What Did Top Israeli War Officials Really Say About Gaza?
Journalists and jurists point to damning quotes from Israel’s war cabinet as evidence of genocidal intent. But the citations are not what they seem.
This story was updated on January 25, 2024 at 1:25pm.
In late November, the NPR reporter Leila Fadel interviewed the international-law scholar David Crane about a disquieting subject: potential genocide in Gaza. Crane was uniquely qualified to opine on this fraught topic, having served as the founding chief prosecutor for the UN’s Special Court for Sierra Leone, where he indicted the president of Liberia for war crimes. On air, he explained why he did not think Israel’s actions met the criteria.
“If I was charged with investigating and prosecuting genocide,” Crane said, “I would have to have in large measure a smoking gun,” which he characterized as “a rebel group, a person, a head of state” explicitly directing those under their control to destroy a people in “whole or in part.” Precisely because genocide is the highest crime, proving it demands the highest standard of evidence. What is required, in relation to the current conflict, is not simply documentation of destruction or war crimes, and not just incendiary statements from individual soldiers or politicians with no role directing military operations, but rather a declaration of intent to eliminate Gazans—not just Hamas—by the top Israeli decision makers.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Crane said, had not made such a statement, which meant that legal intent could not be established. By contrast, he added, “Hamas has clearly stated that they intend to destroy, in whole or in part, the Israeli people and the Israeli state. That is a declaration of a genocidal intent.” Fadel was not convinced, and deftly countered with several damning quotes from the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant: “We are fighting human animals.” “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” The segment ended inconclusively.
Last week, a similar exchange unfolded on BBC radio, when an anchor pressed British Defense Secretary Grant Shapps about Israel’s conduct in Gaza. “The defense minister said, ‘We will eliminate everything,’ in relation to Gaza,” the host observed. Wasn’t this a clear call to violate international humanitarian law? Under repeated questioning, Shapps allowed that Gallant might have overstepped in the emotional aftermath of Hamas’s slaughter of more than 1,000 Israelis, but insisted that the quotation did not reflect the man he’d been regularly talking with about “trying to find ways to be precise and proportionate.”
As it turns out, there’s a reason the quote did not sound like Gallant: The Israeli defense minister never really said it.
On October 10, as the charred remains of murdered Israelis were still being identified in their homes, Gallant spoke to a group of soldiers who had repelled the Hamas assault, in a statement that was captured on video. Translated from the original Hebrew, here is the relevant portion of what he said: “Gaza will not return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate it all.” This isn’t a matter of interpretation or translation. Gallant’s vow to “eliminate it all” was directed explicitly at Hamas, not Gaza. One doesn’t even need to speak Hebrew, as I do, to confirm this: The word Hamas is clearly audible in the video. The remainder of Gallant’s remarks also dealt with rooting out Hamas: “We understand that Hamas wanted to change the situation; it will change 180 degrees from what they thought. They will regret this moment.” It was not Gallant who conflated Hamas and Gaza, but rather those who mischaracterized his words. The smoking gun was filled with blanks.
And yet, the misleadingly truncated version of Gallant’s quote has not just been circulated on NPR and the BBC. The New York Times has made the same elision twice, and it appeared in The Guardian, in a piece by Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch. It was also quoted in The Washington Post, where a writer ironically claimed that Gallant had said “the quiet part out loud,” while quietly omitting whom Gallant was actually talking about. Most consequentially, this mistaken rendering of Gallant’s words was publicly invoked last week by South Africa’s legal team in the International Court of Justice as evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent; it served as one of their only citations sourced to someone in Israel’s war cabinet. The line was then reiterated on the floor of Congress by Representative Rashida Tlaib.
Politicians and lawyers are not always known for their probity, but journalists have fact-checkers. How did an error this substantial get missed so many times in so many places? One New York Times article that cited Gallant’s mangled misquote sourced the words to an op-ed in another outlet, which sourced them to an X post that featured an embedded TikTok video. But the cascade of media failures appears to have begun with a 42-second video excerpt of Gallant’s talk that was uploaded by Bloomberg with incomplete English subtitles. The clip, since viewed more than half a million times, simply skips over “There will be no Hamas” in its translation. (Bloomberg did not return a request for comment at press time. After this article was published, it removed the original video and issued a corrected version that includes the excised sentence about Hamas. Bloomberg's mistaken translation originated with the Associated Press, which also corrected the error. The New York Times corrected both articles containing the same error, as did The Guardian and NPR.)
Unfortunately, this concatenation of errors is part of a pattern. As someone who has covered Israeli extremism for years and written about the hard right’s push to ethnically cleanse Gaza and resettle it, I have been carefully tracking the rise of such dangerous ideas for more than a decade. In this perilous wartime environment, it is essential to know who is saying what, and whether they have the authority to act on it. But while far too many right-wing members of Israel’s Parliament have expressed borderline or straightforwardly genocidal sentiments during the Gaza conflict, such statements attributed to the three people making Israel’s actual military decisions, the voting members of its war cabinet—Gallant, Netanyahu, and the former opposition lawmaker Benny Gantz—repeatedly turn out to be mistaken or misrepresented.
Take the claim, also cited by NPR’s Fadel among others, that Gallant referred to Gazans as “human animals.” The defense minister has used this harsh language several times, and it’s reasonable to wonder whom he’s referring to. But as can be seen from the same Bloomberg video, Gallant uses this phrase to talk about Hamas, telling soldiers who fought off Hamas on the devastated Gaza border: “You have seen what we are fighting against. We are fighting against human animals. This is the ISIS of Gaza.” (Hamas’s atrocities on October 7 have been likened to acts of the Islamic State by both Israeli and American officials, including President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.) One can certainly take issue with Gallant’s language—for one thing, a nonhuman animal never executed a grandmother in her home and then uploaded the snuff film to her Facebook page—but not with the fact that the defense minister’s words referred specifically to Hamas.
So much for Gallant. But what about Netanyahu, a man in thrall to the hard right and not exactly known for rhetorical restraint? On January 5, the New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg argued that President Biden was being naive to Netanyahu’s ambitions to displace Gaza’s population. “As Israeli news outlets have reported,” she wrote, “Netanyahu said this week that the government is considering a ‘scenario of surrender and deportation’ of residents of the Gaza Strip.” Goldberg is an excellent journalist well versed in this topic, and she based her claim on a usually reliable source: the English live blog of Haaretz, Israel’s leading progressive paper, which summarized a news item from Israeli TV. But once again, something crucial was lost in translation.
The original Hebrew media report did not say that Netanyahu was considering the surrender and deportation of Gaza’s residents. It said that, in a meeting with families of the Israeli hostages, Netanyahu expressed openness to the surrender and deportation of Hamas’s senior leadership in exchange for the remaining captives—a theoretical proposal for ending the war that has been raised by the United States but rejected by Hamas. The title of the TV segment was “Recordings of the Prime Minister in a meeting with the families of the abductees and a statement regarding the possible exile of senior Hamas officials.” That was also the headline in the Israeli media. Haaretz quietly corrected its blog days later, though the uncorrected Times column still links to it as evidence, and viral screenshots of the erroneous English translation continue to circulate on social media. (The Times has removed the mistaken section and issued a correction.)
The mistake matters: Far from being decided on the question of Gazan displacement, Netanyahu turned out to be malleable, and has since come out publicly against it under heavy pressure from the Biden administration. Diplomacy like that depends on an accurate understanding of the state of play.
Finally, there is an error of biblical proportions. On October 28, Netanyahu gave a short Hebrew address to the public about the unfolding war against Hamas, in which he cited a verse from the Torah. “‘Remember what Amalek did to you,’” he said. “We remember and we fight.” Netanyahu is a secular Jew, but he is also a student of the Bible, often alluding to it in his public statements. Here is the context of that biblical quote, Deuteronomy 25:17–18, which refers to an enemy clan that pursued and murdered the Israelites: “Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt—how, undeterred by fear of God, he surprised you on the march, when you were famished and weary, and cut down all the stragglers in your rear.” The Bible then enjoins the Israelites to “blot out the memory of Amalek.”
In the days since, this seemingly straightforward reference to a surprise attack on the innocent and the need to punish its perpetrators has been adduced as evidence of Netanyahu’s genocidal intent. The allegation has appeared in outlets including The New York Times and Mother Jones, as well as in South Africa’s arguments at The Hague. But to make the leap from Netanyahu’s citation to genocidal ambition, all of these accounts conflate the biblical story he cites about Amalek with a completely different one in another book of the Bible that takes place hundreds of years later. The verse from Deuteronomy that the Israeli leader quoted—which is explicitly cited in the official translation of his speech—recounts the time of Moses. Netanyahu’s critics mistakenly source his words to the book of Samuel, in which King Saul is commanded to wipe out every member of Amalek, down to their children and livestock. Tellingly, none of those citing Samuel ever quote the verses from Deuteronomy that Netanyahu actually referenced, which clearly illustrate his intended meaning.
“Speaking Hebrew, he’s comparing Hamas to the nation of Amalek in a passage from the Book of Samuel,” reported Leila Fadel, incorrectly, on NPR. (NPR has issued a correction.) The BBC similarly misattributed the passage in its interview with Defense Secretary Shapps, quoting from Samuel and not Deuteronomy. “Netanyahu urged the soldiers to ‘remember what Amalek has done to you,’” the South African lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi argued in the Hague. “This refers to the biblical command by God to Saul for the retaliatory destruction of an entire group of people known as the Amalekites: ‘Put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’” This was not, in fact, what Netanyahu was referring to.
Since ancient times, Amalek has served as Jewish shorthand for a foe that seeks to exterminate the Jewish people. Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, makes regular reference to “remember what Amalek did to you,” both in its documentation and in its public exhibition. Israel’s previous president invoked Amalek when critiquing remarks made by then-President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil about the Nazi genocide. Ironically, The Hague’s own Holocaust memorial is called the “Amalek monument,” and its plaque cites the same Hebrew verse as Netanyahu did. Obviously, these allusions to Amalek refer to the Nazis, not their extended families or the entire German people. The collapsing of this traditional Jewish concept into its worst possible interpretation echoes similar misrepresentations of Muslim terminology, such as jihad. Jewish extremists have sometimes cast all Palestinians as Amalek, but that no more defines the term for everyday Jews than the use of “Allahu akbar” by Muslim terrorists like Hamas defines the phrase for everyday Muslims.
Amalek was not the only one of Netanyahu’s basic biblical references to be miscast as malevolent in the current conflict. In late October, the Israeli leader cited a verse from Isaiah at the end of a speech. “This was a biblical reference to God’s protection of the Jewish people,” wrote the Financial Times editor and columnist Edward Luce. “It also served as a dog whistle to Netanyahu’s allies in America’s evangelical movement … Such talk from Israel’s leader and America’s de facto leader of the opposition deprives Hamas of its dark monopoly on theocracy.”
Here is what Netanyahu said: “With deep faith in the justice of our cause and in the eternity of Israel, we will realize the prophecy of Isaiah 60:18—‘Violence shall no more be heard in your land, desolation nor destruction within your borders; but you shall call your walls Salvation, and your gates Praise.’” Anyone familiar with the original Hebrew verse understands that Netanyahu here was not making a messianic pronouncement, but rather a play on words. In one of history’s great ironies, Hamas is the biblical word for “violence.” (This is why Israelis typically pronounce it with a guttural kh, following their modern pronunciation of the biblical word, to the frustration and amusement of Arabic speakers who correctly pronounce the group’s name with a soft h.) Puns are often objectionable, but they are not theocracy.
I’ve written extensively about Netanyahu’s profound failures. He welcomed the far-right into Israel’s government and gave its members titles and ministries. He has regularly refused to rebuke their extremism because he fears losing power. He is the reason Israel is reduced to arguing that it is innocent of genocidal intent, not because its politicians haven’t expressed it, but because those politicians aren’t military decision makers. In other words, Netanyahu is the one who created the context in which banal biblical references could be understood as far-right appeals. But Jewish scripture should not be distorted by journalists or jurists in an erroneous attempt to indict him.
These omissions and misinterpretations are not merely cosmetic: They misled readers, judges, and politicians. None of them should have happened. The good news is that they can be avoided in the future by making sure to check translations at their source; pressing writers to link to primary sources when possible; and placing scriptural citations from any faith into their proper theological and historical context. Certainly, no outlet or activist should be cavalierly accusing people or countries of committing genocide based on thirdhand mistranslations or truncated quotations.
Neutral principles like these can’t resolve the deep moral and political quandaries posed by the Israel-Hamas conflict. They can’t tell readers what to think about its devastation. But they will ensure that whatever conclusions readers draw will be based on facts, not fictions—which is, at root, the purpose of journalism.