In a letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yaël Braun-Pivet, the leader of the LFI MPs, Mathilde Panot, recalled that on February 26, the columns of the Assembly were lit in orange to remember the Israelis children Kfir and Ariel, who died with their mother Shiri in captivity, after their kidnapping by Hamas on October 7, 2023.

The MP described the action taken that day by the Palestinian Hamas movement as terrible and a war crime, but recalled that following that attack, Israel devastated Gaza without a respite for months, bombings that she also considered war crimes, which motivated the arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Today, the Gaza Strip is now in ruins, the result of Israel’s offensive that killed 48,348 Palestinians, including 14,770 children, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), she said.

Panot recalled statements made at the United Nations that cited more dead Palestinian children, the disappearance of some 11,000, probably trapped under the rubble, and the injuries caused to another 24,000.

UNICEF Global Spokesman James Elder warned in October last year that an average of 40 children were dying in Gaza every day, calling the conflict a war against children, Panot denounced in her letter.

After stating that the mass deaths of Palestinian minors cannot be forgotten or assumed as normal, she asked her colleague Braun-Pivet to illuminate the columns of the French National Assembly to pay tribute to these children, whom she considered victims of genocide.

Our institution would thus be honored to remember all the civilian victims of the conflict, particularly the children, the LFI MP said.

In the case of the Bibas family, Israel claims that its members were killed by their captors a month after the attack on 7 October, but Hamas attributes their death to an Israeli air strike. jg/oda/wmr