Gaza is controlled by terrorists who launched an attack against Israel and Israel is responding to the attack. Civilians die in war, but the Israeli goal is very clearly not genocide.
Allegations. UN member countries that support South Africa’s complaint at the UN:
Presidents of Algeria, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Iran, Türkiye, and Venezuela have all described Israel’s
actions as a genocide, as has the Palestinian President. State officials and representatives from Bangladesh, Egypt, Honduras, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Malaysia, Namibia, Pakistan, Syria, and Tunisia.
They all have such impressive credibility on human rights and totally don’t have an ax to grind against or an Iran to suck up to. /s
Because you like to pick and choose things to make your “argument” of accepting genocide, let me just quote all of the high ranking Israel officials saying God awful Nazi shit:
Netanyahu said “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.” The Bible says “Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants.”
IDF Major general Giora Eiland wrote “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist”.[23] He added “Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieving the goal.”[23] Israeli historian Omer Bartov writes that no Israeli politician nor anyone in the IDF denounced this statement.
The spokesperson for the Israeli army said, in regards to Israel’s bombing of Gaza, “the emphasis is on damage not accuracy”. This statement was interpreted by legal scholars as intention of destruction.
Look at these Israeli Nazis creating their own little holocaust.
You may want to read this article. It clarifies the misunderstandings you are referencing in your comment. The statements to which you are referring are mistranslated and misunderstood.
This article is paywalled. And all I could read was that you can’t use statements from people with no direct role in military operations. You think none of those people have influence over their military operations? You don’t think Benjamin Netenyahu has influence to what the IDF does?
Tell me how they say those awful things, and then along with that they intentionally starve Palestinians and don’t give them water and you say that isn’t connected and that it isn’t an attempt at culling the population.
This story was updated on January 21, 2024 at 2:33pm.
In late November, the NPR reporter Leila Fadel interviewed the international-law scholar David Crane about a disquieting subject: potential genocide in Gaza. Crane was uniquely qualified to opine on this fraught topic, having served as the founding chief prosecutor for the UN’s Special Court for Sierra Leone, where he indicted the president of Liberia for war crimes. On air, he explained why he did not think Israel’s actions met the criteria.
“If I was charged with investigating and prosecuting genocide,” Crane said, “I would have to have in large measure a smoking gun,” which he characterized as “a rebel group, a person, a head of state” explicitly directing those under their control to destroy a people in “whole or in part.” Precisely because genocide is the highest crime, proving it demands the highest standard of evidence. What is required, in relation to the current conflict, is not simply documentation of destruction or war crimes, and not just incendiary statements from individual soldiers or politicians with no role directing military operations, but rather a declaration of intent to eliminate Gazans—not just Hamas—by the top Israeli decision makers.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Crane said, had not made such a statement, which meant that legal intent could not be established. By contrast, he added, “Hamas has clearly stated that they intend to destroy, in whole or in part, the Israeli people and the Israeli state. That is a declaration of a genocidal intent.” Fadel was not convinced, and deftly countered with several damning quotes from the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant: “We are fighting human animals.” “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” The segment ended inconclusively.
Last week, a similar exchange unfolded on BBC radio, when an anchor pressed British Defense Secretary Grant Shapps about Israel’s conduct in Gaza. “The defense minister said, ‘We will eliminate everything,’ in relation to Gaza,” the host observed. Wasn’t this a clear call to violate international humanitarian law? Under repeated questioning, Shapps allowed that Gallant might have overstepped in the emotional aftermath of Hamas’s slaughter of more than 1,000 Israelis, but insisted that the quotation did not reflect the man he’d been regularly talking with about “trying to find ways to be precise and proportionate.”
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As it turns out, there’s a reason the quote did not sound like Gallant: The Israeli defense minister never really said it.
On October 10, as the charred remains of murdered Israelis were still being identified in their homes, Gallant spoke to a group of soldiers who had repelled the Hamas assault, in a statement that was captured on video. Translated from the original Hebrew, here is the relevant portion of what he said: “Gaza will not return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate it all.” This isn’t a matter of interpretation or translation. Gallant’s vow to “eliminate it all” was directed explicitly at Hamas, not Gaza. One doesn’t even need to speak Hebrew, as I do, to confirm this: The word Hamas is clearly audible in the video. The remainder of Gallant’s remarks also dealt with rooting out Hamas: “We understand that Hamas wanted to change the situation; it will change 180 degrees from what they thought. They will regret this moment.” It was not Gallant who conflated Hamas and Gaza, but rather those who mischaracterized his words. The smoking gun was filled with blanks.
And yet, the misleadingly truncated version of Gallant’s quote has not just been circulated on NPR and the BBC. The New York Times has made the same elision twice, and it appeared in The Guardian, in a piece by Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch. It was also quoted in The Washington Post, where a writer ironically claimed that Gallant had said “the quiet part out loud,” while quietly omitting whom Gallant was actually talking about. Most consequentially, this mistaken rendering of Gallant’s words was publicly invoked last week by South Africa’s legal team in the International Court of Justice as evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent; it served as one of their only citations sourced to someone in Israel’s war cabinet. The line was then reiterated on the floor of Congress by Representative Rashida Tlaib.
