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UN Rapporteur Promotes Widely Derided Report Claiming 186,000 People Have Died in Gaza War
Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, attends a side event during the Human Rights Council at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, March 26, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse
The United Nations’ special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories has circulated a heavily disputed and unreliable claim from a medical journal that 186,000 people have been killed in Gaza as a result of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.
“If one includes both direct & indirect deaths from Israel’s assault, the death toll in Gaza goes up to 186,000 people, according to the medical journal [The Lancet]. That’s 1 in every 12 Gaza inhabitants killed in the last 9 months of genocide,” Francesca Albanese posted on X/Twitter.
If one includes both direct & indirect deaths from Israel’s assault, the death toll in Gaza goes up to 186,000 people, according to the medical journal @TheLancet. That’s 1 in every 12 Gaza inhabitants killed in the last 9 months of genocide. https://t.co/pOvhnyKMPW
— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) July 8, 2024
Last week, The Lancet, a prominent medical journal, published an article titled, “Counting the Dead in Gaza: Difficult but Essential.” In a one-page correspondence letter, the authors argue that as many as 186,000 Palestinians may have perished in Gaza, amounting to 8 percent of the enclave’s population. The correspondence letter, which was not a peer-reviewed academic study, arrived at this number by taking the Hamas-supplied casualty figure of 37,396 and multiplying it by five, citing previous research that indicates there are usually at least four indirect deaths in combat for every direct death.
Critics shredded the calculation. Salo Aizenberg, a board member with Honest Reporting, lambasted the “fraudulent letter” in a thread on X/Twitter. Aizenberg pointed out that the health authorities in Gaza controlled by Hamas, the terrorist group that launched the ongoing war in Gaza by slaughtering over 1,200 people in southern Israel on Oct. 7, already includes “indirect deaths” in their casualty figures, meaning that the letter’s authors “double count deaths with multiplier.” These supposed “indirect death” numbers, which typically consider casualties by result of famine, disease, and lack of medical attention, have already been included in United Nations reports.
The letter inaccurately stated that the casualty figures produced by Hamas-controlled authorities are “accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services.” Israel has heavily disputed the reported causality figures and accused Hamas of inflating the death toll in Gaza for the sake of tarnishing the Jewish state’s international reputation. Experts have cast doubt on the reliability of casualty figures coming out of Gaza for overcounting civilian deaths and not distinguishing between civilians and combatants.
The authors of the study state that Gaza authorities have had to “augment” their casualty numbers using figures from third parties, such as “reliable media sources and first responders.” Aizenberg questioned this claim, stating that reputable international media is not on the ground in much of Gaza and Hamas has not presented evidence that first responders are counting bodies in the war-torn enclave. The authors also assert that 35 percent of Gaza’s infrastructure has been “destroyed” as a result of the war while simultaneously citing a UN report that claims 12 percent of the enclave has been destroyed.
Despite the letter’s alleged research flaws, the missive spread like wildfire on social media.
Albanese has an extensive history of using her role at the UN to denigrate Israel and seemingly rationalize Hamas’ attacks on the Jewish state. In the months following Hamas’ brutal assault on the Jewish state, Albanese has accused Israel of enacting a “genocide” against the Palestinian people in revenge for the Oct. 7 attacks.
The United Nations has recently launched a probe against Albanese over allegedly accepting a trip to Australia funded by pro-Hamas organizations. Albanese has also celebrated the anti-Israel protesters rampaging across US college campuses, saying they represent a “revolution” and that they give her “hope.”
The post UN Rapporteur Promotes Widely Derided Report Claiming 186,000 People Have Died in Gaza War first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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The post Trudeau would enforce ICC arrest warrants against Netanyahu, Gallant for post-Oct. 7 war crimes in Gaza appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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The post Montreal’s Dawson College shut down by student strike in solidarity with Palestine; Concordia remains open despite protests appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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US ‘Rejects’ ICC Arrest Warrants for Israeli Officials, Lawmakers Vow to Retaliate With Sanctions
The International Criminal Court, The Hague, Netherlands. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
The US castigated the International Criminal Court (ICC) over its decision on Thursday to issue arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, with lawmakers in Congress promising to seek retribution against the court once President-elect Donald Trump retakes the White House in January.
The ICC rejected an appeal by Israel to dismiss the warrants, instead charging Netanyahu and Gallant with “crimes against humanity and war crimes” in the Gaza conflict. The international body accused the Israeli officials of using “starvation as a method of warfare,” as well as “murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” The court also claimed it discovered “reasonable grounds” to slap Netanyahu and Gallant with charges of “intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population.”
Israeli officials vehemently denied the charges, denouncing the ICC’s decision as politically motivated and based on false allegations.
The White House issued a statement condemning the ICC’s announcement.
