Speaking at the Doha Forum, the Russian Foreign Minister calls for international monitoring of the situation in Gaza.
The Russian foreign minister said it was unacceptable for Israel to use the October 7 Hamas offensive to justify collective punishment against Palestinians in Gaza and called for international monitoring of the situation on the ground in the besieged enclave.
Speaking virtually at the Doha Forum on Sunday, Sergei Lavrov told Tel Aviv Tribune diplomatic editor James Bays that the unprecedented Hamas attack inside Israeli territory did not happen in isolation .
This is due to “decades and decades of blockade (on Gaza) and decades and decades of broken promises to the Palestinians that they would have a state, living side by side with Israel in security and good neighborliness.” , did he declare.
At least 17,700 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 7 – 70 percent of them women and children, prompting rights groups and experts to call it a “genocide.”
In Israel, the revised official death toll from the Hamas attack stands at approximately 1,147.
Addressing the Doha Forum, a two-day global meeting being held in the Qatari capital, Lavrov said the ongoing war in Gaza aims to “cancel culture” – a recent phenomenon that refers to the mass withdrawal of support for public figures or celebrities who have done so. things from the past that are no longer acceptable today.
“Whatever you don’t like about the events leading up to a situation, you undo it,” he said.
Netanyahu speaks to Putin
Russian President Vladimir Putin called the Israeli offensive in Gaza a failure of American diplomacy and suggested that Moscow could play a mediating role in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Moscow also condemned the US veto this week of a UN Security Council resolution calling for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. Dmitri Polyanskiy, Russia’s representative to the UN, said US diplomacy “leaves scorched earth in its wake.”
Shortly after Lavrov’s speech at the Doha Forum, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had a telephone conversation with Putin, expressing his “dissatisfaction” with Moscow’s positions against Israel at the UN and other global forums.
“The prime minister stressed that any country that experiences a criminal terrorist attack like the one Israel experienced would not act with less force than that used by Israel,” read a statement from Netanyahu’s office.
Lavrov’s comments on Tel Aviv Tribune come as Russia’s war in Ukraine continues to rage. Since February 2022, Ukraine has been facing a large-scale Russian invasion that resulted in the occupation of its eastern territories.
Lavrov, however, called it a “hybrid war against Russia launched by the United States and NATO,” adding that the Ukrainian conflict is also based on a cancel culture.
“This is not a war of choice (for Russia). This is an operation that we could not avoid, given the years and years during which the United States and NATO prepared Ukraine to become an instrument aimed at undermining Russia’s security,” he said. he declared.
Lavrov said the Ukrainian government had passed a law aimed at suppressing “everything Russian,” including language, media, culture and education.
“This (law) is against people who have lived for generations in eastern and southern Ukraine… The only thing Western media are encouraged to say is that Russia invaded Ukraine” , he told Bays.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, however, insists that it was Moscow that spurred the current phase of “de-Russification efforts” in the country.
“You do it – over the lifetime of a generation and forever,” he said in a televised speech in March last year.
“You are doing your best to make our people abandon the Russian language, because Russian will be associated with you, only you, with these explosions and murders, with your crimes.”