Politicians and lawyers are not always known for their probity, but journalists have fact-checkers. How did an error this substantial get missed so many times in so many places? One New York Times article that cited Gallant’s mangled misquote sourced the words to an op-ed in another outlet, which sourced them to an X post that featured an embedded TikTok video. But the cascade of media failures appears to have begun with a 42-second video excerpt of Gallant’s talk that was uploaded by Bloomberg with incomplete English subtitles. The clip, since viewed more than half a million times, simply skips over “There will be no Hamas” in its translation. (Bloomberg did not return a request for comment at press time. Following publication, it removed the original video and issued a corrected version that includes the excised sentence about Hamas. The New York Times subsequently corrected its two pieces that contained the misquote.)
Unfortunately, this concatenation of errors is part of a pattern. As someone who has covered Israeli extremism for years and written about the hard right’s push to ethnically cleanse Gaza and resettle it, I have been carefully tracking the rise of such dangerous ideas for more than a decade. In this perilous wartime environment, it is essential to know who is saying what, and whether they have the authority to act on it. But while far too many right-wing members of Israel’s Parliament have expressed borderline or straightforwardly genocidal sentiments during the Gaza conflict, such statements attributed to the three people making Israel’s actual military decisions, the voting members of its war cabinet—Gallant, Netanyahu, and the former opposition lawmaker Benny Gantz—repeatedly turn out to be mistaken or misrepresented.
Take the claim, also cited by NPR’s Fadel among others, that Gallant referred to Gazans as “human animals.” The defense minister has used this harsh language several times, and it’s reasonable to wonder whom he’s referring to. But as can be seen from the same Bloomberg video, Gallant uses this phrase to talk about Hamas, telling soldiers who fought off Hamas on the devastated Gaza border: “You have seen what we are fighting against. We are fighting against human animals. This is the ISIS of Gaza.” (Hamas’s atrocities on October 7 have been likened to acts of the Islamic State by both Israeli and American officials, including President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.) One can certainly take issue with Gallant’s language—for one thing, a nonhuman animal never executed a grandmother in her home and then uploaded the snuff film to her Facebook page—but not with the fact that the defense minister’s words referred specifically to Hamas.
So much for Gallant. But what about Netanyahu, a man in thrall to the hard right and not exactly known for rhetorical restraint? On January 5, the New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg argued that President Biden was being naive to Netanyahu’s ambitions to displace Gaza’s population. “As Israeli news outlets have reported,” she wrote, “Netanyahu said this week that the government is considering a ‘scenario of surrender and deportation’ of residents of the Gaza Strip.” Goldberg is an excellent journalist well versed in this topic, and she based her claim on a usually reliable source: the English live blog of Haaretz, Israel’s leading progressive paper, which summarized a news item from Israeli TV. But once again, something crucial was lost in translation.
The original Hebrew media report did not say that Netanyahu was considering the surrender and deportation of Gaza’s residents. It said that, in a meeting with families of the Israeli hostages, Netanyahu expressed openness to the surrender and deportation of Hamas’s senior leadership in exchange for the remaining captives—a theoretical proposal for ending the war that has been raised by the United States but rejected by Hamas. The title of the TV segment was “Recordings of the Prime Minister in a meeting with the families of the abductees and a statement regarding the possible exile of senior Hamas officials.” That was also the headline in the Israeli media. Haaretz quietly corrected its blog days later, though the uncorrected Times column still links to it as evidence, and viral screenshots of the erroneous English translation continue to circulate on social media.
The mistake matters: Far from being decided on the question of Gazan displacement, Netanyahu turned out to be malleable, and has since come out publicly against it under heavy pressure from the Biden administration. Diplomacy like that depends on an accurate understanding of the state of play.
Finally, there is an error of biblical proportions. On October 28, Netanyahu gave a short Hebrew address to the public about the unfolding war against Hamas, in which he cited a verse from the Torah. “‘Remember what Amalek did to you,’” he said. “We remember and we fight.” Netanyahu is a secular Jew, but he is also a student of the Bible, often alluding to it in his public statements. Here is the context of that biblical quote, Deuteronomy 25:17–18, which refers to an enemy clan that pursued and murdered the Israelites: “Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey
"Remember what Amalek did to you,’” he said. “We remember and we fight.” Netanyahu is a secular Jew, but he is also a student of the Bible, often alluding to it in his public statements. Here is the context of that biblical quote, Deuteronomy 25:17–18, which refers to an enemy clan that pursued and murdered the Israelites: “Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt—how, undeterred by fear of God, he surprised you on the march, when you were famished and weary, and cut down all the stragglers in your rear.” The Bible then enjoins the Israelites to “blot out the memory of Amalek.”
