Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro’s old, comments about civilian casualties resurfaced after tweets of his appearing to dismiss human rights concerns over the Israeli bombardment of Gaza on Monday went viral.
The posts came two days after a Hamas terror attack and offensive killed more than 900 people in Israel.
Since the attacks, Israel has killed around 700 people in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank and promised to launch a full-scale assault on the territory, with Israel’s Defense Minister ordering a complete siege of Gaza to cut off food, water, and fuel.
As the situation was unfolding, an X user posted a quote they claimed to be from the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Palestine.
“We are horrified by what is happening and we call for a truce,” the quote said.
“And they can fuck right off,” Shapiro said in a quote tweet over the post.
The exact quote Nawfal posted couldn’t be immediately confirmed—the Special Rapporteur’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Francesa Albanase, the Special Rapporteur on human rights in Palestine, wrote a thread on X on Saturday morning responding to the attacks and calling out civilian casualties in the conflict.
“I unequivocally condemn attacks on civilians,” she wrote. “Whoever launches them (Pals armed groups or Isr occupation forces) commits crimes that must be accounted for.”
Shapiro’s comment, though referring specifically to not ending the war just announced by Israel after the attack, was condemned by X users, some of whom pointed out previous writing by Shapiro cavalierly dismissing civilian deaths in the early 2000s.
“Ben shapiro turning back to his roots,” wrote one, over a screenshot of Shapiro’s Wikipedia page.
In a 2002 article from the conservative news site Townhall titled “Enemy ‘civilian casualties’ ok by me,” Shapiro wrote that he was “getting really sick of people who whine about ‘civilian casualties.’ Maybe I’m a hard-hearted guy, but when I see in the newspapers that civilians in Afghanistan or the West Bank were killed by American or Israeli troops, I don’t really care. In fact, I would rather that the good guys use the Air Force to kill the bad guys, even if that means some civilians get killed along the way. One American soldier is worth far more than an Afghan civilian.”
In a 2018 column for the Daily Wire, Shapiro accounted for the article by calling it a “bad piece, plain and simple, and something I wish I’d never written” that came when he was 18.
He also wrote that “the larger point of the piece—that we must calculate the risk to American service members when we design rules of engagement—is partially correct, [but] the piece is expressed in the worst possible way.”
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted a video of a compilation of strikes on Gaza by the Israeli army, which was called a war crime by some on X, with one saying it was “a video of his air force violating the Geneva Conventions and bombing a civilian target in Gaza.”
“Half the population of Gaza is children. Israel flattening entire city blocks right now. You are delusional if you believe these strikes are only against Hamas,” said another.
In response to some of the criticism Shapiro faced, he said that civilian deaths in Gaza were explicitly Hamas’ fault.
“Terrorists hide behind civilians. This is what Hamas does. Every ounce of blood is on their hands,” he wrote.
Shapiro also said that people calling for a ceasefire are “part of the problem.”
