Ro Khanna Needs to Look at the Data Before Accusing Israel of ‘Killing Women and Children’

Congressman Ro Khanna said of the Democrats: “If this party does not have the moral clarity on issues of Gaza, on issues of Palestinian national aspirations and statehood, and on issues of not having military weapons that are killing women and children and starving people in Gaza, then we will not have the moral vision to win back the trust of the American people.” “Moral clarity” would mean not doing anything to reward the terrorist group Hamas, such as recognizing a “state of Palestine,” giving it a diplomatic victory after the atrocities it carried out on October 7, 2023. Ro Khanna and his fellow signatories to this disgraceful letter also talk about “Palestinian aspirations.” Does he know what they are? Hamas, in its very charter, has called for the total destruction of the Jewish state. And the Palestinian Authority is little better. Hamas and the PA differ only on matters of tactics and timing. The PA pretends to abjure terrorism, but it continues to both reward past, and incentivize future, acts of terrorism through its “Pay-For-Slay” program that provides generous monthly benefits to imprisoned terrorists and. to the families of terrorists who died while committing their acts of terrorism. And while Hamas wants to act quickly to destroy, by terrorist attacks, the Jewish state, the PA is prepared to wait longer, hoping to first squeeze Israel back within the 1949 armistice lines, with a nine-mile-wide waist from Qalqilya to the sea, and then, no doubt with the help of other Arab states, hoping to cut Israel in two with an invasion force from the east. The destruction of Israel, and its replacement by a 23rd Arab state, remains the goal of both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.

Khanna’s letter refers to “military weapons that are killing women and children.” Yes, in any war there are civilian deaths. In Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the Vietnam and the Korean War, in each of those conflicts hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed. Most regrettable. But in the Gaza War, unlike those other wars, Israel has made tremendous efforts to minimize civilian casualties. The IDF has dropped millions of leaflets, sent millions of text messages, made millions of robocalls, and tens of thousands of personal calls, al in order to warn civilians away from areas and buildings about to be targeted. Khanna makes no mention of this, nor of Hamas’ strategy of hiding both its fighters and its weapons inside civilian buildings, including apartment houses, schools, mosques, and hospitals, so as to increase civilian casualties and then to blame Israel for it. Ro Khanna talks about “women and children” being killed as if Israel intended to kill them, but this is the very opposite of the truth. The IDF intention has never been to kill them, but to warn them away from dangerous areas. Those warnings are not always heeded.

Khanna needs to look at the data before accusing Israel of “killing women and children.” Hamas claims that 66,000 people have died in Gaza to date. Of those 66,000, the IDF believes that 26,000 were male combatants belonging to Hamas. Before the war, every month in Gaza 800 people died of accidents and diseases. Assuming that monthly number has not varied, that means that over the last 24 months of the Gaza War, 19,200 people have died of non-combat related causes. Let’s do the math. 66,000-26,000=40,000. 40,00-19,200=20,800. Let’s not even bother to count those Gazans who were killed by Hamas rockets and missiles that misfired, and landed in Gaza. The IDF estimates that about 10% of those Hamas rockets and missiles have landed inside Gaza, and a number of them have, of course, killed civilians in Gaza; those deaths cannot be attributed to the IDF. Khanna and his fellows bewail the killing of “women and children.” In fact, of the 19,800 civilians killed in Gaza as a result of the war, there is no reason to think that “women and children” died in greater numbers then men.

They certainly were not targeted by the IDF, as Khanna’s letter clearly, and meretriciously, implies. It’s reasonable to assume that a third of those 19,800 civilians were men, a third were women, and a third were children of both sexes. That means 6,600 men (in addition to the 26,000 Hamas fighters, all men), 6,600 women, and 6,600 children, were killed. A regrettable number, but remember that this is urban warfare, where the enemy fighters and their weapons are lodged in civilian buildings. To hear Ro Khanna tell it, It sounds as if those mad-dog Israelis, the soldiers of a colonial-settler ethnic-cleansing genocidal state, have been targeting “women and children,” when we know they have done their best to preserve their lives by warning them away from danger. West Point Professor John Spencer, who has studied the Gaza War from the very beginning, has concluded that “Israel is applying more measures to minimize civilian casualties than any military in history.” What does Ro Khanna, or the 46 others who signed his letter castigating Israel and demanding that the U.S. recognize a Palestinian state, make of that?

Despite all the handwringing over Israel losing support in the U.S., Ro Khanna managed to have only 22% of House Democrats sign his appalling letter. And a similar letter in the Senate, sponsored by Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch, both of Vermont, has been signed by a grand total of eight Senators, out of 100. Those numbers are cause for concern but not, as yet, for alarm.