In the days since, this seemingly straightforward reference to a surprise attack on the innocent and the need to punish its perpetrators has been adduced as evidence of Netanyahu’s genocidal intent. The allegation has appeared in outlets including The New York Times and Mother Jones, as well as in South Africa’s arguments at The Hague. But to make the leap from Netanyahu’s citation to genocidal ambition, all of these accounts conflate the biblical story he cites about Amalek with a completely different one in another book of the Bible that takes place hundreds of years later. The verse from Deuteronomy that the Israeli leader quoted—which is explicitly cited in the official translation of his speech—recounts the time of Moses. Netanyahu’s critics mistakenly source his words to the book of Samuel, in which King Saul is commanded to wipe out every member of Amalek, down to their children and livestock. Tellingly, none of those citing Samuel ever quote the verses from Deuteronomy that Netanyahu actually referenced, which clearly illustrate his intended meaning.
“Speaking Hebrew, he’s comparing Hamas to the nation of Amalek in a passage from the Book of Samuel,” reported Leila Fadel, incorrectly, on NPR. The BBC similarly misattributed the passage in its interview with Defense Secretary Shapps, quoting from Samuel and not Deuteronomy. “Netanyahu urged the soldiers to ‘remember what Amalek has done to you,’” the South African lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi argued in the Hague. “This refers to the biblical command by God to Saul for the retaliatory destruction of an entire group of people known as the Amalekites: ‘Put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’” This was not, in fact, what Netanyahu was referring to.
Since ancient times, Amalek has served as Jewish shorthand for a foe that seeks to exterminate the Jewish people. Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, makes regular reference to “remember what Amalek did to you,” both in its documentation and in its public exhibition. Israel’s previous president invoked Amalek when critiquing remarks made by then-President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil about the Nazi genocide. Ironically, The Hague’s own Holocaust memorial is called the “Amalek monument,” and its plaque cites the same Hebrew verse as Netanyahu did. Obviously, these allusions to Amalek refer to the Nazis, not their extended families or the entire German people. The collapsing of this traditional Jewish concept into its worst possible interpretation echoes similar misrepresentations of Muslim terminology, such as jihad. Jewish extremists have sometimes cast all Palestinians as Amalek, but that no more defines the term for everyday Jews than the use of “Allahu akbar” by Muslim terrorists like Hamas defines the phrase for everyday Muslims.
Amalek was not the only one of Netanyahu’s basic biblical references to be miscast as malevolent in the current conflict. In late October, the Israeli leader cited a verse from Isaiah at the end of a speech. “This was a biblical reference to God’s protection of the Jewish people,” wrote the Financial Times editor and columnist Edward Luce. “It also served as a dog whistle to Netanyahu’s allies in America’s evangelical movement … Such talk from Israel’s leader and America’s de facto leader of the opposition deprives Hamas of its dark monopoly on theocracy.”
Here is what Netanyahu said: “With deep faith in the justice of our cause and in the eternity of Israel, we will realize the prophecy of Isaiah 60:18—‘Violence shall no more be heard in your land, desolation nor destruction within your borders; but you shall call your walls Salvation, and your gates Praise.’” Anyone familiar with the original Hebrew verse understands that Netanyahu here was not making a messianic pronouncement, but rather a play on words. In one of history’s great ironies, Hamas is the biblical word for “violence.” (This is why Israelis typically pronounce it with a guttural kh, following their modern pronunciation of the biblical word, to the frustration and amusement of Arabic speakers who correctly pronounce the group’s name with a soft h.) Puns are often objectionable, but they are not theocracy.
I’ve written extensively about Netanyahu’s profound failures. He welcomed the far-right into Israel’s government and gave its members titles and ministries. He has regularly refused to rebuke their extremism because he fears losing power. He is the reason Israel is reduced to arguing that it is innocent of genocidal intent, not because its politicians haven’t expressed it, but because those politicians aren’t military decision makers. In other words, Netanyahu is the one who created the context in which banal biblical references could be understood as far-right appeals. But Jewish scripture should not be distorted by journalists or jurists in an erroneous attempt to indict him.
These omissions and misinterpretations are not merely cosmetic: They misled readers, judges, and politicians. None of them should have happened. The good news is that they can be avoided in the future by making sure to check translations at their source; pressing writers to link to primary sources when possible; and placing scriptural citations from any faith into their proper theological and historical context. Certainly, no outlet or activist should be cavalierly accusing people or countries of committing genocide based on thirdhand mistranslations or truncated quotations.
Neutral principles like these can’t resolve the deep moral and political quandaries posed by the Israel-Hamas conflict. They can’t tell readers what to think about its devastation. But they will ensure that whatever conclusions readers draw will be based on facts, not fictions—which is, at root, the purpose of journalism.
It’d be nice if they’d stop bombing hospitals and depriving millions of people of the basic necessities of survival then. Oh, and it’d also be nice if they’d stop referring to Palestinians as animals and shooting children in the west bank. And It’d be nice if Netanyahu would stop saying his goal is to annex the west bank and the Gaza strip. And if the Israeli state would stop encouraging settlers to illegally (by their own laws) occupy the west bank.
The attack was also 3 months ago. And tens of thousands of Palestinians have been murdered since then.
It’s not annexation, it’s called irredentism in this circumstance. Gaza is uninhabitable from structural and civil engineering standpoints because of Hamas’s tunnels. It has no capacity or resources to make itself safe. It has also proven it has no ability or desire to actually root out Hamas. So now their neighbor is morally obligated to do it for them.
