Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the US Congress on Wednesday was riddled with misleading claims about his country’s war in Gaza.
Dozens of lawmakers boycotted the speech, 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 Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the “worst” ever delivered by a foreign dignitary in Congress, was riddled with false statements.
Many of them were addressed to the International Criminal Court (ICC), whose prosecutors requested arrest warrants against Israeli leaders in May.
Hamas is “stealing” aid from Gaza
Netanyahu rejected the ICC’s accusation that Israel is blocking aid shipments to Gaza, saying it has facilitated the entry of more than 40,000 trucks of aid into the strip.
“If there are Palestinians in Gaza who do not receive enough food, it is not because Israel prevents them from doing so, but because Hamas steals it from them,” he said.
According to the UN, 28,018 trucks carrying aid 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, only 2,835 aid trucks have entered the Palestinian enclave.
Aid organisations and UN officials have repeatedly criticised Israel’s restrictions on aid as famine looms in the strip.
In March, the United Nations’ hunger monitoring system, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), warned that Gaza was on the brink of famine and projected this could occur by May.
A second report released in June concluded that a high risk of famine persists across the territory, with half a million Palestinians facing starvation.
Israel has taken “more precautions to prevent harm to civilians than any military in history”
Netanyahu said Israeli forces have done everything possible to protect Palestinian civilians, saying they distributed “millions of leaflets, sent millions of text messages and made hundreds of thousands of phone calls to get Palestinian civilians out of danger.”
Israeli forces periodically 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 July 22, the Israeli army began shelling the eastern neighborhoods of Khan Younis, a previously designated humanitarian zone hosting 400,000 Palestinians, minutes after issuing an evacuation order.
In a June report, the UN assessed six Israeli attacks that caused large numbers of deaths and concluded that Israeli forces had consistently failed to minimize harm to civilians.
The majority of the 39,000 confirmed deaths in Gaza are civilians, according to UN and health ministry figures.
On October 7, Hamas “burned babies alive”
Netanyahu repeated unsubstantiated claims that Hamas “burned babies alive” during its attack on southern Israel on October 7. He also told a story of Hamas fighters murdering two babies who were hiding in the attic of a family home.
These claims are among many testimonies of the Hamas attack carried out by Israeli personnel that the Haaretz newspaper deemed false.
Among the allegations was an account by Golan Vach, head of Israel’s military search and rescue service, who claimed to have seen the bodies of burned babies. The military said Vach mistakenly said babies when he actually meant children.
An Israeli soldier also said in an interview that “there were babies and children hanging on a clothesline one after another.” The army denied this, saying he was a reservist who did not speak in an official capacity.
Netanyahu himself told US President Joe Biden that Palestinians “tied up dozens of children,” burned them and executed them.
There is no available evidence to suggest that groups of dead children were found at the same location matching the description provided by Netanyahu, according to Haaretz.
Article originally published in Middle East Eye.
Source: www.laizquierdadiario.com
