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France 24
France 24
Marc PERELMAN

'Netanyahu wants a perpetual war,' says Palestinian ambassador to UK

TÊTE À TÊTE © FRANCE 24

As the war in Gaza enters its six month – and more than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed – FRANCE 24 spoke to the Palestinian ambassador to the UK, Husam Zomlot. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu "wants to have a perpetual war", Zomlot told FRANCE 24. The ambassador cited Netanyahu's "personal reasons" and also "strategic interests of his government and the Israeli establishment to finish off a job that started 76 years ago, which is the ethnic cleansing of Palestine". 

"That's why Israel [is] doing what it did in the last six months [in Gaza]", the Palestinian ambassador to the UK said, while denouncing "Western complicity and [the] greenlighting" of Israel's deadly offensive.

Earlier this week, seven aid workers from the food aid NGO World Central Kitchen (WCK) were killed in an Israeli strike on Gaza.

Watch moreHow World Central Kitchen has been helping Gazans as famine looms

Agreeing with WCK chief Jose Andres, who accused Israel of targeting his aid workers "systematically, car by car", Zomlot said "the way Israel murdered these aid workers is very deliberate".

The Israeli forces "didn't strike all of them at the beginning. And they went after them, three strikes, until they murdered all of them," he explained. "So this could not be – in any way or shape – unintended, as Israel claims," he added. 

The purpose is "very clear", said the ambassador: "Implementing a famine" by targeting local NGOs, then hungry Gazans, and now international aid workers. This is a "tool of the genocide", he added.

A UN-backed report warned back on March 19 that half of Gazans were experiencing "catastrophic" hunger and projected imminent famine in the territory's north.

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