High civilian causalities? Are you serious? Whonos the one that killed over 20,000 people? Who are the ones starving half a million people? Is it Hamas? No Its Israel. “High civilian causalities” my ass. The IDF also caused some of the causalities on October 7th too. They shot indiscriminately and hit their own people.
Yes friendly fire in the chaos of hundreds of mass shooting, active shooter events.
In my country, that sort of chaos is why we have the felony murder rule and why it’s been used in past incidents of friendly fire to properly charge the criminals with such needless deaths, if first responders accidentally shoot each other or a bystander.
I don’t agree. If the IDF warns people before they bomb a building and people refuse to leave the building, it’s their refusal that is the superceding cause, it’s a knowing assumption of risk.
Good actual example. First or second week of the war north of Gaza City. Everyone had already been airdropped leaflets and received masses text and emergency broadcast warnings to evacuate and head south and that anyone who stayed behind was in extreme danger. A few hundred thousand people did not evacuate.
IDF stumbles across a tunnel section is wanted to bomb underneath several blocks of apartments. Israel, as a world leader in the development of strategies to avoid civilian casualties, uses the cell phone network to call people still in the buildings. They start running door to door, IDF stays on the phone and promises not to bomb until the people leading the evacuations say everyone is clear.
As they evacuate, a number of people refuse. Hamas has been spreading Facebook posts saying that the calls are a hoax. They tell the caller, “prove this is real, fire a warning shot.” Bam, warning shot goes off. They say “there’s a lot of bombing, prove it’s real and do another warning,” bam another warning shell. They are convinced and so they continue evacuating. Everyone gets out, a resident tells the IDF it’s clear, several city blocks get demolished when IDF blew up the tunnels. 3,600 people used to live there and there were zero civilian casualties. The tunnels were completed destroyed.
In my view, the superceding cause to the apartments falling down was when Hamas built a tunnel underneath them and then used them to launch a massive terrorist attack–involving thousands of rockets (fired actually indiscriminately against civilians targets and infrastructure) and mass shootings at concerts and restaurants, on families just driving down the road, and on first responders who came in response to the gunfire–and then retreated back into those same tunnels, making them legitimate military targets.
This story is the exception only because everyone agreed to leave.
If people had refused to leave or been tricked or forced to stay behind by Hamas, in my example above, the superceding cause of their deaths would have been Hamas spreading rumors, in addition to all the propaganda is has already spread about dying with honor as martyrs, which caused people not to evactuate in the first place.
I guess the October 7 attackers thought they would retreat back into the tunnels and Israel was just going to say “darn, guess they got away!”
I agree. Civilian death tolls have been rapidly going down, not increasing. The airstrikes match up with the tunnels systems. There is no credibility to claims of “indiscriminate” bombings. The high number of civilian casualties is simply and readily explained by the fact that Hamas refused to let people evacuate and forced them to remain behind to be used as human shields and martyrs. High civilian casualties is one of Hamas’s weapons, and with Iran’s influence campaigns and astroturfing, it’s working to trick a lot of people whose ignorance and gullibility are going to allow Trump to win another term.
The only countries who’ve joined South Africa’s complaint to the UN criminal court are dictatorships, authoritarian , and/or theocratic shitholes such as Iran, Syria, Bahrain, Iraq, Brazil, Venezuela, Malaysia, and Cuba. The question South Africa’s complaint raises, after sorting through the circular logic, recursive reasoning, and claims attributed to incredible sources or simply “reports,” is when did South Africa start doing Iran’s bidding?
There’s been some heinous war crimes committed by IDF soldiers, maybe even a culture that causes soldiers to go too far. Those are the exception, by a lot. I have faith that, as a democracy, credible accusations will be investigated and charged within the customs of Israel’s military justice system, and most reports of atrocities have been highly exaggerated, recursive, and/or lack basic indicia of credibility.
“match up with tunnel systems” they leveled countless city blocks. They’ve bombed hospitals, they tell Palestinians to go to one part of Gaza where they say it’s “safe” and then they bomb there too. Over 20,000 people dying is not a fucking accident, it’s all intentional. They aren’t even letting them eat or have water. Forced starvation and dehydration among the whole population, oh wow yeah that really doesn’t sound like they’re trying to get rid of all of them.
I wouldn’t bother with this person. Stopped ages ago. They know all this information. Sadly when you’re stuck in tunnel vision, no facts or evidence or rationales will ever get you out.
What, absolutely, do you imagine is happening?
Gaza is controlled by terrorists who launched an attack against Israel and Israel is responding to the attack. Civilians die in war, but the Israeli goal is very clearly not genocide.
Okay yeah sure. Thats why the Israeli Minister of Defense said “We will eliminate everything” among many other things said and done:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_genocide_in_the_2023_Israeli_attack_on_Gaza
Allegations. UN member countries that support South Africa’s complaint at the UN:
They all have such impressive credibility on human rights and totally don’t have an ax to grind against or an Iran to suck up to. /s
Because you like to pick and choose things to make your “argument” of accepting genocide, let me just quote all of the high ranking Israel officials saying God awful Nazi shit:
Netanyahu said “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.” The Bible says “Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants.”
