TEL AVIV – Sen. Bernie Sanders’s anti-Israel statements go “even beyond Hamas terrorist propaganda,” declared Breitbart Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter Aaron Klein during a radio interview on Wednesday night.
Klein was referring to an interview given by the far-left contender to the New York Daily News ahead of the New York primaries scheduled for April 19 in which Sanders vastly inflated the number of Palestinians killed by Israel in during the 2014 Gaza War.
“I don’t remember the figures, but my recollection is over 10,000 innocent people were killed in Gaza,” Sanders told the paper’s editorial board.
Klein retorted, “Even Hamas, in their most exaggerated claims of Palestinian casualties, are putting it at 2,500.”
“I remind everybody that Hamas used civilians as human shields, used mosques to store rockets. Even fired rockets, by the way, from the main Gaza hotel where the journalists were staying. So they put reporters in danger… Bernie Sanders, I don’t know where you get your information from, but apparently its even beyond Hamas terrorist propaganda.”
Klein was speaking during his weekly segment on John Batchelor’s popular national radio show.
Click below to listen to Klein’s full segment on Batchelor’s program.
During his Daily News interview, Sanders continued by stating that Israel bombed “hospitals.”
“My understanding is that a whole lot of apartment houses were leveled. Hospitals, I think, were bombed. So yeah, I do believe and I don’t think I’m alone in believing that Israel’s force was more indiscriminate than it should have been,” Sanders said.
Klein noted that Sanders referenced Israel’s bombing of a hospital but he left out that the IDF bombed an Gaza’s empty Al-Wafa Hospital, saying it was being used as a Hamas terrorist command center. No casualties were reported in the bombing, and Israel first fired numerous warning shots and ensured that the building was evacuated.
Israel and the Palestinians published different figures for the death toll of Operation Protective Edge, as Israel dubbed it, but both put the number of dead well below 2,500, including both civilians and militants. Israel says 1,408 of 2,203 Palestinians killed in the war were militants. Hamas claimed more than half were civilians.