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Israel/Zionism See other Israel/Zionism Articles Title: Bernie Sanders Did Confuse Numbers of Dead and Wounded in Gaza War, but Israel’s Mass Killing of Civilians Is a Fact Updated | Sunday, 3:16 p.m. Israeli politicians continued to rail against Bernie Sanders on Friday, even after the candidate admitted that, in an interview with the Daily News editorial board, he did momentarily confuse the estimated number of Palestinians wounded in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in 2014, over 10,000, with the number of civilians killed, at least 1,473, according to a United Nations count. After Sanders told the editors of the News, “my recollection is over 10,000 innocent people were killed in Gaza,” the most blistering attack came from Michael Oren, a member of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, who recently served as Israel’s Ambassador to the United States. Oren compared the misstatement to “a blood libel,” a term used to refer to the antisemitic myth dating to medieval Europe which held that Jews used the blood of Christian children in their rituals. He also insisted that Sanders had to apologize for spreading a false statistic that could help the Palestinian-led movement to use the economic tools of Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS, against Israel. Zeev Elkin, Israel’s immigration minister, chimed in with the comparatively mild assessment that the error by Sanders was “weird and loony.” In an opinion piece for the News on Friday, Yair Lapid, who was a member of the governing coalition’s security cabinet at the time of the Gaza offensive, then accused Sanders of helping Hamas by bolstering the Islamist militant group’s “narrative that it is the real victim.” Lapid also asserted, without offering any evidence for the claim, that “the Israeli government found most of those killed in the operation were terrorists.” Several independent examinations of the casualties in Gaza, however, have concluded just the opposite — that at least 60 percent of the Palestinians killed in Gaza during Israel’s seven-week offensive were civilians. One week after the conclusion of the fighting, the U.N. reported that 2,131 Palestinians had been killed in the Israeli bombardment, and of the first 1,752 cases to be verified, “1,473 are believed to be civilians, including 501 children and 257 women.” Just 279 were “members of armed groups.” At that time, 379 of the bodies had yet to be identified. The U.N. also reported that four Israeli civilians, including one child, and 66 Israeli soldiers were killed by Palestinian militant factions during the fighting that summer. Six months later, The Associated Press reported that its journalists had carried out a painstaking examination of the casualties from 247 Israeli airstrikes that, according to witnesses and site visits, had destroyed residential compounds in Gaza. The review found that of 844 people killed in just those strikes, 508 of the dead, over 60 percent, “were children, women and older men, all presumed to be civilians.” (This method of counting excludes anyone killed in Israel’s other 4,750 airstrikes and credible evidence that at least some of the young men killed by Israeli fire were civilians too.) Having been attacked by Israelis who supported the Gaza offensive, Sanders was then defended by Israeli critics of the operation. As Noam Sheizaf, a journalist in Tel Aviv, pointed out on Twitter, the hysteria in Israel seemed to be rooted in more than a dispute about exact figures, given that “we only killed 500 kids” is not great material for righteous indignation. Hagai El-Ad, the director of B’Tselem, an Israeli rights group that also reported on the killing of civilians during the offensive, argued that Sanders deserved credit for talking about the killing of so many Palestinian civilians, despite having confused the numbers of the dead and wounded. El-Ad responded directly to Oren’s complaints about Sanders on Twitter. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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