IDF Major general Giora Eiland wrote “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist”.[23] He added “Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieving the goal.”[23] Israeli historian Omer Bartov writes that no Israeli politician nor anyone in the IDF denounced this statement.
The spokesperson for the Israeli army said, in regards to Israel’s bombing of Gaza, “the emphasis is on damage not accuracy”. This statement was interpreted by legal scholars as intention of destruction.
Look at these Israeli Nazis creating their own little holocaust.
You may want to read this article. It clarifies the misunderstandings you are referencing in your comment. The statements to which you are referring are mistranslated and misunderstood.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/01/israel-south-africa-genocide-case-fake-quotes/677198/
This article is paywalled. And all I could read was that you can’t use statements from people with no direct role in military operations. You think none of those people have influence over their military operations? You don’t think Benjamin Netenyahu has influence to what the IDF does?
Tell me how they say those awful things, and then along with that they intentionally starve Palestinians and don’t give them water and you say that isn’t connected and that it isn’t an attempt at culling the population.
In late November, the NPR reporter Leila Fadel interviewed the international-law scholar David Crane about a disquieting subject: potential genocide in Gaza. Crane was uniquely qualified to opine on this fraught topic, having served as the founding chief prosecutor for the UN’s Special Court for Sierra Leone, where he indicted the president of Liberia for war crimes. On air, he explained why he did not think Israel’s actions met the criteria.
“If I was charged with investigating and prosecuting genocide,” Crane said, “I would have to have in large measure a smoking gun,” which he characterized as “a rebel group, a person, a head of state” explicitly directing those under their control to destroy a people in “whole or in part.” Precisely because genocide is the highest crime, proving it demands the highest standard of evidence. What is required, in relation to the current conflict, is not simply documentation of destruction or war crimes, and not just incendiary statements from individual soldiers or politicians with no role directing military operations, but rather a declaration of intent to eliminate Gazans—not just Hamas—by the top Israeli decision makers.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Crane said, had not made such a statement, which meant that legal intent could not be established. By contrast, he added, “Hamas has clearly stated that they intend to destroy, in whole or in part, the Israeli people and the Israeli state. That is a declaration of a genocidal intent.” Fadel was not convinced, and deftly countered with several damning quotes from the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant: “We are fighting human animals.” “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” The segment ended inconclusively.
Last week, a similar exchange unfolded on BBC radio, when an anchor pressed British Defense Secretary Grant Shapps about Israel’s conduct in Gaza. “The defense minister said, ‘We will eliminate everything,’ in relation to Gaza,” the host observed. Wasn’t this a clear call to violate international humanitarian law? Under repeated questioning, Shapps allowed that Gallant might have overstepped in the emotional aftermath of Hamas’s slaughter of more than 1,000 Israelis, but insisted that the quotation did not reflect the man he’d been regularly talking with about “trying to find ways to be precise and proportionate.” Recommended Reading
As it turns out, there’s a reason the quote did not sound like Gallant: The Israeli defense minister never really said it.
On October 10, as the charred remains of murdered Israelis were still being identified in their homes, Gallant spoke to a group of soldiers who had repelled the Hamas assault, in a statement that was captured on video. Translated from the original Hebrew, here is the relevant portion of what he said: “Gaza will not return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate it all.” This isn’t a matter of interpretation or translation. Gallant’s vow to “eliminate it all” was directed explicitly at Hamas, not Gaza. One doesn’t even need to speak Hebrew, as I do, to confirm this: The word Hamas is clearly audible in the video. The remainder of Gallant’s remarks also dealt with rooting out Hamas: “We understand that Hamas wanted to change the situation; it will change 180 degrees from what they thought. They will regret this moment.” It was not Gallant who conflated Hamas and Gaza, but rather those who mischaracterized his words. The smoking gun was filled with blanks.
And yet, the misleadingly truncated version of Gallant’s quote has not just been circulated on NPR and the BBC. The New York Times has made the same elision twice, and it appeared in The Guardian, in a piece by Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch. It was also quoted in The Washington Post, where a writer ironically claimed that Gallant had said “the quiet part out loud,” while quietly omitting whom Gallant was actually talking about. Most consequentially, this mistaken rendering of Gallant’s words was publicly invoked last week by South Africa’s legal team in the International Court of Justice as evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent; it served as one of their only citations sourced to someone in Israel’s war cabinet. The line was then reiterated on the floor of Congress by Representative Rashida Tlaib.
Politicians and lawyers are not always known for their probity, but journalists have fact-checkers. How did an error this substantial get missed so many times in so many places? One New York Times article that cited Gallant’s mangled misquote sourced the words to an op-ed in another outlet, which sourced them to an X post that featured an embedded TikTok video. But the cascade of media failures appears to have begun with a 42-second video excerpt of Gallant’s talk that was uploaded by Bloomberg with incomplete English subtitles. The clip, since viewed more than half a million times, simply skips over “There will be no Hamas” in its translation. (Bloomberg did not return a request for comment at press time. Following publication, it removed the original video and issued a corrected version that includes the excised sentence about Hamas. The New York Times subsequently corrected its two pieces that contained the misquote.)
