Fox News host Jesse Watters delivered an astonishingly dehumanizing segment this week on the “national security threat” of Palestinian civilians — and criticized the “explosive” birth rate of a war-torn population that has endured brutal Israeli bombardment for 15 months.
“We have a free land here,” he said on “The Five” Tuesday. “But this population in Palestine is hostile, it’s uneducated. It’s even more radicalized than they were at the beginning of this. I mean, now they have no homes at all. They’re even more hateful of the Israelis.”
“And their birth rate is explosive,” Watters continued. “The average Palestinian woman has five and a half babies. The average Israeli woman has only two and a half babies. So demographically, they’re a threat. Not to mention the national security threat.”
Those comments arrived one week after President Donald Trump held a press conference with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in which he proposed the U.S. “take over” Gaza and turn the bombed-out land into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Netanyahu gifted Trump a golden beeper that day in a likely nod to Israel’s covert attack last year against suspected terrorists in Lebanon and Syria, which wounded thousands and killed at least two children, and called him “the greatest friend Israel has ever had.”
The Gaza Health Ministry estimates more than 46,000 Palestinians have been killed since the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023. Watters was thus shredded on social media for lauding Trump’s plan, which would be tantamount to the international war crime of ethnic cleansing.
“There is no one, no one, on American television who speaks in a more racist and genocidal way about Palestinians than Jesse Watters,” wrote former MSNBC anchor Mehdi Hasan on X, formerly Twitter, who reposted the segment. “This is Nazi-level shit right here.”
Watters was not just callous in his apparent disregard for human life in Palestine, but also inaccurate: the fertility rate in Gaza and the West Bank was 3.44 children in 2022, compared to Israel’s rate of 2.89 in the same year, according to Statista.
The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu in November and accused his government of purposefully using food as a weapon by preventing it from entering Gaza — thus spurring widespread famine for the besieged population.
Watters was previously condemned in the weeks after Oct. 7, when he claimed Americans have “had it” with the “Muslim world” and pro-Palestinian protesters, which prompted former President Joe Biden’s administration to demand an apology from Fox News.
His latest remarks are similarly being denounced by outrage pundits on social media.
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