There he goes again. Bernie Sanders is hoping to force a vote to withhold arms to Israel, Captain Ahab once again chasing his blue-and-white whale as rage and obsession consume him.
There is another classically tragic aspect to this: Bernie is living in a time and place entirely removed from our own. The war he is raging about on the Senate floor is not the war that is actually being fought in the Middle East. It’s a relic—much like Sanders himself—that is best left behind.
Citing Hamas’s statistics with an emphasis on the claim that “more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed,” Sanders announced that this week he “will force Senate votes on two Joint Resolutions of Disapproval I have introduced to block certain offensive arms sales to Israel. These sales, proposed by the Trump Administration, would provide $8.8 billion in bombs and other munitions to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s extremist government to continue its destruction of Gaza.”
Unfortunately for Sanders, we are now at a moment when these anti-Israel talking points can be debunked with Hamas’s own stats.
As Salo Aizenberg, a leading analyst of the Gaza authorities’ fatality documents, posted, “Hamas’ new March 2025 fatality list quietly drops 3,400 fully ‘identified’ deaths” among whom were “1,080 children. These ‘deaths’ never happened. The numbers were falsified—again.”
Hamas is playing a familiar game here. The terror group will inflate casualty figures and go so far as to “name” and “identify” each one on the list, which will be reported immediately. Following the reports, Israel will be criticized for using excessive force and for endangering civilians. After that round of reporting has faded from the headlines, Hamas will edit the list, revising the total figure down and deleting thousands of fake entries so the permanent record appears more in line with the facts. The monthly numbers that media had been using become, at that point, irrelevant—but only in retrospect. No changes will be made to stories, no corrections appended, no apologies made.
Crucially, even after the adjustments, the March numbers aren’t accurate either. For one, Aizenberg notes, they include over 8,000 natural deaths, which is around 15 percent or so of the total—a huge chunk of the list.
Further, Hamas doesn’t distinguish between combatants and noncombatants. The deaths from war, Aizenberg wrote, are about 41,000 once the natural deaths are removed. Israel has reportedly killed about 20,000 Hamas fighters, which means nearly half of the war casualties have been Hamas combatants. Last, 72 percent of fatalities aged 13-55—the traditional age range of soldiers used by Hamas—were men.
Hamas’s list is thus inaccurate in the extreme but still quite useful, if you are willing to actually read the material. Sanders & Co. are trying to ban the transfer of offensive weapons to Israel just at the moment when Hamas has proved the unprecedented accuracy of Israel’s urban warfare.
Sanders can complain about the Israeli government all he wants—Israel has been acquitted of Sanders’s charges by the Palestinian government itself.
But let’s not stop there. To speak in progressive Democrats’ own language, the vibe has shifted. Gazans are out in the streets to oppose what Sanders would most like to do: enable Hamas to survive the war and keep charge of the enclave. Moreover, Gazan clans are striking back—very publicly—at Hamas in retaliation for its violent repression and mafia-like control tactics. Bernie speaks not for innocent Palestinians but for their tormentors.
According to videos on Telegram, tens of thousands of Palestinians are demonstrating against Hamas today in Beit Lahia. Another recent video out of Gaza shows injured Gazans, several of whom are children, exiting an ambulance and shouting that Hamas were hiding among them, causing them to be in the line of fire.
Bernie Sanders and his merry band of Hamas propagandists are behind the times. Hamas is so yesterday. Bernie isn’t speaking for Palestinians, he’s speaking over them—and further endangering their lives for his own political crusade.
