The Vermont senator finished second in the 2016 and 2020 primaries and has not ruled out the question of running for the top office again in 2024.

Candor has a habit of attracting critics, however, as Sanders discovered following an interview about peace in the Middle East a number of years ago.

The Claim

A tweet, posted on October 10, 2022, with the message “Still can’t believe that this wasn’t a headline from The Onion” included next to a screen grabbed headline “Israel demands correction from Sanders: it killed only 531 Palestinian children in summer 2014.”

The tweet’s phrasing makes Israel, rather than Sanders, the implicit target of the criticism.

The Facts

Sanders, who is Jewish, has been criticized before for comments he made about Israel.

In 2021, the controversial lawyer Alan Dershowitz called the Vermont Senator an “anti-Semite” and a “self-hating Jew,” seemingly in response to a New York Times piece criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

However, the tweet about Palestinian child deaths misrepresents both what Sanders has said and the article from which the headline originates.

In a 2016 interview with New York Daily News’ editorial board, Sanders said he recollected that “10,000 innocent people were killed in Gaza” in 2014 although admitting “I don’t remember the figures.”

" I don’t have it in my number…but I think it’s over 10,000," he added.

“My understanding is that a whole lot of apartment houses were leveled. Hospitals, I think, were bombed.

“So yeah, I do believe and I don’t think I’m alone in believing that Israel’s force was more indiscriminate than it should have been.”

Later in the interview, he was corrected by a New York Daily News editorial board member who said: “It was about 2,300, I believe, killed, and 10,000 wounded.”

A United Nations report on the 2014 conflict in Gaza found that “2,251 Palestinians were killed, including 1,462 Palestinian civilians, of whom 299 women and 551 children; and 11,231 Palestinians, including 3,540 women and 3,436 children, were injured.”

A literature review from 2017, published in The Lancet, arrived at a figure close to that quoted in the UN report.

While Sanders has later admitted his “10,000 innocent deaths” misquote, he then went on to incorrectly claim during a CNN roundtable that the UN report said that “over 2,000 civilians were killed,” an error noticed by Israeli media.

Despite criticism, Sanders’ interview with the New York Daily News was also far more even-handed than some of the reporting surrounding it appeared to suggest.

At one point, during a conversation about reaching a successful peace deal, Sanders said “demands” would be made of Palestinians, too, including “the absolute condemnation of all terrorist attacks.”

“The idea that in Gaza there were buildings being used to construct missiles and bombs and tunnels, that is not where foreign aid should go,” he added.

“Foreign aid should go to housing and schools, not the development of bombs and missiles.”

Furthermore, while a number of Israeli politicians called for Sanders to make amends, there appears to have been no formal demands made by the Israeli government.

Although figures differ slightly on the totals, Sanders never made specific claims about the number of Palestinian children who died, nor were they mentioned during the interview with the New York Daily News.

The story which the tweet screen-grabbed is from a 2016 article by Mondoweiss, a progressive media outlet that describes itself as “an independent website devoted to informing readers about developments in Israel/Palestine and related US foreign policy.”

The headline is an editorialized response to the outrage Sanders faced for his incorrect claim, highlighting how arguing about Sanders’ comments would not alter the fact that “532 Palestinian children” were killed in 2014 (though, as mentioned above, the UN believes this estimate to be higher).

The article does not actually provide any evidence that the Israeli government demanded a correction from Sanders or mentioned the child victims.

It does cite a call for a correction by the Anti-Defamation League—a U.S.-based NGO that campaigns against anti-Semitism—and criticism voiced against Sanders by former and current Israeli officials.

Taken out of context, however, the headline suggests that Sanders had made specific claims about the number of Palestinian children killed, and that Israel has proposed a “corrected” figure for him to quote in response.

Newsweek contacted Bernie Sanders for comment and The Embassy of Israel to the United States comment.

The Ruling

Needs Context.

Sanders did not make the claim in the form that the tweet suggests.

In 2016, he claimed during an interview that 10,000 innocents were killed during conflict in Gaza in 2014. He was corrected during the interview, but his mistake led to calls among some Israeli politicians and media for him to amend his misquote.

The headline, which was included in the tweet, was from an article that appeared to conflate the two strands.

FACT CHECK BY Newsweek’s Fact Check team