ABC News has refuted a recent claim by President Joe Biden that Israel commits “indiscriminate bombing” in Gaza, reporting, after an investigation, that Israel has in fact used a “historically high level of precision weapons usage in urban warfare.”
Biden made the outlandish claim, without providing evidence, during remarks at a private fundraiser last week in Washington, DC. His claim caused a minor diplomatic crisis, with Israel rejecting the accusation and the White House trying to clean it up.
A CNN “exclusive” by controversial reporter Natasha Bertrand claimed that nearly half of the munitions used by Israel in airstrikes against terrorists in Gaza were “dumb bombs,” only reporting in the 20th paragraph that Israel had obtained technology from the U.S. that allowed these bombs to be converted into guided munitions. The accusation was repeated at a White House briefing, and caused an Israeli spokesman to deny the claim, accusing CNN of burying the lede in its own story.
Now, ABC News has reported that the truth is exactly the opposite of what President Biden claimed:
The numbers assessed by the U.S. intelligence report would suggest a historically high level of precision weapons usage in urban warfare, according to ABC News contributor Steve Ganyard, a former State Department official and Marine Corps fighter pilot.
“Precision weapons are expensive and in short supply compared to ‘dumb’ bombs, but if Israel is using precision aerial weapons 55-60% of the time, then that is more than any country in the history of urban warfare,” Ganyard said.
Furthermore, experts and U.S. officials told ABC News there are tactics that can be used to drop these weapons, which are more neutrally referred to as “unguided munitions,” with precision, and to largely avoid needlessly killing or injuring civilians.
The White House has yet to retract its claim, or to provide a single example of “indiscriminate bombing” by Israel in ten weeks of war against Hamas.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
