Katherine Hearst
Middle East Eye / July 25, 2024
In his speech, Netanyahu claimed that Israel is facilitating entry of aid into Gaza and safeguarding civilians.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the US Congress on Wednesday was riddled with misleading claims about his country’s war on Gaza.
Dozens of lawmakers boycotted the address, while thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters occupied parts of the US Capitol to demand Netanyahu’s arrest for alleged war crimes and genocide committed by Israeli forces in Gaza.
His speech, which former House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said was the “worst” by a foreign dignitary in Congress’s history, was peppered with false statements.
Many of them were directed at the International Criminal Court (ICC), whose prosecutors requested arrest warrants for Israeli leaders in May.
Middle East Eye debunks some of his claims:
Hamas is ‘stealing’ the aid to Gaza
Netanyahu rejected the ICC’s accusation that Israel is blocking aid deliveries to Gaza, claiming that it has facilitated the entry of over 40,000 aid trucks into the strip.
“If there are Palestinians in Gaza who aren’t getting enough food, it’s not because Israel is blocking it. It’s because Hamas is stealing it,” he said.
According to the UN, 28,018 aid trucks have entered the strip since October.
But since Israeli forces seized the Rafah crossing in May, one of the few routes in and out of Gaza, just 2,835 aid trucks have entered the Palestinian enclave.
Humanitarian organizations and UN officials have repeatedly criticized Israel’s restrictions on aid, as famine stalks the strip.
In March, the UN’s hunger monitoring system, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), warned that Gaza was on the verge of famine, projecting that it could happen by May.
A second report published in June found that the high risk of famine persists across the territory, with half a million Palestinians suffering starvation.
Israel has taken ‘more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history’
Netanyahu said that Israeli forces have done their utmost to safeguard Palestinian civilians, claiming that they distributed “millions of flyers, sent millions of text messages, made hundreds of thousands of phone calls to get Palestinian civilians out of harm’s way”.
Israeli forces regularly issue evacuation orders and sometimes distribute leaflets to warn Palestinians of their intention to attack an area. But these measures do little to prevent civilian deaths.
On 22 July, the Israeli army started bombing the eastern neighbourhoods of Khan Younis, a previously designated humanitarian area that sheltered 400,000 Palestinians, minutes after it issued an evacuation order.
In a report in June, the UN assessed six Israeli attacks that caused a high number of fatalities and concluded that Israeli forces had consistently failed to minimize civilian harm.
The majority of those killed among the 39,000 confirmed deaths in Gaza are civilians, according to UN and Ministry of Health data.
Hamas ‘burned babies alive’ on 7 October
Netanyahu repeated disproven claims that Hamas “burned babies alive” during its assault on southern Israel on 7 October. He also recounted a story of Hamas fighters murdering two babies who were hidden in the attic of a family home.
These claims were among many testimonies of the Hamas attack by Israeli personnel that the Haaretz newspaper found to be false.
Allegations included an account by Golan Vach, head of the Israeli military search and rescue service, who claimed to have seen the bodies of burned babies. The military said he misspoke by saying babies when he meant to say children.
An Israeli soldier also said in an interview that “babies and children were hung on a clothesline in a row”. The military denied this, saying that he was a reservist who did not speak in an official capacity.
Netanyahu himself told US President Joe Biden that Palestinians “bound dozens of children” together, burned them and executed them.
There is no available evidence to suggest that groups of children were found dead in the same location that match the description provided by Netanyahu, according to Haaretz.
Katherine Hearst is a writer, film maker and organizer
