Articles in the liberal media and by the middle-class left claim that key Israeli government officials admit their genocidal aim is to wipe out the Palestinians in Gaza. There’s just one small problem. The quotes they use are not what those officials actually said.
In November Syracuse University College of Law professor David Crane was interviewed by NPR reporter Leila Fadel, explaining that unlike Hamas, which calls for genocide against Israel, no Israeli leader says the same about Palestinians.
Fadel insisted that wasn’t true, quoting Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant as saying, “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” But Fadel left out a key phrase from the quote. Gallant actually said, “There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate it all.”
This misquotation has been cited over and over by the New York Times, BBC, the Guardian, Bloomberg, the Washington Post and other liberal outlets, and by the South African government prosecutors in their charge that Israel is guilty of genocide before the International Court of Justice.
Fadel, Bloomberg and others also claim that Gallant called Gazans “human animals.” This quote comes from a talk he gave to soldiers fighting against Hamas. “We are fighting against human animals,” Gallant said. “This is the ISIS of Gaza.”
“One can certainly take issue with Gallant’s language,” The Atlantic journalist Yair Rosenberg commented, “but not with the fact that the defense minister’s words referred specifically to Hamas.”