Netanyahu lashes foreign press for ‘false’ reporting regarding Gaza humanitarian situation

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pressed during the press conference on the Gaza civilian death toll, which the premier says is roughly the same as the combatant death toll.

Fighting in the densely populated Strip, riddled with vast tunnel networks, the IDF has achieved the “lowest ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in the history of modern urban warfare — it’s 1 to 1,” he says.

Netanyahu says 17,000-18,000 Hamas operatives have been killed.

The Hamas-run health ministry places the total figure at nearly 41,000, though it doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants.

Netanyahu reiterates that Israel takes precautions to limit civilian casualties and has recently enabled a massive vaccination campaign against polio. His office had been quick to deny Hebrew reports that Israel had agreed to temporary ceasefires to allow for children to be vaccinated.

“We think that every civilian death is a tragedy. For Hamas, every civilian death is a strategy,” he asserts.

He says Israel has worked to ensure that Palestinians are moved out of harm’s way before it launches attacks and points to international warnings against the mass evacuation of over one million Palestinians from Rafah, which he says were proven to have been wrong.

He argues that forecasts of mass civilian casualties as a result of Israel’s Rafah operation also proved wrong and that barely any innocents ended up being killed.

The ratio of civilian to combatant deaths has fallen “precipitously” since Israel entered Rafah, he says, saying a key IDF commander there said the total was “probably two dozen” — most of them caused when an IDF bomb hit a Hamas ammunition depot in a civilian area.

“Report honestly because you accused us of something that is outrageous, and in fact, the accusations against us [turned out to be] outrageously false,” he demands.

“The Israeli army is doing something that no other army has done in history, and will continue to do that. I’m not going to change my humanitarian policies, vaccination policies and combat policies to minimize civilian casualties,” Netanyahu says.

Aid groups still argue that the repeated orders of Palestinians to move en masse from one part of Gaza to another have created catastrophic humanitarian conditions, including poor water and sewage quality that has led to the resurgence of diseases.