US President Joe Biden on 25 October said that he has \u201cno notion\u201d 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\u2019s the price of waging a war,” Biden said Wednesday during a joint press conference with Australia\u2019s 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 \u2013 including at least 2,704 children.
\u201cEveryone uses the figures from the Gaza Health Ministry because those are generally proven to be reliable,\u201d Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), told the Washington Post on 24 October. \u201cIn the times in which we have done our own verification of numbers for particular strikes, I\u2019m not aware of any time which there\u2019s been some major discrepancy.\u201d
\u201cWe know that a health ministry is going to base [death tolls] on assessments coming from hospitals, morgues, etc.,\u201d he added. \u201cThey have an ability to collect that in a way that other sources not there can\u2019t do.\u201d
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 \u201caxis of evil\u201d and the \u201caxis of progress.\u201d
\u201cWe are the people of light, they are the people of darkness \u2014 and light shall triumph over darkness,\u201d Netanyahu stressed in the latest attempt by a senior Israeli official to dehumanize\u2002the 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\u2002the 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n