Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan accused Israel’s military of killing more than 100 innocent Palestinians in Gaza this week and then lying about it, equating these actions to ones performed by Russian President Vladimir and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad against their enemies.
Hasan, whose MSNBC program, "The Medhi Hasan" show was canceled late last year, made the point while speaking to CNN’s Abby Phillip on Thursday night.
More than 100 Palestinians died on Thursday while rushing towards trucks containing humanitarian aid. Local reports claimed that Israeli troops fired on the Gazans, while Israeli military officials said that most of the people died while being trampled in the scramble to get to the trucks.
According to the Israeli Defense Forces, "Gazan residents surrounded the trucks, and looted the supplies being delivered. During the incident, dozens of Gazans were injured as a result of pushing and trampling. The incident is under review."
The IDF’s statement suggested that fewer than 10 civilians were injured by Israeli forces opening fire during the delivery of humanitarian aid, and that most deaths and injuries came from the stampede.
Philips asked Hasan, "Do you lend any credibility to that explanation? And from the eyes of the world, does it matter what the explanation is for what we saw unfold?"
Her guest disputed these claims made by the IDF and began by comparing the Israeli military’s tactics to the police brutality that sparked the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020.
He said, "In terms of believing the Israelis, I would say that it took multiple innocent Black people to die at the hands of police in this country, whether it's Breonna Taylor, whether it's Freddie Gray, whether it's George Floyd, for people in our industry, Abby, to start saying, well, maybe we shouldn't just blindly believe police statements after shootings happen."
He continued saying, "And I feel that we still haven't quite reached that point in the Middle East with the Israeli military." He then accused Israel of telling "so many lies" throughout its war with Hamas. "So many, you can't even count," he added.
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"And now we are told today, well, actually, it was just a stampede, even though eyewitnesses, Abby, say that the Israelis opened fire, Israeli tanks opened fire, without warning, according to one eyewitness in the Washington Post," Hasan noted, continuing to trash the IDF’s statement.
"The Israelis opened fire on hungry people trying to get flour. It's being called a flour massacre for that reason."
The former MSNBC host then made the comparison to the Russian and Syrian dictators, stating, "When Putin did stuff like this in Ukraine, we condemned him. When Assad did stuff like this in Syria, we condemned him."
Hasan rebuked the U.S. government, asking where the condemnation was. He then urged President Biden to end Israel’s war against Hamas, stating, "Joe Biden has the power to pick up the phone and end this war. He can ring the Israeli prime minister and say, we're cutting you off. We're cutting off aid. We're cutting off armaments."
Hasan has been skeptical of Israel’s actions in the war since it began following Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre in the country.
Last November, the then-MNSBC host told Israeli official Mark Regev, an advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to his face that his government had killed innocent Palestinian children, and was spreading misinformation about its actions.
Inflammatory remarks he made in 2009 before becoming an MSNBC personality began circulating online in November 2023, when he compared non-Muslims to "animals" and linked homosexuals to "pedophiles" and "sexual deviants." New York Post reporter Jon Levine said it's "hard to imagine MSNBC allowing someone on television who said similar things about a different religion."
"We know that keeping the moral high ground is key. Once we lose the moral high ground, we are no different from the rest of the non-Muslims, from the rest of those human beings who live their lives as animals, bending any rule to fulfill any desire," Hasan said in one of the unearthed clips.
Fox News Digital’s Michael Dorgan and Brian Flood contributed to this report
