Fact Check: Biden Cites Hamas Death Statistics in SOTU

CLAIM: President Joe Biden said: “More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed. Most of whom are not Hamas.”

VERDICT: MISLEADING. The death figure Biden cited comes from Hamas and does not exclude terrorists killed.

President Biden addressed the ongoing war in Gaza during his State of the Union address on Thursday night. He showed empathy for the innocent Israelis who were murdered in the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7, and said Israel had the right to defend itself. At the same time, he implied that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza (untrue); suggested Israel does not try to avoid Palestinian civilian casualties (also untrue); and proposed a “two-state solution” to the conflict, which would reward Hamas’s brutality with the achievement of Palestinian sovereignty.

Along the way, Biden cited the “30,000” figure, which comes from the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is controlled by Hamas. There is no way to know if the figure is accurate, and the Gaza authorities have lied to the world before, most notably in the Al-Ahli hospital incident in October, when they claimed 500 people were killed by an Israeli airstrike. In reality, the death toll was closer to 50; there was no direct hit at the hospital, but rather in the adjacent parking lot; and those who died were killed by an errant Palestinian terrorist rocket aimed at Israeli civilians, not by any Israeli fire.

Even assuming the figure is correct, there is no way to know whether it includes Palestinians killed by Palestinian fire, and it may also include Palestinian terrorists killed inside Israel during the terror attack that they were perpetrating.

Crucially, the “30,000” figure does not distinguish between civilians and terrorists. When Biden says that “most” of the 30,000 Palestinians that Hamas says were killed were civilians, he does not say whether that means 100 terrorists or 10,000 have been killed.

Israel estimates that it has killed upwards of 11,000 Hamas terrorists thus far — most of whom also disguise themselves as civilians during combat. That is an historically low rate of civilian casualties.

There is no real way to know the number of Palestinian casualties. But when President Biden cites misleading Hamas statistics, he is not only misleading the public, but also granting a propaganda win to radical Islamic terrorists.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.