The American website The Intercept conducted an investigation into lists of the numbers of victims who fell as a result of the current Israeli aggression on Gaza strip. The news site confirmed that the investigation found evidence that refutes the US President’s claim joe biden He doesn’t trust those numbers.
Biden was asked last week what his government wanted to do to reduce the number of civilian casualties in Gaza, and his response was that the numbers contained in those lists cannot be trusted.
The Gaza Ministry of Health responded to these allegations by publishing a list of the names of 6,747 people who had died as of October 26 since the start of the bombing campaign, including 2,665 children. Before The Intercept discovered that a 14-year-old boy’s name was listed twice, bringing the total number of martyrs to 6,746. Other than that, the list does not include duplicate names.
An American of Palestinian origin lost more than 40 of his relatives during the attack on Gaza, as was proven by the list of the Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip, which the Intercept viewed while conducting its investigation.
The American website stated in its report that Biden’s attempt to deny the validity of the numbers coming out of Gaza, considering them fake news, allowed the defenders of the indiscriminate Israeli bombing campaign to ignore taking the crisis seriously. They even pointed out that the Islamic Resistance Movement (agitation) which runs Gaza – and then the Ministry of Health there – deliberately “inflates these numbers.”
Human rights organizations – which have been working in Gaza for years – quickly rejected Biden’s claim, while the American Associated Press reported that the Ministry of Health’s figures during previous conflicts largely match the figures reached by both the Israeli government and…United nations.
The US State Department itself has always considered these statistics reliable, according to the Intercept report.
But Biden later clarified that he meant to say he did not trust Hamas, but not all Palestinians, according to the Wall Street Journal.
After the ministry published a list of the names of the victims, skeptics pointed out that “the list may be fabricated, and that containing names does not prove anything.”
Immediately after the names were published, National Security Council Strategic Communications Coordinator John Kirby echoed the same doubts, saying that the Ministry of Health is “a front for the Hamas movement” and that “we cannot accept anything coming from Hamas – or even the alleged ministry – as it is.”
But is the list itself reliable? The American website asks in its report, before answering, that it verified dozens of names on the ministry’s list, by investigating the family of Maram Al-Dada, a Palestinian who was born and raised in Gaza and now resides in the US state of Florida.
Al-Dada told The Intercept – before the list was issued – that 7 of her father’s relatives, and 30 of her mother’s relatives, were martyred in and around the city of Khan Yunis. A week later, this total had increased to 46.
The Intercept investigation compared the list of Dada’s relatives, which began compiling last week, with the list later announced by the Ministry of Health. The website added that Aldada and her parents requested that the last names of the deceased not be published, as there are fears in Gaza that Israel has targeted journalists and their families, and may retaliate against civilians who speak to Western media.
The Dada family hopes to emerge from the war with as many of its relatives alive as possible.
The website confirmed that it had submitted new reports to the White House, and asked it whether Kirby and Biden still stood by their allegations on this subject. He also asked him whether the administration had made any unilateral attempts to verify the reliability of the Ministry of Health’s figures.
However, the White House referred the American website to the public statements made by Kirby and State Department spokesman Matt Miller, which acknowledged that there had been civilian casualties.
The report quotes Al-Dada as saying that her family was never political, and had no connection to the Hamas movement. The October 7 attack surprised them just as it surprised the world.
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