'Real scandal': Ex-French PM decries West's media bias, silence on Gaza carnage

Former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has decried France and the West over their inaction on the Israeli genocidal war on the Gaza Strip.

In rare remarks by a former French premier, Dominique de Villepin referred to the French silence on the war on Gaza and the biased French media coverage of death toll, saying it’s "a real scandal in terms of democracy."

France "no longer has a voice on the international scene,” he added in an interview with broadcaster France Inter on Thursday.

Dominique de Villepin noted that the war on Gaza is not like the other wars as the most casualties are women and children.

He stressed that France and other Western countries have tools to stop the war, including the suspension of arms sales to the occupying regime, and economic sanctions.

“But we refuse to use these levers with arguments which are absolutely unreal culturally or intellectually speaking. Saying 'we need to let Israel fight its war to the end', but what end? …What is the end?"

France lives in "absurdity" resulting in it "fading away", he reiterated.

The former official warned that France and the West will "foot the bill" for what he described as “the biggest historical scandal”, in terms of the loss of credibility and legitimacy.

Elsewhere in his remarks, the former prime minister rebuked the interviewer for referring to the death toll in Gaza as data provided by "the Hamas-run Ministry of Health," saying such a narrative adopted by most Western media outlets is aimed to show the figures as “unreliable.”

"There's not only the Ministry of Health from Hamas which says that there are 40,000 dead. And there are probably many more, MANY more! So from this basis let's not give the feeling that it would be a number like that, unreliable. No!"

“It’s an unfortunate everyday reality. In Gaza, bodies are torn into pieces, Hearts are in pieces! Souls are in pieces! Heads are in pieces!"

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Dominique de Villepin noted that “Israel has no political objective and when you have no political objective the only thing you can do is war... There is a security objective, there is an identity objective, there is a messianic madness and that explains the catastrophe that we're witnessing."

Israel unleashed its genocidal war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian Hamas resistance group carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the usurping entity in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.

Since the start of the war, the Tel Aviv regime has killed 41,118 Palestinians and injured nearly 95,125 others, with most of the population being forcefully displaced. 

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