CNN Downplays Low Ratio of Palestinian Civilians to Terrorists Killed

CNN continued its biased coverage of the Israeli war against the Palestinian Hamas terrorist group on Tuesday, spinning remarks by an Israeli military spokesman as if he saw the deaths of civilians as a “positive,” rather than the low ratio of civilian deaths.

As Breitbart News reported Monday, a leaked report from a off-the-record briefing for foreign journalists suggested that Israel believed that 5,000 of the roughly 15,000 that Hamas reported dead in Gaza were terrorists — a historically low ratio, if true.

Terrorists typically hide among civilians, using them as human shields, deliberately driving up the radio of civilians to terrorists killed. In Afghanistan, the U.S. and NATO allies brought the ratio down to about three or four civilians per terrorist killed.

In a conflict with Hamas in 2021, in which Israel did not invade Gaza on the ground, the ratio was an unprecedented one-to-one, a historic achievement in avoiding civilian casualties. In this conflict, which has required Israel to invade, the ratio is still low.

CNN’s headline on the web was “Israel military says 2 civilians killed for every Hamas militant is a ‘tremendously positive’ ratio given combat challenges.” Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Lt. Col. (Res.) Jonathan Conricus told CNN’s Erin Burnett on the air: “If you compare that ratio to any other conflict in urban terrain between a military and a terrorist organization using civilians as their human shield and embedded in the civilian population, you will find that that ratio is tremendously positive and perhaps unique in the world.”

Conricus also added: “We are not after the civilians and we’re going through great efforts in order to keep it that way.”

At no point did he say that the killing of civilians itself was “tremendously positive.”

Update: At a press conference Tuesday, Netanyahu suggested that Israel had killed about half of Hamas’s batallion commanders.

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 new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent 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.