The British journalist Brendan O’Neill reports on the IDF’s recent renewal of fighting in Gaza, where it has devastated what remained of Hamas’ leadership, and on how the Western media, instead of celebrating, has been denouncing Israel for this achievement. More on O’Neill’s furious reaction to that media coverage can be found here: “Why don’t we hear more about Israel’s stunning blow against Hamas’s fascists?,” by Brendan O’Neill, The Spectator, March 19, 2025:
Imagine if, following an Allied raid on Nazi positions, the newspapers the next day told us about nothing but the civilian casualties. No mention of the fascists who were killed. Instead, just pained commentary on the suffering of the innocents who tragically found themselves swept up in this act of war. We would think that strange, right?
Well, that’s how I feel perusing the coverage of Israel’s resumption of its military crusade against Hamas. You could be forgiven for thinking this is a blindly barbarous assault in which only the guiltless have perished. It’s not true. In reality, Israel appears to have landed a brilliant blow on the new fascism, taking out some of Gaza’s most nefarious radical Islamists who played key roles in the armies of antisemites that subjected the Jews of Israel to such horrors on 7 October 2023.
The removal of Hamas’s de facto prime minister, its security chief, its top domestic bruiser and other commanders represents the decapitation of this racist movement that poses such a threat to the Jewish nation and to civilization itself. Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a deranged Sunni Islamist army devoted to the destruction of Israel, also confirmed that its military spokesman was killed. PIJ gleefully took part in 7 October’s carnival of violence. Yet we’re left with the impression that Israel has only killed innocents, and only intended to….
The Western media have not made clear who these Hamas and PIJ leaders were, how important a blow their loss has been. Instead, it harps continually on the inexorable rise in deaths in Gaza, now telling us that “more than 50,000 have been killed,” according to the Gaza Health Ministry, “70% of them women and children.”
What is not reported is that the Gaza Health Ministry is merely a mouthpiece for Hamas, that provides it with all of its figures on casualties; that there is no way to know if the Hamas claim that “70% of those who have been dying in Gaza are women and children” is true or false, and that the figure of “50,000 killed in Gaza” makes it sound as if these were all civilian deaths.
What should be explained, but never is, is that “of the 50,000 people in Gaza Hamas now claims have been killed, at least 22,000 were members of Hamas.” Furthermore, before the war, the average number of deaths in Gaza from diseases and accidents was 800 a month, which means that in the last 18 months, 14,400 Gazans have died of non-combat-related causes. And an indeterminate number were also killed by rockets launched at Israel that misfired, and landed inside Gaza, as the PIJ rockets that fell short and landed at the parking lot of the Al-Ahli Hospital, killing hundreds.
Of those 50,000 (assuming we accept this Hamas-provided figure), then, we must deduct 22,000 Hamas dead and 14,400 non-combat-related dead. Do the math: 50,000 minus 22,000 equals 28,000; 28,000 minus 14,400 equals 13,600 civilian deaths in Gaza from the war. That number is no doubt regrettable, though given Hamas’ modus operandi, embedding itself in among civilians, understandable. It is certainly a far cry from the number — 50,000 — that the media are drumming into our brains.
A key metric in judging how careful an army has been to minimize civilian casualties is to look at the ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths. The UN has said that in all the wars fought since 1945, that ratio has been 9:1. In Afghanistan, the Americans managed to get it down to 5:1, and in Iraq, lower still, to 4:1. But in Gaza, the IDF has managed to lower that ratio to the unheard-of level of 13.6:22, or much less than 1:1. No other army in the history of warfare has brought the civilian-to-combatant ratio even close to what the IDF has achieved. No wonder West Point Professor John Spencer, an expert in urban warfare, has concluded from his study of the Gaza War that Israel “has implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties in urban warfare than any other military in the history of war.”
We are actively discouraged from coolly discussing Hamas’s culpability, the question of Jewish security and the idea of ‘just war’, and expected merely to emote. When it comes to the Jewish nation’s wars, you must park your critical faculties and just feel. It is a catastrophic failure of the human duty of moral examination. ‘Truth is the first casualty of war’, they say. It is also the first casualty of the rash, saccharine Israelophobia that is so rife now.
