Ex-US army chief defends Israel’s Oct. 7 response: ‘Can you imagine what we would do?’
Former Joint Chiefs chairman Mark Milley tells panel an onslaught of comparative scale would have killed 50,000-100,000 in US, ‘no way around’ Gaza’s brutal urban warfare
Former US Army chief Mark Milley on Tuesday defended Israel’s conduct of the war in the Gaza Strip after Hamas’s October 7 massacre, saying that a massacre equivalent in scale in the United States would have meant “50,000-100,000 people” being killed in a single morning.
“Israel has a right to defend itself. They were the ones who were attacked, brutally, on the 7th of October. Twelve hundred people were slaughtered — not just killed in the conduct of war, they were slaughtered, beheaded, butchered, raped in front of their husbands,” Milley, who ended his four-year term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in September, said at a geopolitics panel in Washington DC.
During Hamas’s brutal incursion, 252 hostages were also taken, 128 of whom remain in Gaza, not all of them alive.
“And it was stuff that was not even a hair’s breadth removed from what the Nazis did,” he continued. “And if you take the math and do 1,200 and apply it to the United States, that’d be 50,000-100,000 people dead in a morning. Can you imagine what we would do?”
Milley added that in his own experience, “war is a horrible thing” and that such a war fought in “dense urban areas” inevitably would produce “very high levels of collateral damage,” appearing to reference the significant destruction in the Strip amid the military offensive against Hamas, which is taking place in densely populated Gaza.
“There’s almost no way around it, but if there’s any morality at all, you need to get into it, achieve your political objectives, get it done, get it done fast, and get it over with,” he said.
Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley on the Israel-Hamas war: "If you take 1200 (Israelis) and apply it to the United States, that'd be 50-100 thousand people dead in a morning! Can you imagine what we would do?"
????: @CNBC pic.twitter.com/lKRj6ocopn— Embassy of Israel to the USA (@IsraelinUSA) May 11, 2024
The general’s comments came as Israel faces growing international pressure to bring about a ceasefire amid the mounting death toll in Gaza. The Biden administration has also been increasingly critical of the high civilian toll.
The US president said Wednesday he would halt certain arms transfers to Israel if it launches a wide-scale invasion in the southern Gaza city of Rafah after the White House confirmed a delay in the transfer of 2,000- and 500-pound bombs over concerns that the IDF could use them in Rafah, as it has in other parts of Gaza.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 34,000 people in the Strip have been killed in the fighting so far, a figure that cannot be independently verified, does not distinguish between civilians and combatants and includes some 15,000 terror operatives Israel says it has killed in battle. Israel also says it killed some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.
Israel stresses that it is only targeting terror groups in its offensive, but faces an uphill battle in limiting civilian casualties in the conflict, and has provided overwhelming evidence that Hamas and other terror organizations use civilian areas as cover for their activities.
