A senior Israeli cabinet minister on Monday rejected international criticism of Israel’s open-fire policies in the besieged Gaza, saying the disproportionate number of Palestinian casualties does not reflect the true story, using Second World War tactics as a justification for Israel’s brutality.
Speaking to foreign reporters, Yoav Gallant accused Gaza’s Hamas rulers of cynically exploiting their own repressed population to score points against Israel and urged the world not to “calculate who is right and who is wrong by the numbers of the casualties”.
Israel has come under heavy international criticism for shooting unarmed protesters, with rights groups accusing the military of acting illegally by using deadly force from a long distance when soldiers’ lives are not immediately threatened, creating a massacre in the besieged enclave.
“In the Second World War, 7.5 million Germans were killed and only 500,000 British. So who was the aggressor, the Germans or the British?” he asked. “The issue is not the numbers. The issue is who is doing what.”