Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, told Piers Morgan yesterday that Israel’s destruction of Gaza had surpassed the “destruction of Hiroshima” by a nuclear bomb at the end of World War II, with civilian death ratios not seen since the 20th century.
Bartov, who was born in Israel and fought in the October 1973 Arab-Israel War, said: “We’ve heard that the IDF is the most moral army in the world. Even when I served in the IDF in the 1970s, it was not the most moral army in the world. But now, it’s a totally different organization.” Then he provided some numbers:
“The statistics are that between 2 and 5% of the population have been killed, 60-70% of them civilians. A third of those killed are children. Over a thousand of those killed are children below the age of one. That’s a ratio that has not existed in the 21st century and indeed you have to go back to World War II for these figures. Some of the destruction in cities in Gaza is greater than the destruction of Hiroshima in nuclear weapons, and so we now have only one part of Gaza that is not completely flattened, and right now, as we speak, in Deir al-Balah, the IDF is involved in destroying it.”