Brendan O’Neill’s fury is prompted by how the meretricious media focuses only on those videos of wounded or dead Gazans that are shown on the nightly news, without providing any context: that Hamas started this war with the atrocities — rapes, tortures, mutilations, murders, it carried out on October 7, 2023; that civilians in Gaza have died because Hamas has deliberately embedded its operatives in civilian buildings and sites; that the IDF moves heaven and earth, through its elaborate system of warning people away from buildings and areas about to be targeted, to minimize civilian casualties, while Hamas tries always to maximize them. The enormity of the IDF’s effort can be judged by the fact that already by March 2024 the IDF had dropped nine million leaflets, sent fifteen million text messages, and made sixteen million robocalls, to warn Gazans of areas that, for their own safety, they should promptly leave.
Brendan O’Neill’s indignation — Swiftian and savage — with the Western media is well-deserved. When will that media stop spouting Hamas propaganda and begin to report truthfully and fully on the war between a terrorist group bent on genocide, and the embattled Jewish state wanting only to survive, and to treat Israel with a modicum of fairness?
Walter Sieruk says
The Prime Minister of the State of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, is right when he declared that “Hamas must be destroyed.”
The reason why this is so is because when it comes to those brutal cruel vile heinous malicious and murderous jihadist savages of Hamas it’s “Either kill or be killed.”
So, Hamas needs to be hit long and hard and it should to hit with much military might and. struck great power repeatedly until it’s completely destroyed. As it had been also, rightly said “Half –measures is folly and madness.”
For the jihadists of Hamas will not respond to reason or logic , in others words, they cannot and will not be reasoned with. The only language that are able to understand is that of being the receiving end of a power of a great military might. As Thomas Jefferson had ,rightly ,written “With every barbarous people…force is law.”
Even the leftist US President Franklin D. Roosevelt with all liberal socialist had very wisely declared, “No compromise can end that conflict. There never has been—there never can be—successful compromise between good and evil. Only total victory can reward the champions of tolerance, and decency, and freedom, and faith.”
Prime Minister Benjamin had revealed knowledge and wisdom by his statement about the need to about the very important and necessary need to engage in the “Elimination of Hamas.”
Walter Sieruk says
The “Strength of the Sword” is the only language that those liars murderers kidnapper, torturers and vile heinous rapist’s jihadists of Hamas are able to understand. For those dangerous death –inflecting Muslim terrorists of Hamas have no honor, at all, and cannot be reasoned with. For genuine honest negotiation with disingenuous and outright lying, malicious and vicious fiendish malice-filled Muslims terrorists of Hamas is impossible.
Therefore, Hamas needs to be taken down with a strong might of military force. Hamas hit hard, hit long and should keep on being blasted, taken down and not allowed to raise its ugly jihad head again.
Hamas is nothing a deadly plague of Islamic terrorism. Therefore, it should and needs to completely eliminated forever. It will then it will be “Good riddance to Bad Rubbish.” When it comes to Hamas it’s “Bad Rubbish” To the most extreme horrific and horrendously evil possible.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Israel needs to start carpetbombing Gaza. So that Arab countries can be exposed as not caring for the Palis at all. After they are done and the strip is empty, we can take over the development of Gaza for all those “international peoples”
cornelius says
Yep. This “genocide in Gaza” nonsense is so vile. Israel destroyed the armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in 6 days back in 1967. Meanwhile, a year and half into this war, Israel has yet to destroy Hamas. Why?
The answer is simple: Because Israeli restraint in trying to protect Gazan civilians has precluded a rapid victory.
sporticus says
So what happens when the last hostage, dead or alive, is handed over to Israel?
Does it start all over again with a fresh batch?
While Hamas has held Israeli citizens hostage, Israel has been held hostage against decisive action by the weeping families.
By now the number of IDF military killed in this tedious drawn out business exceeds the number of hostages taken by Hamas.
Israel society needs a more stoic approach, a realisation that all of their citizens are at war and they cannot expect the destruction of State of Israel just to save their children or spouses or siblings.
If it starts all over again I will give up reading about it and will hit the media off switch.