“The United States fundamentally rejects the court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for senior Israeli officials. We remain deeply concerned by the prosecutor’s rush to seek arrest warrants and the troubling process errors that led to this decision,” White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters.
The ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, has come under fire for initially making his surprise demand for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant on the same day in May that he suddenly canceled a long-planned visit to both Gaza and Israel to collect evidence of alleged war crimes. The last-second cancellation infuriated US and British leaders, according to Reuters, which reported that the trip would have offered Israeli leaders a first opportunity to present their position and outline any action they were taking to respond to the war crime allegations.
Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL), Trump[s pick to serve as his incoming national security adviser, wrote on X/Twitter that the ICC will face a “strong response” when the next administration takes office in January.
“These allegations have been refuted by the US government,” Waltz wrote in a post on X. “Israel has lawfully defended its people & borders from genocidal terrorists. You can expect a strong response to the antisemitic bias of the ICC & UN come January.”
In May, the ICC chief prosecutor officially requested arrest warrants for the Israeli premier, Gallant, and three Hamas terrorist leaders — Yahya Sinwar, Ibrahim al-Masri (better known as Mohammed Deif), and Ismail Haniyeh — accusing all five men of “bearing criminal responsibility” for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Israel or the Gaza Strip. The three Hamas leaders have since been killed, and Gallant was recently fired as Israel’s defense minister.
US and Israeli officials subsequently issued blistering condemnations of the ICC move, decrying the court for drawing a moral equivalence between Israel’s democratically elected leaders and the heads of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the ongoing war in Gaza with its massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7.
A flood of prominent Republican lawmakers repudiated the decision by the ICC and have vowed to sanction the organization.
“The Court is a dangerous joke. It is now time for the US Senate to act and sanction this irresponsible body. The Court defied every concept of fundamental fairness and legitimized a corrupt prosecutor’s actions,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) wrote on social media.
Graham also called on Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the current Senate majority leader, to advance bipartisan legislation that would sanction the ICC over its targeting of Israeli officials.
Sen. John Thune (R-SD), the Senate Republican Leader-elect, lambasted the ICC’s arrest warrants as “outrageous.” He vowed to place legislation on the floor to sanction the international court next year if the current Senate does not take action.
“The ICC’s arrest warrant against Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Gallant is outrageous, unlawful, and dangerous. Leader Schumer should bring a bill to the floor sanctioning the ICC. If he chooses not to act, the new Senate Republican majority next year will,” Thune wrote on X/Twitter.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) wrote a statement in agreement with Thune, calling on the ICC to “abandon its unlawful pursuit of arrest warrants against Israeli officials.” Collins added that if the court refuses to drop the sanctions, “the Senate should immediately consider the bipartisan legislation passed by the House to sanction the ICC.”
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) demanded the ICC reverse course on the warrants or risk being sanctioned by the United States.
“The ICC has lost all credibility. Instead of being an anti-Israel propaganda machine, it must reverse its unlawful arrest warrants against Israeli officials, or face sanctions,” Ernst wrote.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) wrote that “it’s past time to sanction the ICC.”
Sen. Ted Budd (R-NC) lambasted the court as “illegitimate” and called on Congress to punish the international organization.
“Congress should immediately pass the Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act so that President Trump can sanction ICC officials on day one,” Budd posted on X/Twitter.
Some Democratic lawmakers also bashed the ICC, calling on the Biden administration to take swift action against the international court.
“I’m outraged by the ICC’s politically motivated efforts to target Israel and equate it to the Hamas terrorists who intentionally murdered, raped, and kidnapped civilians on October 7. I’m once again calling on [President Joe Biden] to use his authority to swiftly respond to this overreach,” Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) wrote.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), a lawmaker who has positioned himself as a stalwart ally of Israel in the year following the Oct. 7 slaughters, dismissed the ICC’s warrants as having “no standing, relevance, or path.”
Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), arguably the most vocal Democratic supporter of Israel in the House of Representatives, wrote that the ICC decision “represents the weaponization of international law at its most egregious.” He added that the ICC “has set a precedent for criminalizing self-defense.”
“The ICC ignores the cause and context of the war. Israel did not initiate the war,” Torres wrote in a statement.
“None of that context seems to matter to the kangaroo court of the ICC, which cannot let facts get in the way of its ideological crusade against the Jewish State. The ICC should be sanctioned not for enforcing the law but for distorting it beyond recognition,” he added.
In May, the House passed the Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act, which would place sanctions on the ICC for “any effort to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute any protected person of the United States and its allies.” In October, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) urged Schumer to bring the bill to the Senate floor for a vote.
The post US ‘Rejects’ ICC Arrest Warrants for Israeli Officials, Lawmakers Vow to Retaliate With Sanctions first appeared on Algemeiner.com.