Top White House official John Kirby clashed with several reporters over President Biden's rejection of the Hamas-provided death toll of Palestinians in Gaza since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks against Israel.
Questions at Thursday's press briefing were dominated by the comments Biden made Wednesday. He said he had "no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth" about the civilian body count being provided by the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is run by Hamas, saying, "I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using."
"The president yesterday, John, said he has no confidence in the death toll numbers presented by the Palestinians in Gaza. What's he basing that on? How did he reach that conclusion?" Reuters correspondent Steve Holland asked the NSC spokesman.
"Well, we all know that the Gaza Ministry of Health is just a front for Hamas, it's run by Hamas, a terrorist organization," Kirby responded. "I've said it myself up here, we can't take anything coming out of Hamas, including the so-called Ministry of Health, at face value."
NBC correspondent Peter Alexander pressed Kirby, "You don't dispute that thousands of Palestinians, many of them innocent civilians, have been killed by Israeli strikes so far, do you?" Kirby replied, "Of course not," but reiterated that the numbers provided by Hamas' Ministry of Health should not be relied on.
"They say it's more than 7,000. Is there any way to assess how many it is?" Alexander followed. "I mean, the president said — it was a pretty dramatic moment when he said, yeah, we don't have any confidence in that. We respect you can't take Hamas at its word, but it does appear by all independent journalism, including that by a lot of people in the room, that thousands of Palestinians has been killed. Would you agree?"
"We would not dispute that," Kirby answered.
Another reporter, McClatchy correspondent Michael Wilner, asked whether the Biden administration had any idea what percentage of the deaths in Gaza have been Hamas terrorists versus civilians, something Kirby replied, "I do not."
Things got more combative when NPR correspondent Franco Ordoñez pointed out how several aid groups including the United Nations have cited those numbers, asking, "Are they wrong to do that?"
"They can make their own decisions about what numbers they want to say. We're not going to cite 'em," Kirby responded.
Raquel Krähenbühl of Brazil's TV Globo then interjected, pointing out how the State Department had previously cited Hamas' numbers in the past, prompting Ordoñez to ask, "Is the administration's posltion that is now — Hamas is now manipulating the numbers now, but not before?"
"Well, do you remember that attack on the hospital?" Kirby shot back. "And what did the Gaza Ministry of Health put out, something like 500? They slapped the number 500 on it — you know — within the hour of that attack and, of course, they — the same Ministry of Health said it was an Israeli airstrike. So, we know that's not true. And we've now since found out that the numbers aren't that high, either. They never got up to 500."
Kirby continued, "Now it was — it was at least a couple of hundred. That's terrible, and that's atrocious and that's sad. And we all obviously grieve with the families and loved ones who are affected by that, but the numbers are not reliable. They're just not reliable, and I don't need to tell you how to do your jobs, but if you're going to report casualty figures out of Gaza, I would frankly recommend you don't choose numbers put out by an organization that's run by a terrorist organization."
Krähenbühl later grilled Kirby on Biden's remarks when he said, "I'm sure innocents have been killed, and it's the price of waging a war."
"Don't you think this is insensitive?" Krähenbühl asked. "There’s being very harsh criticism about it. For example, the Council of American-Islamic Relations said it was deeply disturbed and called on the president to apologize. Would the president apologize? And does he regret saying something like that?"
"No, no," Kirby told the reporter. "What’s harsh is the way Hamas is using people as human shields. What’s harsh is taking a couple of hundred hostages and leaving families anxious waiting and worrying to figure out where their loved ones are. What's harsh is dropping in on a music festival and slaughtering a bunch of young people just trying to enjoy an afternoon. I could go on and on. That's what's harsh. That is what's harsh."
"And being honest about the fact that there have been civilian casualties and that there likely will be more is being honest, because that's what war is. It's brutal. It's ugly. It's messy. I've said that before. The president also said that yesterday. Doesn't mean we have to like it, and it doesn't mean that we're dismissing any one of those casualties — each and every one is a tragedy in its own right... It would be helpful if Hamas would let them leave... We know that there are thousands waiting to leave Gaza writ large and Hamas is preventing them from doing it. That is what is harsh," he added.
Last week, several news organizations rushed to report claims made by the Gaza Health Ministry that Israel bombed Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital through an airstrike resulting in more than 500 civilian casualties.
Subsequent reporting and intelligence found it was an explosion in the hospital's parking lot stemming from a misfired rocket fired by Hamas ally Islamic Jihad, resulting in a death toll a fraction of what Hamas had first alleged.
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