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matthew miller
'We Took the Gloves Off': Former Israeli Military Chief Admits 220,000 Gaza Casualties
"Looking forward to the contortions of people whose paychecks are dependent on denying that any of this is the case," said one observer.
Sep 12, 2025
Belying persistent efforts by Israel and its defenders to deny the staggering number of Palestinians killed during the 23-month Gaza genocide, the general who led the Israel Defense Forces during most of the war acknowledged this week that around 220,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded.
Former Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi—who stepped down in March after leading the IDF since January 2023—told residents of Ein Habor in southern Israel earlier this week that "over 10%" of Gaza's population of approximately 2.2 million "were killed or injured" since October 2023.
"This is not a gentle war, we took the gloves off from the first minute" Halevi said, adding that "not once" has any legal authority "limited" his wartime conduct.
Following the October 7 attack, the IDF dramatically loosened its rules of engagement, effectively allowing an unlimited number of civilians to be killed when targeting a single Hamas member, no matter how low-ranking.
The IDF’s use of massive ordnance, including US-supplied 1,000- and 2,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs capable of leveling entire city blocks, and utilization of artificial intelligence to select targets has resulted in staggering numbers of civilian deaths, including numerous instances of dozens or more people being massacred in single strikes.
Halevi insisted that "we are doing everything in accordance with international law."
The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague disagrees, having issued warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes including forced starvation and murder. Israel's conduct in the war is also the subject of an International Court of Justice (ICJ) genocide case filed by South Africa and supported by around two dozen nations.
Halevi's admission tracks with official Gaza Health Ministry figures showing at least 228,815 people killed or wounded by Israeli forces in Gaza. GHM also says that around 9,000 people are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Experts—including the authors of multiple peer-reviewed studies in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet—assert that the actual death toll in Gaza is much higher than reported.
The remarks by Halevi come less than a month after a joint investigation by Israeli journalist and filmmaker Yuval Abraham of +972 Magazine and Local Call and Guardian senior international affairs correspondent Emma Graham-Harrison revealed that, as of May, 5 in 6 Palestinians—or 83%—killed by the IDF through the first 19 months of the war were civilians. The report, which drew from classified IDF intelligence data, blew the lid off of Israeli government claims of a historically low civilian-to-combatant kill ratio.
Responding to Halevi's admission, Drop Site News national security and foreign affairs reporter Murtaza Hussain said on social media that he is "looking forward to the contortions of people whose paychecks are dependent on denying that any of this is the case."
Israeli officials and media, along with their supportive US counterparts during both the Biden and Trump administrations, have generally cast doubt or outright denied GHM figures—which have been found to be reliable by the IDF, US officials, and researchers—by linking them to Hamas. This comes in addition to widespread Israeli and US denials of Israel's forced famine and starvation deaths and IDF war crimes in Gaza.
However, there have been rare instances of frankness, including when Barbara Leaf, a senior State Department official during the Biden administration, said that Gaza casualties could be "even higher than are being cited." Biden-era State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller also admitted that the Gaza death toll "could very well be more" than GHM reported, even as he lied to the public about who was thwarting ceasefire efforts.
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US 'Denying and Revoking' Visas of Palestinian Officials Ahead of UN General Assembly
The Palestinian presidency said the decision—which comes as more and more nations formally recognize Palestine's statehood—"stands in clear contradiction to international law and the UN Headquarters Agreement."
Aug 29, 2025
The Trump administration said Friday that Secretary of State Marco Rubio "is denying and revoking visas from members of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority" ahead of next month's United Nations General Assembly in New York.
The US State Department said Friday that "the Trump administration has been clear: It is in our national security interests to hold the PLO and PA accountable for not complying with their commitments, and for undermining the prospects for peace."
"Before the PLO and PA can be considered partners for peace, they must consistently repudiate terrorism—including the October 7 massacre—and end incitement to terrorism in education, as required by US law and as promised by the PLO," the statement continues.
No US administration in modern times has ever demanded that Israel repudiate its generations-long illegal occupation and settler colonization of Palestine, its ongoing genocide in Gaza, or any other violation of international law or human rights.
