Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday described the situation in the Gaza Strip as a catastrophe and denied that the level of destruction is comparable to what is happening in Ukraine.
“What is going on [na Faixa de Gaza] It is a catastrophe,” the Kremlin chief said at the year-end press conference.
Putin said that “everyone” can see the difference between the “special military operation” (official Russian term for the February 24, 2022 invasion) in Ukraine and what is happening in Gaza.
“Nothing like this is happening in Ukraine,” he said of the war between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas that has been going on since October 7.
Putin even recalled that UN Secretary General António Guterres declared that the Gaza Strip was the largest children’s cemetery in the world.
“This assessment is objective. This assessment is objective, what can you say,” he added.
Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, sparking a conflict that destroyed many cities and infrastructure in Europe’s second-largest country after the Russian Federation in almost two years.
The exact number of victims in Ukraine, a country of more than 43 million people, is unknown, but the UN has confirmed the deaths of at least 10,000 civilians by November.
The war in the Gaza Strip was caused by an unprecedented attack by Hamas on Israel, which killed 1,200 people.
In retaliation, Israel vowed to destroy Hamas and launched an air and land offensive that caused a high level of infrastructure destruction in the Gaza Strip, a small area of 2.3 million people.
The Israeli offensive killed 18,600 people in the Gaza Strip, according to the latest figures from Hamas, which has controlled the Palestinian enclave since 2007 and is considered a terrorist group by Israel.
Putin also said Russia had offered to send a field hospital to the Gaza Strip, a hypothesis he said had been ruled out by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who claimed it was unsafe.
The Russian leader emphasized that Moscow maintains contacts with all countries in the region and praised the energetic attitude of his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who repeatedly described Netanyahu as a “war criminal.”
Today’s press conference is Putin’s first of its kind since the start of the war in Ukraine and, like all previous ones, was broadcast live on television.
This year the Kremlin combined the press conference with the president’s hotline, in which Putin answers questions from Russian citizens.
Source: DN
