July 16, 2025 - Epoch Times
04:59
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| This whole story is a piece of Hamas disinformation. | |
| And it's the same type of disinformation we've seen over this entire conflict, where every single day the so-called health ministry of Hamas releases a statistic of civilian casualties. | |
| They don't distinguish between the casualties being civilians or whether they're Hamas fighters. | |
| While everyone is constantly appealing to international law, international humanitarian law, and all of these things, Hamas, they seem to only dress in their military fatigues when they're transferring hostages for the cameras. | |
| They dress as civilians, they blend in civilians. | |
| So what we've experienced since GHF started is an adaptation of this part of the Hamas disinformation war, which is they started saying that basically every casualty in the Gaza Strip was a civilian casualty, and every civilian casualty happened at GHF. | |
| And then they started saying, so our sites, therefore, are death traps. | |
| It's a lie. | |
| Like with any lie, there's an element of truth. | |
| And the truth is, the IDF has admitted that there were a few circumstances where civilians may have been inadvertently killed or harmed. | |
| It's a much, much smaller number, we believe, than any of this reporting. | |
| And what isn't reported is that Hamas intentionally harmed and killed probably many hundreds of people in order to try to claim that those casualties were either at our sites or at the hands of the IDF or in proximity to our distribution sites. | |
| In fact, recently when Hamas managed to infiltrate one of our sites and throw two grenades at our American aid workers, I'm sure they would have been happy to kill Americans, but it doesn't seem like that was the intention. | |
| They were happy to harm them, but what they wanted to do, we believe, is they wanted to provoke our team to retaliate and harm civilians right in the middle of the ceasefire negotiation. | |
| I suppose that it's also controversial that the Israeli military is providing the security for you. | |
| I think it's the only such scenario I've ever heard of. | |
| It's not exactly because I guess a more common term would be creating a humanitarian zone in a conflict. | |
| So in a conflict like this, I mean, the professional army operating in the conflict is the IDF. | |
| So this is a war. | |
| It's an active war. | |
| We didn't wait for a ceasefire to feed people because the people needed fed immediately. | |
| So you have the IDF, which is the professional military. | |
| And sometimes, plenty of times, we disagree with the IDF. | |
| We're always arguing with the IDF. | |
| We ask for this and that, and we're going back and forth. | |
| And it's a professional army. | |
| We can demand an investigation. | |
| They can do an investigation. | |
| and ask them to change the way the path through the humanitarian zone sort of functions and all of these things. | |
| But it's not uncommon at all in a war where there are... | |
| You create a humanitarian zone. | |
| The difference in Gaza is that Gaza is such a concentrated place, and the IDF is fighting basically against a guerrilla warfare type of enemy. | |
| The rules of engaging are more complex. | |
| Is it dangerous? | |
| It's very dangerous. | |
| Do we want civilians having to cross IDF lines in order to get to our food? | |
| No. | |
| We want to be as close to the people as we can. | |
| And in fact, we're in the process of getting closer to the people and piloting new things. | |
| In a ceasefire scenario, one of the features of the ceasefire scenario is that we have to engage with the people outside of the IDF. | |
| I mean, this has always been the plan. | |
| But it's a misnomer that somehow, because the IDF is operating in the Gaza Strip, that this delegitimizes GHF's work. | |
| It's the exact opposite. | |
| But it's also complicated for us because we can't control what happens outside of our distribution sites. | |
| And this is the weird thing, that we always get asked questions that should be directed to the IDF. | |
| So the press and Hamas and critics and international organizations, the United Nations and others, some politicians, they want to hold us accountable for their problems with the IDF. | |
| We're not the IDF. | |
| You've got a problem with the IDF. | |
| We have problems with the IDF. | |
| Sometimes go talk to them. |
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