Unfortunately, this concatenation of errors is part of a pattern. As someone who has covered Israeli extremism for years and written about the hard right’s push to ethnically cleanse Gaza and resettle it, I have been carefully tracking the rise of such dangerous ideas for more than a decade. In this perilous wartime environment, it is essential to know who is saying what, and whether they have the authority to act on it. But while far too many right-wing members of Israel’s Parliament have expressed borderline or straightforwardly genocidal sentiments during the Gaza conflict, such statements attributed to the three people making Israel’s actual military decisions, the voting members of its war cabinet—Gallant, Netanyahu, and the former opposition lawmaker Benny Gantz—repeatedly turn out to be mistaken or misrepresented.
Take the claim, also cited by NPR’s Fadel among others, that Gallant referred to Gazans as “human animals.” The defense minister has used this harsh language several times, and it’s reasonable to wonder whom he’s referring to. But as can be seen from the same Bloomberg video, Gallant uses this phrase to talk about Hamas, telling soldiers who fought off Hamas on the devastated Gaza border: “You have seen what we are fighting against. We are fighting against human animals. This is the ISIS of Gaza.” (Hamas’s atrocities on October 7 have been likened to acts of the Islamic State by both Israeli and American officials, including President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.) One can certainly take issue with Gallant’s language—for one thing, a nonhuman animal never executed a grandmother in her home and then uploaded the snuff film to her Facebook page—but not with the fact that the defense minister’s words referred specifically to Hamas.
So much for Gallant. But what about Netanyahu, a man in thrall to the hard right and not exactly known for rhetorical restraint? On January 5, the New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg argued that President Biden was being naive to Netanyahu’s ambitions to displace Gaza’s population. “As Israeli news outlets have reported,” she wrote, “Netanyahu said this week that the government is considering a ‘scenario of surrender and deportation’ of residents of the Gaza Strip.” Goldberg is an excellent journalist well versed in this topic, and she based her claim on a usually reliable source: the English live blog of Haaretz, Israel’s leading progressive paper, which summarized a news item from Israeli TV. But once again, something crucial was lost in translation.
The original Hebrew media report did not say that Netanyahu was considering the surrender and deportation of Gaza’s residents. It said that, in a meeting with families of the Israeli hostages, Netanyahu expressed openness to the surrender and deportation of Hamas’s senior leadership in exchange for the remaining captives—a theoretical proposal for ending the war that has been raised by the United States but rejected by Hamas. The title of the TV segment was “Recordings of the Prime Minister in a meeting with the families of the abductees and a statement regarding the possible exile of senior Hamas officials.” That was also the headline in the Israeli media. Haaretz quietly corrected its blog days later, though the uncorrected Times column still links to it as evidence, and viral screenshots of the erroneous English translation continue to circulate on social media.
The mistake matters: Far from being decided on the question of Gazan displacement, Netanyahu turned out to be malleable, and has since come out publicly against it under heavy pressure from the Biden administration. Diplomacy like that depends on an accurate understanding of the state of play.
Finally, there is an error of biblical proportions. On October 28, Netanyahu gave a short Hebrew address to the public about the unfolding war against Hamas, in which he cited a verse from the Torah. “‘Remember what Amalek did to you,’” he said. “We remember and we fight.” Netanyahu is a secular Jew, but he is also a student of the Bible, often alluding to it in his public statements. Here is the context of that biblical quote, Deuteronomy 25:17–18, which refers to an enemy clan that pursued and murdered the Israelites: “Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey
"Remember what Amalek did to you,’” he said. “We remember and we fight.” Netanyahu is a secular Jew, but he is also a student of the Bible, often alluding to it in his public statements. Here is the context of that biblical quote, Deuteronomy 25:17–18, which refers to an enemy clan that pursued and murdered the Israelites: “Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt—how, undeterred by fear of God, he surprised you on the march, when you were famished and weary, and cut down all the stragglers in your rear.” The Bible then enjoins the Israelites to “blot out the memory of Amalek.”
In the days since, this seemingly straightforward reference to a surprise attack on the innocent and the need to punish its perpetrators has been adduced as evidence of Netanyahu’s genocidal intent. The allegation has appeared in outlets including The New York Times and Mother Jones, as well as in South Africa’s arguments at The Hague. But to make the leap from Netanyahu’s citation to genocidal ambition, all of these accounts conflate the biblical story he cites about Amalek with a completely different one in another book of the Bible that takes place hundreds of years later. The verse from Deuteronomy that the Israeli leader quoted—which is explicitly cited in the official translation of his speech—recounts the time of Moses. Netanyahu’s critics mistakenly source his words to the book of Samuel, in which King Saul is commanded to wipe out every member of Amalek, down to their children and livestock. Tellingly, none of those citing Samuel ever quote the verses from Deuteronomy that Netanyahu actually referenced, which clearly illustrate his intended meaning.
