US President Joe Biden on 25 October said that he has “no notion” that the Health Ministry in Gaza, journalists, and humanitarian groups are telling the truth about the soaring number of civilian deaths in the Gaza Strip 18 days into Israel’s indiscriminate carpet bombing campaign.
“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 said 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 added. However, he did not explain why he believes Palestinians lie about the genocide unfolding in Gaza.
Despite Biden’s alleged apprehensions, as of 26 October, the death toll in the Gaza Strip stands at over 6,500 – including at least 2,704 children.
“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), told the Washington Post on 24 October. “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 inflammatory statement coincided with a televised address by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in which he said 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 stressed in the latest attempt by a senior Israeli official to dehumanize the Palestinian population.
Since the start of the Gaza-Israel war on 7 October, Israel and its western allies have been working overtime to discredit, censor, and obscure the reality faced by 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, who have been subjected to enough explosives over the past two weeks to equal the size of the nuclear bomb dropped in Hiroshima.
Moreover, Israel has completely cut off Gaza from access to humanitarian aid as well as electricity, water, fuel, food, and medicine for over two weeks, exacerbating an already dire humanitarian crisis.

Thecradle