Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • I would submit that Israel has lost the PR war catastrophically.

  • You tell me if they've even made a dent in Hamas.

  • Well, it's very hard to say exactly how much damage they've done to Hamas, because there's just not much information.

  • The Israelis control who gets into Gaza, who gets out, what they see.

  • And therefore, there's not a lot of hard facts in the media.

  • And that includes the Israeli press as well.

  • My sense is that they're not doing very well at all.

  • First of all, the Israelis only control about 40% of Gaza.

  • Just think about it.

  • They control 40%.

  • That means the other 60% is territory where Hamas can go and the Israelis can't get at them.

  • Second, the Israelis have not captured any hostages.

  • That's quite surprising.

  • If they haven't captured any hostages, that probably tells you a lot about their ability to find the Hamas fighters.

  • Furthermore, if you look at the number of people that the Israelis have killed, the number is about 20,000, as you said before.

  • And most people agree that about 70% of that 20,000 is women and children.

  • So that would be 14,000.

  • That means that the Israelis have killed 6,000 males.

  • Now, those 6,000 males were certainly not all Hamas fighters.

  • Most of them, I'm sure, were innocent civilians.

  • So let's say of the 6,000, 4,000 were civilians and 2,000 were Hamas fighters.

  • I don't think that's the likely number, but let's give the Israelis the benefit of the doubt.

  • That says that they've killed 2,000 Hamas fighters.

  • Well, most people argue that Hamas had 30,000 to 40,000 fighters to start with.

  • If they had 30,000 to 40,000 fighters and they've killed 2,000, that means they have a whole heck of a lot of fighters left.

  • Finally, you just don't see any evidence of the Israelis capturing Hamas fighters and then taking pictures of them or videos of them or parading them around.

  • The people that they're parading around, the males that they're parading around and humiliating are in almost all cases civilians who they have captured and are interrogating.

  • So I just don't see a lot of evidence that the Israelis, the IDF, is winning this war against Hamas.

  • I think it's going to have to go on for a long time if there's any hope of ultimately decisively defeating Hamas.

  • Given the accuracy of what you say about the Israelis controlling information, what's the other side of that coin?

  • How many Israeli soldiers have been killed or captured?

  • This is a very tricky issue.

  • If you go on Telegram and you look at what the pictures and the videos that Hamas is releasing, it looks like they're doing a lot of damage to the Israelis, that they're putting up a real fight.

  • Hamas is.

  • I'm not 100% sure of that.

  • It's hard to tell exactly what's going on.

I would submit that Israel has lost the PR war catastrophically.

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it