"The PA must also end its attempts to bypass negotiations through international lawfare campaigns, including appeals to the [International Criminal Court] and [International Court of Justice], and efforts to secure the unilateral recognition of a conjectural Palestinian state," the State Department added. "Both steps materially contributed to Hamas' refusal to release its hostages, and to the breakdown of the Gaza ceasefire talks."
The ICC last year issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including murder and the forced starvation of Palestinians that is driving a famine that has killed at least hundreds of Palestinians and is starving hundreds of thousands more. The ICJ is currently weighing a genocide case against Israel filed by South Africa—not the PA.
As for ceasefire talks, Matthew Miller, who served as a State Department spokesperson during the Biden administration, recently admitted that Israel habitually torpedoed ceasefire agreements each time they were nearing a conclusion in what he called a sustained effort to "try and sabotage" a deal. Miller repeatedly stood at his podium and told reporters that Hamas was to blame for thwarting a truce.
Miller added that Netanyahu openly admitted to US officials that he wanted to continue the Gaza war for "decades."
It is not clear which Palestinian officials will have their visas denied or revoked. The office of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said in a statement responding to the US announcement that "this decision stands in clear contradiction to international law and the UN Headquarters Agreement—which effectively shields UN member-state officials from US immigration policies—particularly since the state of Palestine is an observer member of the United Nations."
This isn't the first time the US has blocked Palestinian officials from attending a General Assembly. In 1998, the Regan administration denied then-PLO Chair Yasser Arafat a visa and the General Assembly was convened in Geneva instead of New York. There have already been numerous calls to relocate this year's General Assembly to the Swiss city following the US move.
The US announcement comes as more and more countries formally recognize Palestinian statehood or move to do so amid Israel's genocidal assault, siege, and famine in Gaza, which, combined, have left more than 230,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing and the strip in ruins.
Approximately 150 of the UN's 193 member states have officially recognized Palestine. Since October 2023, countries including Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Malta, Portugal, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway, and Spain have either recognized Palestine or announced their intent to do so.
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'Hope He Smirks in Hell': Biden Spox Matt Miller Panned for Finally Acknowledging Israeli War Crimes
"The most cynical aspect of it all is that he is deluded enough to believe that now admitting what he knew all along makes him look principled," said one critic.
Jun 03, 2025
Matthew Miller—the former U.S. State Department spokesperson who smirked and lied his way through the Biden administration's support for Israel's annihilation of Gaza—now acknowledges that Israel has committed war crimes, but for many critics his admission is "too little, too late," as one critic said Tuesday.
Asked Monday by Sky News "Trump 100" podcast host Mark Stone whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza—as alleged by a growing number of experts and in an ongoing International Court of Justice case—Miller said: "I don't think it's a genocide, but I think it is without a doubt true that Israel has committed war crimes."
"'Just following orders' alibi lost its efficacy after 1945."
When Stone said that "you wouldn't have said that at the podium" during his Biden administration tenure, Miller replied: "When you're at the podium, you're not expressing your personal opinion. You're expressing the conclusions of the United States government."
Numerous online critics blasted Miller's " just following orders" reply, with some noting that a number of State Department officials resigned in opposition to the Biden administration's support for Israel.
"Miller is a war criminal," Indian author and scholar Sunny Singh said, pointing to the legal principle established during the post-World War II Nuremberg Trials of Nazi officials stating that "the fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."
Another academic, Oxford University professor and lawyer Alonso Gurmendi Dunkelberg, said that "Miller is a despicable person who willingly accepted to be the face of a genocide to provide cover for one of the most horrific mass atrocities of this century and is now trying to escape a sinking ship. He is irredeemable."
The Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project said on social media: "For months on end, in his position as State Department spokesperson, Matthew Miller lied through his teeth by denying Israel's war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza. Too little, too late, Matt, to finally admit it."
Entrepreneur-turned-commentator Arnaud Bertrand called Miller the "lowest of the low" in a lengthy social media post.
