(From left) “Equiano.Stories” producer Mati Kochavi, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan and New York City Mayor Eric Adams at an event at the United Nations on March 29, 2022. Photo: Shahar Azran.
On October 29, the AP reported:
The U.N. Mideast envoy said 2022 is on course to be the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since the U.N. started tracking fatalities in 2005, and he called for immediate action to calm “an explosive situation” and move toward renewing Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
Tor Wennesland told the U.N. Security Council that “mounting hopelessness, anger and tension have once again erupted into a deadly cycle of violence that is increasingly difficult to contain,” and “too many people, overwhelmingly Palestinian have been killed and injured.”
What Mr. Wennesland, and the media at large, ignores is that the overwhelming majority of those killed were in the midst of violent actions at the time, and most were members of armed terrorist groups.
Adin Haykin has been maintaining a huge Twitter thread of those killed this year, with photos and documentation. The real story isn’t the record number of Palestinians killed — but the number of Palestinian terrorists and attackers.
Nearly all those killed were either in the midst of attacking or were members of known terror groups. Out of 121 killed (one died of a heart attack), I only count six who might have been innocent – killed while the IDF was going after attackers, or one killed when he ignored warning shots and kept approaching the soldiers, for example.
This is a year of attacks unprecedented since the second intifada. And Israel has no need to apologize for killing the terrorists before most of them manage to reach Israeli civilians.
One other data point: before May 2021, the number of attacks using small arms were quite small, only a couple a month. The number of shooting attacks tracked by the Shin Bet have dramatically increased since then; here are the statistics over the past 12 months:
