By IINA,
Cairo : The Arab League condemned yesterday Israel’s “holocaust” in the Gaza Strip the day after violence in the isolated territory killed over 20 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and three Israeli soldiers. A statement from the General Secretariat of the 22-member pan-Arab body “denounced Israel’s collective punishment policy as a ‘holocaust’,” the official MENA news agency reported.
The deliberate use of the word ‘holocaust’ referred to a warning by Israel’s Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai in April that rocket fire from Gaza would bring Palestinians “a worse catastrophe as we will use all means to defend ourselves.” The Hebrew word for catastrophe is the same as the word for holocaust, which is usually used to refer to the mass murder of millions of Jews, Romas, homosexuals and others by the Nazis.