Palestinian Civilians Tell NBC Israel Is Warning Them to Evacuate Before Launching Airstrikes
Isaac SchorrOct 10th, 2023
NBC News foreign correspondent Raf Sanchez joined José Diaz-Balart on MSNBC Tuesday, where he explained how Israeli military was taking extra precautions to limit Palestinian civilian casualties in the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip and southern Israel.
“It’s a city, it’s so densely populated. How does the authorities, intelligence, etc., differentiate between civilians and Hamas when in many times they’re intertwined as far as where they’re living and where they’re existing?” asked Diaz-Balart.
“It is true that Hamas and the civilian population are intermingled, that there are Hamas facilities in residential neighborhoods. Israel says that Hamas uses the population of Gaza as human shields to try to, you know, shield themselves from Israeli strikes by hiding behind civilians,” answered Sanchez.
“There is a network of tunnels underneath Gaza City built by Hamas. It’s how they move military hardware around. And you can bet that those Israeli hostages, those 150 or so people are likely in those tunnels,” he explained. “They are likely spread out across the network as Hamas tries to make it as difficult as possible for Israel to rescue these hostages who are seen as such valuable bargaining chips.”
Then the reporter shifted gears to detail the lengths to which Israel goes to save civilian lives:
In terms of how Israel goes about reducing civilian casualties, they say that they use very precise intelligence before they strike any specific location. I’ve been inside Gaza when Israel has been bombing, and you meet Palestinians who say that their phone rang and on the other end of the line was an Israeli military officer telling them in Arabic, ‘We’re going to strike your apartment building because there is Hamas infrastructure in it, but we want you to go door by door first and make sure that there’s nobody inside the building before we strike.
In some cases, they can stay on the phone for an hour making sure that the building is empty before they bomb it. But as I said, José, it is simply the reality that when you drop high-powered explosives in a place as densely populated as Gaza City, that there will be civilians killed. The death toll inside Gaza now is above 800. Here inside Israel, it is above 900. Both those people massacred in the kibbutzim and the other communities in the south of this country by these Hamas gunmen, but also people killed in this intense wave of rocket fire
Watch above via MSNBC.
Palestinian Civilians Say Israel Is Helping to Evacuate Them (mediaite.com) |
