20 July 2014 — Mondoweiss

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer got a one-on-one with Benjamin Netanyahu and asked him about the disturbing optics of the Gaza onslaught, in which Israel has now killed hundreds of civilians, many of them children:

You see these painful pictures though of these Palestinian children and these refugees, thousands of them, fleeing their homes. It’s a horrendous sight right now– if you look at the images, heart-wrenching. What goes through your mind when you see that?

Netanyahu:

I’m very sad. When I see that I’m very sad. We’re sad for every civilian casualty. They’re not intended. This is the difference between us. The Hamas deliberately targets civilians and deliberately hides behind civilians.  They imbed their rocketeers, their rocket caches, their other weaponry, which they use to fire on us in civilian areas… What choice do we have?…

All civilian casualties are unintended by us but actually intended by Hamas. They want to pile up as many civilian dead as they can because somebody said, and I mean, it’s gruesome, but they use telegenically-dead Palestinians for their cause. They want– the more dead the better.

This is the Israeli talking point. David Brooks of the New York Times, who has said that he is an ardent supporter of Israel, said on public radio Friday that

Hamas has basically decided they want to see their own people killed as a propaganda coup. And I think here again the administration – Bill Clinton and others – have named things very accurately. And what we’re seeing is sort of a desperate Hamas trying to gin up some sort of publicity coup through the death of their own people.

Brooks is referring to these comments by Bill Clinton:

[Hamas has] a strategy designed to force Israel to kill their own civilians so that the rest of the world will condemn them….

In the short and medium term Hamas can inflict terrible public relations damage by forcing (Israel) to kill Palestinian civilians to counter Hamas.

Thanks to Annie Robbins.