
“We know that a health ministry is going to base [death tolls] on assessments coming from hospitals, morgues, etc.,” he added. “They have an ability to collect that in a way that other sources not there can’t do.”
Biden’s statement took place during a time when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a televised address, in which he declared that the war on Gaza is a battle between the “axis of evil” and the “axis of progress.”
“We are the people of light, they are the people of darkness — and light shall triumph over darkness,” Netanyahu proclaimed during his speech.
The Israel-Hamas conflict is existential in nature, where both sides are more willing to commit atrocities to impose their will on the other. A rational response to such a conflict is one of non-intervention.
The US has no business facilitating a potential genocide of another people. Hopefully, cooler America First, or at least realist, voices prevail in this instance.
Share: