ABC’s Good Morning America and CBS Mornings spent Thursday on the pro-Hamas terrorists bandwagon, touting the “growing outrage” at Israel for its response to the October 7 terror attacks, including operations at Al Shifa hospital (which has doubled as a base and weapons cache) and the supposedly “excessive,” “hard to take,” and not “proportional” death tolls between Gazans and Hamas terrorists.
CBS foreign correspondent Remy Inocencio boasted off the top of his report that “Israel is facing growing outrage over its operations in Gaza” before leading into an interview with 26-year-old Israeli-American drone pilot with the pseudonym “Captain D,” whose face was obviously not shown to protect his identity.
“Captain D” stated the obvious the pious liberal media refuse to grapple with: “When we see someone firing a rocket and then running into a hospital, we now know that that hospital is involved in terrorist organizations.”
He told Inocencio another obvious point, which was that “[i]t’s not easy” to determine who’s a civilian versus what the CBS reporter dubbed “militants” and it comes down to a team of people as well as discussing “international law, intelligence, [and] operational people giving a justification”
In a voice-over, Inocencio tag-teamed with a U.N. official and leaned on the terrorist-run Gaza Health Ministry’s assertion that Israel’s death toll of Gazans hasn’t been “proportional” to those in Hamas according to “international laws of war” (click “expand”):
INOCENCIO: Under international laws of war, civilian deaths should be proportional to the military advantage, not excessive. Gaza’s Health Ministry run by Hamas says over 11,000 Palestinians have been killed in response to terror attacks that killed 1,200 Israelis.
U.N. HUMANITARIAN OFFICE’s ANDREA DE DOMENICO: It’s a crisis of humanity.
INOCENCIO: Andrea de Domenico is chief for the U.N. Humanitarian Office in Jerusalem.
DE DOMENICO: And we are allowing for military objectives that can be absolutely legitimate. I’m not about to question that, but where is that line of balance of proportion that will justify that?
Asked whether he’s had to abort a strike, “Captain D” said he had “many times” and would “be a wealthy man” if given “a dollar for every time I heard, ‘we have children coming’” into frame.
As for mistakes, “Captain D” showed why Israel is different from the murderous Hamas in that he conceded “sometimes, we do mess up” and it weighs on him.
Inocencio closed by again taking the terrorists at their word: “[A]ccording to Hamas’s numbers, for every one person that was killed in Israel on October 7, nearly 10 people have died in Gaza”.
Co-host and Democratic donor Gayle King — who had the gullible gall to play moral equivalency a day earlier between Israelis and Gazans with the father of a hostage — fretted that “[t]hose numbers are so hard to take” emotionally.
Later in the show during a sit-down with former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, co-host Tony Dokoupil had a more intelligent topic to discuss while co-host Nate Burleson asked the all-too-vague question of how Israeli should go about “preventing civilian casualties” (click “expand”):
DOKOUPIL: I have a simple and maybe dumb question. All of these calls for a ceasefire, all of this criticism of Israel, I don’t hear in that calls for Hamas to surrender.
ESPER: Yes.
DOKOUPIL: Why aren’t the Arab countries lining up and saying this is an illegitimate government. It is holding its own people hostage. It’s killing civilians.
ESPER: Yes.
DOKOUPIL: Get them out of there.
ESPER: You know, because the Arab countries are very afraid of the Arab Street, which is fully behind Hamas, right? So that’s the problem. I agree with you. More troubling is why isn’t the U.N. calling for Hamas to release the hostages, to ceasefire, to get out of the hospitals, get out of the schools, so forth and so on.
(....)
BURLESON: Is there a simple answer to preventing civilian casualties?
ESPER: There’s not. I mean, Gaza is so dense, and Hamas is not letting many of those civilians leave. I mean, I think Israel is doing the right things by opening up humanitarian corridors, urging people to leave, going as far as to provide fuel and safe exits out, but Hamas is keeping them in place, and that’s a challenge. It gets back to your question. Why aren’t people calling for Hamas to let the people leave?
Over on ABC’s Good Morning America, senior national correspondent Matt Gutman reacted to the evidence from the Americans and Israelis that Hamas had used Al Shifa hospital as a base by suggesting to IDF spokesperson Lt. Col. Amnon Shefler that’s still not enough to move in there against the terrorist group.
“Does that justify laying siege to a hospital where there are hundreds of patients who are already in dire circumstances,” Gutman wondered to Shefler.
Shefler hit back: “We’re fighting Hamas. We know that this is another stronghold by Hamas and we’re going after them, wherever they are.”
He then touted as though it were fact claims from the head of plastic surgery at Al Shifa that “more than half of the ICU patients, 43 out of 63, have died after oxygen supplies ran out.”
To see the relevant transcripts from November 16, click here (for ABC) and here (for CBS).
