ANPI branch slammed for equating Shoah with Gaza 'genocide'

ANPI branch slammed for equating Shoah with Gaza ‘genocide’

(ANSA) – ROME, JAN 17 – A branch of Italian Partisans Association ANPI near Florence has been slammed for organising an event equating the Shoah with Israel’s alleged genocide in Gaza on Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27. The ANPI branch at Bagno a Ripoli near the Tuscan capital has announced an event titled ‘Never again: 80 years ago the extermination of the Jewish people by the Nazis, today the genocide of the Palestinian people by the State of Israel”. The head of the Florence association Friends of Israel, Kishore Bombaci, said “this is very serious because it intends to put on the same plane the Shoah with the current situation in Gaza and ends up degrading in an unacceptable way the memory of the extermination of six million Jews by the Nazi regime.” A member of Premier Giorgia Meloni’s rightwing Brothers of Italy (FdI) party, Senator Paolo Marcheschi, said “the parallelism between Israel’s war against Hamas and the Shoah is not only an outrage against the memory of the victims but also a sinister and instrumental political provocation”. He said “we trust that this meeting will not take place”. Bagno A Ripoli Mayor Francesco Casini said “we hope ANPI understands the mistake of equating the Holocaust and the Israel-Hamas war”. South Africa has brought Israel before the International Court of Justice in The Hague for its alleged genocide in Gaza, a charge Tel Aviv has dismissed as “grossly distorted”. Israel’s response to the October 7 Hamas attack that killed 1,200 in southern Israel has so far reaped over 24,000 victims including over 10,000 children, the Hamas run health ministry in the Strip says. (ANSA).