(Gatestone Institute) Daniel Greenfield - The Associated Press recently falsely claimed that the Israeli campaign against Hamas "sits among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history" and was even worse than "the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II." The Washington Post argued that "Israel has waged one of this century's most destructive wars in Gaza," while the Wall Street Journal contended that it was "generating destruction comparable in scale to the most devastating urban warfare in the modern record." Yet, even accepting the Hamas casualty figures (in which there are no terrorists, only civilians), this is still one of the least violent conflicts in the region. In 2016, the Washington Post described the Syrian Civil War, with 250,000 deaths, as "the most destructive conflict in the region." In 2020, the UN called the Yemeni Civil War, with 150,000 deaths, "the most destructive conflict since the end of the Cold War." In the current phase of the war in Sudan, 15,000 people have been killed over the last year, as part of a larger conflict that may have claimed two million lives. The Tigray War in Ethiopia over the last three years may have cost the lives of between 80,000 to 600,000 people. Every significant war and civil war in the region had a much higher death toll than the Hamas war. The Hamas attack of Oct. 7 killed 10% of the population of Kibbutz Be'eri, making it far worse per capita than anything in Israel's response to those atrocities. The morality of a war is not measured in civilian casualties, but in deliberate civilian killings. Morality is defined by intent, not statistics. Hamas has engaged in the deliberate killings of civilians. Israel has not.
2024-02-04 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive