BEIJING, Dec. 20 (Xinhua) -- An Israeli mayor has condemned the Auschwitz-Birkenau National Museum in Poland for claiming that the Palestinian Gaza Strip should be razed to the ground and turned into an "open-air museum" like the Auschwitz concentration camp.
On December 14, in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah, people rescue people on the rubble of buildings following Israeli air strikes. Xinhua News Agency (photo by Yasser Cudi).
According to the Times of Israel and other **18**, David Azoulay, the mayor of Methura, Israel, said in an interview with a radio station on the 17th: "The entire Gaza Strip needs to be emptied and razed to the ground." Turn the Gaza Strip into a museum, as Auschwitz did, and let the world see what Israel can do. ”
Azoulay called the attack on Israel by the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) on October 7 as the "second Jewish Congress" and therefore wanted the world to see that "no one should be inhabited in the Gaza Strip". He also said that Israel could use the navy to send people fleeing Gaza to refugee camps in Lebanon.
This is a sign in German and Polish written "Stop" in Auschwitz (photo taken on November 8, 2014). Xinhua News Agency reporter Jin Liang quick photo.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau National Museum issued a statement on the social ** platform X (formerly Twitter) on the 17th, saying: "The memory of the victims of Auschwitz is sometimes desecrated by various extreme remarks and used as a tool to achieve a certain goal", and Azoulay seems to want to use the symbol of Auschwitz to "act as a kind of pathological, hateful, pseudo-literary and symbolic expression".
Azoulay's remarks sounded "like a call for a mass like Auschwitz" that "must confront and resolutely reject this madness," the statement said.
The National Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau wants Israel** to "respond to this shameful abuse, because terrorism must not be responded to with terrorism".
Azoulay later said in an interview with The Times of Israel that he had never appealed to anyone but simply "wanted to see the Gaza population relocate" elsewhere. He was dismissive of the criticism of the Auschwitz-Birkenau National Museum, which in turn accused the museum's statement of being a "disgrace" and a defense of a "despicable murderer."
It is worth mentioning that the Auschwitz-Birkenau National Museum** published a statement by the International Auschwitz Commission last month in support of Israel's fight against Hamas. The director of the museum, Peter Ziwinsky, was a member of this representative group of victims of the Nazi concentration camps.
Since the outbreak of the new round of Palestinian-Israeli conflict, some Israeli politicians have made extreme statements, claiming to wipe the Gaza Strip off the map, and even claiming to use nuclear weapons.
Auschwitz was the largest concentration camp established by Nazi Germany during World War II, and is the general name of more than 40 concentration camps near the city of Auschwitz in southern Poland, established in 1940, known as the "Death Factory". Some 1.1 million people, including a large number of Jews, were killed here. (Hu Ruoyu).