“Speaking Hebrew, he’s comparing Hamas to the nation of Amalek in a passage from the Book of Samuel,” reported Leila Fadel, incorrectly, on NPR. The BBC similarly misattributed the passage in its interview with Defense Secretary Shapps, quoting from Samuel and not Deuteronomy. “Netanyahu urged the soldiers to ‘remember what Amalek has done to you,’” the South African lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi argued in the Hague. “This refers to the biblical command by God to Saul for the retaliatory destruction of an entire group of people known as the Amalekites: ‘Put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’” This was not, in fact, what Netanyahu was referring to.
Since ancient times, Amalek has served as Jewish shorthand for a foe that seeks to exterminate the Jewish people. Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, makes regular reference to “remember what Amalek did to you,” both in its documentation and in its public exhibition. Israel’s previous president invoked Amalek when critiquing remarks made by then-President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil about the Nazi genocide. Ironically, The Hague’s own Holocaust memorial is called the “Amalek monument,” and its plaque cites the same Hebrew verse as Netanyahu did. Obviously, these allusions to Amalek refer to the Nazis, not their extended families or the entire German people. The collapsing of this traditional Jewish concept into its worst possible interpretation echoes similar misrepresentations of Muslim terminology, such as jihad. Jewish extremists have sometimes cast all Palestinians as Amalek, but that no more defines the term for everyday Jews than the use of “Allahu akbar” by Muslim terrorists like Hamas defines the phrase for everyday Muslims.
Amalek was not the only one of Netanyahu’s basic biblical references to be miscast as malevolent in the current conflict. In late October, the Israeli leader cited a verse from Isaiah at the end of a speech. “This was a biblical reference to God’s protection of the Jewish people,” wrote the Financial Times editor and columnist Edward Luce. “It also served as a dog whistle to Netanyahu’s allies in America’s evangelical movement … Such talk from Israel’s leader and America’s de facto leader of the opposition deprives Hamas of its dark monopoly on theocracy.”
Here is what Netanyahu said: “With deep faith in the justice of our cause and in the eternity of Israel, we will realize the prophecy of Isaiah 60:18—‘Violence shall no more be heard in your land, desolation nor destruction within your borders; but you shall call your walls Salvation, and your gates Praise.’” Anyone familiar with the original Hebrew verse understands that Netanyahu here was not making a messianic pronouncement, but rather a play on words. In one of history’s great ironies, Hamas is the biblical word for “violence.” (This is why Israelis typically pronounce it with a guttural kh, following their modern pronunciation of the biblical word, to the frustration and amusement of Arabic speakers who correctly pronounce the group’s name with a soft h.) Puns are often objectionable, but they are not theocracy.
I’ve written extensively about Netanyahu’s profound failures. He welcomed the far-right into Israel’s government and gave its members titles and ministries. He has regularly refused to rebuke their extremism because he fears losing power. He is the reason Israel is reduced to arguing that it is innocent of genocidal intent, not because its politicians haven’t expressed it, but because those politicians aren’t military decision makers. In other words, Netanyahu is the one who created the context in which banal biblical references could be understood as far-right appeals. But Jewish scripture should not be distorted by journalists or jurists in an erroneous attempt to indict him.
These omissions and misinterpretations are not merely cosmetic: They misled readers, judges, and politicians. None of them should have happened. The good news is that they can be avoided in the future by making sure to check translations at their source; pressing writers to link to primary sources when possible; and placing scriptural citations from any faith into their proper theological and historical context. Certainly, no outlet or activist should be cavalierly accusing people or countries of committing genocide based on thirdhand mistranslations or truncated quotations.
Neutral principles like these can’t resolve the deep moral and political quandaries posed by the Israel-Hamas conflict. They can’t tell readers what to think about its devastation. But they will ensure that whatever conclusions readers draw will be based on facts, not fictions—which is, at root, the purpose of journalism.
It’d be nice if they’d stop bombing hospitals and depriving millions of people of the basic necessities of survival then. Oh, and it’d also be nice if they’d stop referring to Palestinians as animals and shooting children in the west bank. And It’d be nice if Netanyahu would stop saying his goal is to annex the west bank and the Gaza strip. And if the Israeli state would stop encouraging settlers to illegally (by their own laws) occupy the west bank.
The attack was also 3 months ago. And tens of thousands of Palestinians have been murdered since then.
It’s not annexation, it’s called irredentism in this circumstance. Gaza is uninhabitable from structural and civil engineering standpoints because of Hamas’s tunnels. It has no capacity or resources to make itself safe. It has also proven it has no ability or desire to actually root out Hamas. So now their neighbor is morally obligated to do it for them.
“neighbor” is a funny way to describe an occupying force that has kept them under siege with no end in sight.
Gaza is uninhabitable because the IDF levelled every fucking building there.
Right. Someone dug tunnels under them all and then launched decades of terrorist attacks from them. October 7 was the last end of the rope.
Gaza is controlled by Israel
To be fairrrr, Id argue that does in fact mean Gaza is controled by terorists, but clearly thats not the point the other guy is making.
Approaching 30k dead, half of which are children. When does it become genocide in your eyes?
You bring much of the antisemitism you experience on yourselves, bub.
