WASHINGTON—Saying civilian casualties were the “price of waging a war” and that so far the price had not been high enough, President Biden spoke to reporters Thursday about the conflict in Gaza and expressed doubts that enough Palestinians had died. “I have no confidence that the death toll provided by the Hamas-run Ministry of Health is as high as it should be,” the president told a PBS correspondent who asked about reports that Israeli airstrikes had now killed more than 7,000 Gazans, with Biden then stating that conditions on the ground were too chaotic to say with any certainty whether enough of the 2 million people living on a small strip of land they are not allowed to leave had been slaughtered. “Obviously, statistics from Gaza are subject to bias, so we can’t use them to determine when the number of dead Palestinians has reached a sufficient level. Perhaps when the fog of war has cleared, we’ll realize Israel has killed more Gazans than was necessary, but now is not the time to ease up.” Biden went on to reiterate his position that Israel had a right to defend itself against the 1 million children in Gaza who have spent their entire lives in captivity with no access to clean drinking water.
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