Thursday November 21, Dominique de Villepin published an article in Libération in which he asked the Israeli government to “open the doors of Gaza to prove that it lives up to the principles it claims.”
“400,000 people are today locked up in the north of Gaza and subjected to this terrible ordeal of hunger,” denounced the former French Prime Minister on Saturday in the program What an era! on France 2.
According to him, the international community must “know what is happening. We cannot leave a territory of 365 km2 in the dark, from which we cannot escape.” Recalling that civilians “are under siege. They do not have enough to feed themselves”. And where “tens of thousands of women and children have been killed in recent months. At some point, a democracy must be accountable to international society“.
“We do not have the right to indifference”
After more than a year of conflict in Gaza, the International Criminal Court (ICC) provoked Israel’s fury by issuing unprecedented arrest warrants on Thursday against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity (another ICC warrant for the same reasons targeted Mohammed Deif, head of the armed wing of Hamas).
ICC says it found ‘reasonable grounds’ to believe Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant were ‘criminally responsible’ war crime of starvation as a method of warfare, as well as crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhumane acts. The two men, again according to the ICC, “intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population of Gaza of things essential to their survival”, including food, water, medicine, fuel and electricity.
“We do not have the right to indifference despite the deafening silence, the invisibility of what is happening“, said the former French Prime Minister. Underlining the “absence of image”. “Journalists are targeted and murdered. Those who send images from Gaza are often children aged 13-14.”
This is, according to him, an “unheard of” situation. “We must open the doors, it is an absolute duty.”
Today we cannot shirk our responsibility when we are Prime Minister of a democracy like Israel.”
Dominique de Villepin
Benjamin Netanyahu denounced an “anti-Semitic” decision, considering himself the victim of a new “Dreyfus trial” named after the Jewish French captain convicted of espionage at the end of the 19th century before being exonerated and rehabilitated.
“We cannot today shirk our responsibility when we are Prime Minister of a democracy like Israel,” explained Dominique de Villepin. Adding that “the responsibility, at a given moment, is to look at what is happening next to you, to see the consequences.” “We are no longer in the period of the Second World War. Today, it is unbearable,” he concluded.
As a reminder, the Israeli military offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip has at least 44,056 Palestinian deathsaccording to figures from the Hamas government’s Ministry of Health (without distinction between civilians and combatants). It followed the unprecedented attack by Hamas commandos on Israeli territory on October 7, 2023, which resulted in the death of 1,205 people – mostly civilians – according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures.
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