No, Israel’s War In Gaza Is Not The ‘Deadliest In Recent History’

ANALYSIS – Not by a long shot. The anti-Israel spin machine has been working overtime recently. Last Thursday, the Associated Press argued that Israel's justified fight against Hamas terrorists “now sits among the deadliest and most destructive in history.”

Well, that line was “overkill” (pun intended) even for AP, so it quickly edited its language to cite wars in “recent” history. But that still ignores all the major holes in reasoning, misconceptions and outright falsehoods used to write that piece of “news.”

Nor did it stop a slew of other left-wing anti-Israel outlets from latching on to this narrative: that “Israel's response to Hamas's Oct. 7 massacre is the most destructive … the deadliest … the biggest… the worst…”

As in almost every case of mainstream reporting on this, the comparisons are extremely misleading, or outright false.

For example, as the Algemeiner noted in its excellent analysis, “Less than a week into the war, The Washington Post reported that Israel had already dropped the same quantity of munitions on Gaza as the US dropped on Afghanistan in its most intense full year of bombing.”

But the Algemeiner notes, “this is wildly false,” explaining that:

The US had dropped 17,500 munitions on Afghanistan in just 76 days of bombing in 2001. The newspaper eventually corrected after outreach by CAMERA, but not before the fake statistic was echoed by the Los Angeles Times' managing editor, NBC's Mehdi Hasan, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, J Street, and members of Congress.

No one pays attention to corrections anyways.Then there were the false claims echoed by The New York Times that “Israel has killed more women and children than have been killed in Ukraine.”

This misrepresentation relied on Ukraine casualty figures that, per the Times' own source, are “considerably” lower than the actual number of civilian deaths.

Like the AP, The Times also did a stealth edit to its piece, changing its language online, but it left the error uncorrected in print.

Then, there is the issue of civilian displacement. On Dec. 22, The Washington Post reported that the displacement of two million people in Gaza's population was “the largest displacement in the region since Israel's creation in 1948.”

As the Algemeiner notes, “Again, this is totally false.”

It explains: “In Syria, just on the other side of Israel from Gaza, 12 million people have recently been displaced, according to the United Nations.”

And of course, we have this doozy of a headline. The print edition of the New York Times ran a large headline announcing, “Gaza Deaths Surpass Any Arab War Losses in 40 Years,” in Hamas' fight against Israel. This, based on the Hamas figures of 20,000 killed.

The article itself more correctly referred to “Arab conflicts with Israel” but the headline stayed the same.

Meanwhile, the Algemeiner notes, the same ‘newspaper of record' has previously reported on the 470,000 deaths in Syria's war; the 150,000 deaths in Yemen's war; the 150,000 deaths in Lebanon's civil war; the 500,000 Iraqi deaths from the country's war with Iran; and the 150,000 Iraqi deaths during the gulf war.

None of these body counts come remotely close to the likely inflated numbers provided by Hamas. And there are many more examples of false and wildly misleading news reporting about Israel's war against Hamas.

Bottom line: urban combat is notoriously deadly and destructive. 

Add to it an unprecedented level of subterranean warfare in the terror tunnels that create a web below most of Gaza's neighborhoods and civilian structures, and this war by Israel is likely remarkably less destructive than it could be, or recent comparable wars have been.

For more details about these facts see the report by the Algemeiner.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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