Rashida Tlaib Fumes Over US House Vote to Prohibit State Department From Citing Hamas Casualty Figures

The US House of Representatives on Thursday passed a measure that would prohibit the US State Department from using funds from the international affairs budget to cite casualty figures from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health, sparking backlash from Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI).

A bipartisan group of lawmakers — Reps. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Joe Wilson (R-SC), Mike Lawler (D-NY), and Carol Miller (R-WV) — spearheaded the amendment to the annual State Department appropriations bill. The measure ultimately passed the House by a vote of 269-144. It’s unclear whether the amendment will survive a vote on the Senate floor.

Tlaib lambasted her peers in the House for the vote, suggesting that they harbor deeply-ingrained “racism” against Palestinians. She dismissed the amendment as an effort to “dehumanize” Palestinian people.

“Since 1948, there has been a coordinated effort, especially in this chamber, to dehumanize Palestinians and erase Palestinians from existence,” Tlaib said before the vote. “My colleagues want to prohibit our own US officials from even citing the Palestinian death toll.”

The Gaza Health Ministry — which is run by the Hamas terrorist group in control of the Palestinian enclave — manages the health care and medical services in the Gaza Strip. Experts have cast doubt on the reliability of their figures for systematically overcounting the number of casualties and not distinguishing between civilians and terrorists as part of a strategy to tarnish Israel’s public image.

“Six children, six are killed in Gaza every single hour,” Tlaib said. “But Palestinians are not just numbers. Behind these numbers are real people — mothers, fathers, sons, daughters who have had their lives stolen from them and their families torn apart, and we should not be trying to hide it.”

Tlaib apparently sourced the claim that six children in Gaza are killed hourly from the World Health Organization (WHO), which has long been criticized for allegedly having an anti-Israel bias. The WHO made these claims in November, roughly a month into the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. Earlier this month, however, the Associated Press published an analysis showing that the proportion of children killed in the war in Gaza has nosedived, falling to below 40 percent of all casualties in April from above 60 percent in October.

“There is so much anti-Palestinian racism in this chamber that my colleagues don’t even want to acknowledge that Palestinians exist at all,” Tlaib continued. “Not when they’re alive, and now, not even when they’re dead. It’s absolutely disgusting. This is genocide denial.”

Israel’s ongoing defensive war against Hamas in Gaza has not been legally recognized as a genocide by any major international organization. South Africa has attempted, so far unsuccessfully, to get the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to rule that Israel is committing “state-led genocide” as part of an ongoing case. Israeli officials have strongly condemned the ICJ proceedings, noting that the Jewish state is targeting terrorists who use civilians as human shields in its military campaign.

According to John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, Israel has “followed the laws of war, legal obligations, best practices in civilian harm mitigation, and still found a way to reduce civilian casualties to historically low levels.” When taking into account casualty figures from both Hamas and Israel, the latter’s war effort has led to 1.5 civilian deaths for every combatant death — a far lower proportion of civilian deaths compared to the US-led effort to eliminate ISIS from the Iraqi city of Mosul.

Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman to serve in Congress, has received widespread bipartisan backlash for her fierce opposition to Israel. She also possesses a map of the Middle East in her office which omits the existence of the Jewish state.

In the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre throughout southern Israel, Tlaib defended the chant “from the river to to the sea, Palestine will be free” as an “aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence.” The chant is widely acknowledged as a call to eliminate the state of Israel, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

In April, Tlaib received a wave of criticism for refusing to condemn anti-Israel protesters who chanted “death to America” and “death to Israel” during a rally in her district.

Two months earlier, the House passed a resolution condemning Hamas’ use of sexual assault as a weapon of war during its Oct. 7 attack on Israel. It was a near-unanimous vote, with a single exception: Tlaib, who only voted “present,” arguing she could not support the measure because it did not also accuse Israel of using sexual assault as a weapon of war. Mounting evidence has documented Hamas’ systematic use of torture and sexual violence, including mass rape, against the Israeli people during the onslaught.

Last month, Tlaib gave a keynote speech at a conference in which many speakers celebrated the Oct. 7 attacks and called for the eradication of Israel.

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