Israel's Foreign Ministry on Thursday slammed as a "blood libel" a report by Human Rights Watch in which the NGO accuses the Jewish state of genocide.
The report alleges that Israel did this by depriving Palestinians in the Gaza Strip of adequate water supplies.
Israel has rejected such allegations, noting that is has let into Gaza more than 900,000 tons of aid since Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, including water, in addition to the water that Israel supplies to the Strip through piping.
"Human Rights Watch is once more spreading its blood libels in order to promote its anti-Israel propaganda. … This report is full of lies that are appalling even when compared to HRW's already low standards," the ministry said.
The HRW report follows another from Amnesty International, which also accused Israel of genocide. Amnesty Israel flat-out disputed its parent organization's allegations.
"This pseudo report is more genocide inversion, built on innuendo, speculation and international legal fiction," Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor, said on Thursday.
Deliberately refraining from mentioning the "Hamas underground atrocity infrastructure, HRW's refrain accusing Israel of 'deliberately' and 'intentionally' seeking to 'exterminate' Palestinians in Gaza has no credibility. Far removed from a 'highly respected human rights organization,' HRW, like Amnesty International, is a major source of virulent hate propaganda targeting Israel," he added.
A rigorous analysis published on Saturday of Hamas authorities' mortality statistics for Gaza shows they were vastly inflated and methodologically flawed. The report by the London-based Henry Jackson Society security think tank breaks down the figure of about 44,000 deaths since Oct. 7, 2023, that the Hamas-controlled health ministry in Gaza has published, and which international media have reported without scrutiny.
The scale of civilian deaths in Gaza is a key element in a lawfare and propaganda campaign to isolate Israel internationally using false allegations of genocide.
The figure, which does not distinguish between civilians and the 17,000 terrorists Israel says it has killed in Gaza, also includes about 5,000 people who die of natural causes each year, wrote Andrew Fox, an analyst who specializes in defense, the Middle East and disinformation, who prepared the report for the Henry Jackson Society. "This report raises serious concerns that the Gaza MoH figures have been overstated."
An estimated 6,000 Palestinian terrorists invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting another 250. About 100 hostages remain in the Gaza Strip, though three dozen of them are believed to have died. Israel and Hamas are engaged in indirect talks for a ceasefire and a hostages-for-terrorists exchange.
The condition of the hostages is unknown as Hamas has not allowed aid organizations, including the Red Cross, to visit them.
Republished with permission from Jewish News Syndicate