The Israeli regime has sparked widespread outcry after it posted a video on X claiming that “there are no innocent civilians” in the war-torn Gaza Strip.
An official Israeli regime X account affiliated with the occupying entity’s foreign ministry posted a video with the caption “We need to talk about the elephant in the room. Many Gazan civilians participated in the horrific events of 7 October.”
“It is also reported that Gazan civilians held Israeli hostages captive in their homes. The world must condemn this in the strongest terms,” it further alleged.
Along with some images purportedly belonging to Operation Al-Aqsa Storm launched by Hamas on October 7, the 51-second video also used a portion of an interview given by released captive Mia Schem.
In her interview conducted in December shortly after she was released, the French-Israeli woman, who was speaking in Hebrew with her words translated onto the screen in English, claimed that “there are no innocent civilians” in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Many people denounced the video as an attempt by the Israeli regime to justify the killing of about 37,300 civilians in the Gaza Strip since October.
“This is disgusting. It is exactly what atrocity perpetrators say,” Mark Kersten, a war crimes researcher with the Wayamo Foundation, an international justice organization, wrote on X.
Schem’s outrageous comment in the excerpt of her interview forced either the Tel Aviv regime or the X to delete the post since it is not available on the site. However, the post can still be seen on an archive site.
Almost a week after Operation Al-Aqsa Storm, Israeli president Isaac Herzog also claimed in a press conference that there were no innocent civilians in Gaza,
“It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat,” he alleged.
The Tel Aviv regime has accused Hamas of committing crimes during it operation.
Israel unleashed its Gaza onslaught after the Hamas operation. It has killed mostly women and children in Gaza over the past more than eight months.
Tel Aviv has also imposed a “complete siege” on the territory, cutting off fuel, electricity, food, and water to the more than two million Palestinians living there.