Brazilian President Lula da Silva made an embarrassing mistake when he claimed in a speech that 12.3 million children have been killed in the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the war with Hamas. Foreign Minister Israel Katz responded yesterday, (Friday) asking that a law should be instituted making it "mandatory for every person who wants to run for president of a country to learn how to count."
As mentioned, during his speech at a national conference on the rights of children and youth, da Silva asked the Brazilian audience to raise their hands as a gesture to the children of Gaza. "We will now pay tribute to the almost 40,000 children who died or were left without a father and mother because of COVID, and to the children in Brazil who have perished of malnutrition because they are still not getting the necessary calories and proteins," said the president. "But above all - this is a tribute to the almost 12 million and 300 thousand children who have died in the Gaza Strip and in Israel, in bombings in a crazy war against humanity."
In practice, Da Silva's figure is completely unfounded, because the total population in all of Israel and Gaza combined is about 11 million people. Even the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, which is under the control of Hamas, claims that about 33,000 Palestinians, including about 12,000 children have been killed since the start of hostilities.