As if this all started on October 7. Let’s just not account for all that inconvenient stuff that happened earlier. Got it.
Doesn’t matter what their goal is. It matters what their actions cause.
Causing high civilian casualties is literally Hamas’s strategy, holding their families as human shields, preventing people from evacuating, etc.
Isn’t that the superceding cause of virtually every civilian death?
High civilian causalities? Are you serious? Whonos the one that killed over 20,000 people? Who are the ones starving half a million people? Is it Hamas? No Its Israel. “High civilian causalities” my ass. The IDF also caused some of the causalities on October 7th too. They shot indiscriminately and hit their own people.
Yes friendly fire in the chaos of hundreds of mass shooting, active shooter events.
In my country, that sort of chaos is why we have the felony murder rule and why it’s been used in past incidents of friendly fire to properly charge the criminals with such needless deaths, if first responders accidentally shoot each other or a bystander.
You’re blaming the victims.
The IDF shoot Israelis all the time, even outside of October 7th. They just killed some Israeli hostages in Gaza.
Yes kurwa people die in warzones. It’s horrible.
Well Israel makes it a warzone.
The superseding cause of virtually every civilian death in Gaza is an IDF bullet or bomb.
I don’t agree. If the IDF warns people before they bomb a building and people refuse to leave the building, it’s their refusal that is the superceding cause, it’s a knowing assumption of risk.
Good actual example. First or second week of the war north of Gaza City. Everyone had already been airdropped leaflets and received masses text and emergency broadcast warnings to evacuate and head south and that anyone who stayed behind was in extreme danger. A few hundred thousand people did not evacuate.
IDF stumbles across a tunnel section is wanted to bomb underneath several blocks of apartments. Israel, as a world leader in the development of strategies to avoid civilian casualties, uses the cell phone network to call people still in the buildings. They start running door to door, IDF stays on the phone and promises not to bomb until the people leading the evacuations say everyone is clear.
As they evacuate, a number of people refuse. Hamas has been spreading Facebook posts saying that the calls are a hoax. They tell the caller, “prove this is real, fire a warning shot.” Bam, warning shot goes off. They say “there’s a lot of bombing, prove it’s real and do another warning,” bam another warning shell. They are convinced and so they continue evacuating. Everyone gets out, a resident tells the IDF it’s clear, several city blocks get demolished when IDF blew up the tunnels. 3,600 people used to live there and there were zero civilian casualties. The tunnels were completed destroyed.
In my view, the superceding cause to the apartments falling down was when Hamas built a tunnel underneath them and then used them to launch a massive terrorist attack–involving thousands of rockets (fired actually indiscriminately against civilians targets and infrastructure) and mass shootings at concerts and restaurants, on families just driving down the road, and on first responders who came in response to the gunfire–and then retreated back into those same tunnels, making them legitimate military targets.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67327079
This story is the exception only because everyone agreed to leave.
If people had refused to leave or been tricked or forced to stay behind by Hamas, in my example above, the superceding cause of their deaths would have been Hamas spreading rumors, in addition to all the propaganda is has already spread about dying with honor as martyrs, which caused people not to evactuate in the first place.
I guess the October 7 attackers thought they would retreat back into the tunnels and Israel was just going to say “darn, guess they got away!”
I agree. Civilian death tolls have been rapidly going down, not increasing. The airstrikes match up with the tunnels systems. There is no credibility to claims of “indiscriminate” bombings. The high number of civilian casualties is simply and readily explained by the fact that Hamas refused to let people evacuate and forced them to remain behind to be used as human shields and martyrs. High civilian casualties is one of Hamas’s weapons, and with Iran’s influence campaigns and astroturfing, it’s working to trick a lot of people whose ignorance and gullibility are going to allow Trump to win another term.
The only countries who’ve joined South Africa’s complaint to the UN criminal court are dictatorships, authoritarian , and/or theocratic shitholes such as Iran, Syria, Bahrain, Iraq, Brazil, Venezuela, Malaysia, and Cuba. The question South Africa’s complaint raises, after sorting through the circular logic, recursive reasoning, and claims attributed to incredible sources or simply “reports,” is when did South Africa start doing Iran’s bidding?
There’s been some heinous war crimes committed by IDF soldiers, maybe even a culture that causes soldiers to go too far. Those are the exception, by a lot. I have faith that, as a democracy, credible accusations will be investigated and charged within the customs of Israel’s military justice system, and most reports of atrocities have been highly exaggerated, recursive, and/or lack basic indicia of credibility.
“match up with tunnel systems” they leveled countless city blocks. They’ve bombed hospitals, they tell Palestinians to go to one part of Gaza where they say it’s “safe” and then they bomb there too. Over 20,000 people dying is not a fucking accident, it’s all intentional. They aren’t even letting them eat or have water. Forced starvation and dehydration among the whole population, oh wow yeah that really doesn’t sound like they’re trying to get rid of all of them.
I wouldn’t bother with this person. Stopped ages ago. They know all this information. Sadly when you’re stuck in tunnel vision, no facts or evidence or rationales will ever get you out.
To them everything can be explained by Hamas.
Is Hamas in the room with us right now?