Netanyahu hits back at Macron for criticizing starvation policy in Gaza
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused Emmanuel Macron of supporting Hamas, after the French president criticized as “unacceptable” and “shameful ”the Tel Aviv regime’s blocking of humanitarian supplies to the Gaza Strip.
A statement from Netanyahu’s office said on Wednesday that Macron has once again chosen to stand with the Gaza-based group and echo its narratives, accusing Israel of blood libels.
Instead of supporting the Western camp and calling for the release of the captives, Macron is once again demanding that Israel surrender, it said, but reiterated, “Israel will not stop and will not surrender.”
The statement came after Macron took a swipe at the Israeli prime minister during an interview with TF1 television network on Tuesday night, saying, “What he’s doing is shameful.”
The French president noted that Europe should consider sanctioning Israel over the humanitarian situation in Gaza, where hundreds of thousands are facing starvation.
“My job is to do everything I can to make it stop,” Macron said, adding that the possibility of revisiting the EU trade cooperation agreements with Israel is on the table.
The agreements include terms that waive customs duties on certain Israeli products.
This is not the first time the two have publicly sparred over the same subject in recent times.
Last month, the French president infuriated Israeli authorities by saying in another televised interview that Paris could recognize a Palestinian state “in the coming months.”
“I’m not doing it to please anyone. I’ll do it because at some point it will be right,” he said.
At the time, Netanyahu called Macron to express “fierce opposition to the establishment of a Palestinian state,” his office said in a statement on April 15.
Macron’s criticism of Netanyahu came despite the fact that investigative websites Disclose and Marsactu wrote earlier this year that Marseille-based firm Eurolinks had sold Israel M27 links, metal pieces used to join rifle cartridges into ammunition belts for machine guns.
Such ammunition “could have been used against civilians in the Gaza Strip,” the investigative outlets’ reporting said.
Since early March, Israel has imposed a blockade on Gaza, having unilaterally terminated the ceasefire established in January and resumed its genocidal military campaign against the Palestinian population in the region.
The New York Times (NYT) reported Tuesday that some Israeli military officials have “privately concluded that Palestinians in Gaza face widespread starvation unless aid deliveries are restored within weeks.”
Citing information from three Israeli officials familiar with the matter, the NYT wrote, “For months, Israel has maintained that its blockade on food and fuel to Gaza did not pose a major threat to civilian life in the territory, even as the United Nations and other aid agencies have said a famine was looming.”
Because time is needed to restart aid deliveries, the officers said that “immediate steps were needed to ensure that the system to supply aid could be reinstated fast enough to prevent starvation,” the NYT pointed out.
