Israeli watchdog group NGO Monitor has noted that one of the foreign media’s favorite Gaza-based interviewees, Norwegian physician Mads Gilbert, is a man with an extremist political past.

Gilbert has been quoted widely, including in a Times of London article where he told friends by SMS, “We are wading in death, blood and amputees. Many children. A pregnant woman. I have never experienced anything so terrible.”

Gilbert also used a BBC interview from Gaza’s Shifa Hospital to cite casualty statistics that he said proved the IDF was deliberately targeting civilians.

According to NGO Monitor, however, Gilbert’s past is indicative of “ideological extremism,” such as when he expressed support for the September 11 attacks on the United States in a 2001 interview in Norway’s Dagbladet newspaper.

In the interview, he argued that “the oppressed also have a moral right to attack the USA with any weapon they can come up with,” adding specifically that he supported the terror attack “within the context which I have mentioned.”

Gilbert was also a candidate for local government in 2007 for the Norwegian Red Party, an outgrowth of the radical Norwegian Workers’ Communist Party.

An Israeli government official also told the Post that “there is no way [Gilbert] could have personal access to the kind of statistics he cited. He got them from the Gaza Health Ministry, which is controlled by Hamas. That raises the question: To what extent is he a willing or unwilling mouthpiece for Hamas?”