"Miller was quite literally the face of the U.S. covering for Israel, denying their war crimes on the podium day in and day out, all with his characteristic smirk," Bertrand said. "And NOW, after tens of thousands of women and children were massacred, he says he actually knew full well he was lying to the public, but that he was just doing his job and following orders."
"And the most cynical aspect of it all is that he is deluded enough to believe that now admitting what he knew all along makes him look principled," Bertrand added. "We're seeing more and more cases like his as the scale of the horrors that happened—and are still happening—in Gaza is becoming more and more impossible to deny. They're nothing more than opportunists trying to salvage their reputations on the graves of those they helped kill."
Miller's acknowledgment of Israeli war crimes marks a stark departure from what he typically said during many of his press briefings, when he repeatedly said that the Biden administration determined Israel was not breaking international law. Israel's conduct in the war prompted the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged extermination and weaponized starvation—
Even as the Biden administration received hundreds of reports that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were using U.S.-supplied weapons to kill and maim thousands of Palestinian civilians, Miller kept pushing the false narrative that Israel was not committing war crimes, despite internal department findings and outside expert assessments.
Miller went even further, accusing United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese of antisemitism in a bid to discredit her criticism of Israel and its U.S. and Western enablers, whom she called the "axis of genocide."
During one contentious exchange with journalist Sam Husseini, Miller acknowledged what many experts including in the Biden administration had warned: that the actual death toll in Gaza "could very well be more" than the roughly 38,000 Palestinians that the Gaza Health Ministry reported at the time. Asked by Husseini about a peer-reviewed study in the prestigious U.K. medical journal The Lancet estimating up to 186,000 indirect deaths in Gaza, Miller stumbled through his attempt at a response.
"You're smirking as you say that," Husseini said, giving birth to the "Count Smirkula" meme that dogged Miller for the rest of his tenure.
"Count Smirkula, Ma[t]thew Miller, stood on the podium day in and day out, denying Israel's war crimes," Palestinian engineer and researcher Bashar Zapen noted on social media. "The U.S. knew. Biden knew. Miller knew. He smirked every time he lied. Hope he smirks in hell."
During a press meeting on Tuesday, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said that the US is aware that the death toll in Gaza “could very well be more” than what has been reported. pic.twitter.com/Gqs4Mim9it
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) July 10, 2024
Miller also said during the Sky News interview that there were "debates" about whether to suspend arms transfers to Israel, "and you saw at times us hold back certain arms while we negotiated the use of those arms."
However, at the time Miller denied that the Biden administration was considering any suspension of the billions of dollars in U.S. armed aid to Israel, which included bombs used in some of the deadliest IDF massacres in Gaza, such as the October 31, 2023 bombing of the Jabalia refugee camp with 2,000-pound bombs in which at least 126 civilians were killed in a bid to assassinate a single Hamas commander.
The Biden administration knew that the IDF had lifted all curbs on civilian harm following the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack, explicitly allowing the killing of an unlimited number of civilians in order to eliminate any Hamas member, no matter how low-ranking. Faced with growing congressional opposition to sending arms to Israel, the Biden administration repeatedly bypassed Congress to keep the armaments flowing.
The staggering Gaza death toll eventually prompted the Biden administration to temporarily suspend shipment of some arms including 2,000-pound bombs. But the shipments soon resumed and the death toll in Gaza—which now reportedly stands at more than 54,500 after nearly 20 months of Israel's onslaught and starvation-inducing siege—continued to rise.
Journalists—hundreds of whom have been killed or maimed by Israeli attacks in Gaza since October 2023—were particularly dismissive of Miller's acknowledgment.
"Zero respect for Matthew Miller,"
Washington Post opinion columnist Rana Ayyub wrote on the social media site X. "Day after day, he defended war crimes, gaslit the suffering of Gazans, and helped shape public opinion to justify atrocities—including the killing of journalists."
Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed
said on the same site that "we will also never forgive and forget you, and you will always be remembered as the smirker of the Gaza Genocide."
"You also must be held accountable," he added.
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