A senior advisor to Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has defended widely-bashed footage showing scores of Palestinian civilians stripped to their underwear by the Israeli occupation forces in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Mark Regev downplayed the humiliating act in an interview with Britain’s Sky News television network on Saturday, claiming that the practice was “not the end of the world” as the weather is “warmer” in West Asia.
“Remember, it’s the Middle East and it’s warmer here, and especially during the day when it’s sunny, to be asked to take off your shirt, it might not be pleasant but it’s not the end of the world,” Regev said.
The video clip, confirmed by the Israeli military after it emerged on Thursday, shows the stripped and blindfolded Palestinian men sitting on the street somewhere in northern Gaza as they are watched over by several troops.
The Palestinian captives were reported to have been abducted by Israeli forces in Beit Lahia, in the far north of the impoverished coastal sliver, with Tel Aviv claiming that they were members of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas.
The incident, involving at least 100 Palestinian men, has been categorically condemned by Palestinian officials and rights groups as “degrading” and “inhumane.”
Regev’s claim came after an Israeli politician called for burying alive hundreds of Palestinian civilians captured by Israeli forces during the occupying entity’s war on the besieged territory.
In a post on X on Friday, Aryeh Yitzhak King, the deputy mayor of the occupied al-Quds, called on the Israeli military to “bury alive” Palestinians captured in Gaza, stressing that the occupation army was eliminating what he called “Muslim Nazis” in the Strip.
In globally-rebuked remarks last month, Israel’s so-called heritage minister Amichai Eliyahu said dropping a nuclear weapon on Gaza was “one of the possibilities” in the ongoing war on the besieged enclave.
The far-right minister also insisted that allowing any humanitarian aid into Gaza was wrong, calling the innocent civilian population in Gaza “Nazis.”
Israel waged the war on Gaza on October 7 after Hamas-led Palestinian resistance groups carried out a surprise attack against the occupying entity in response to its decades-long crimes against Palestinians.
Israeli strikes have so far killed more than 17,400 people, most of them women and children, and injured over 46,480 others in its relentless air and ground attacks on Gaza since.
According to the UN, around 80 percent of the inhabitants of Gaza are displaced and more than 1.1 million are seeking refuge in UN Palestine refugee agency (UNRWA) shelters.
