The Palestinian foreign ministry has denounced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's remarks as saying that the origins of the ancient Palestinians date back to southern Europe, describing it as racist and an extension of its deceptive campaigns.
"The national and humanitarian presence of our people in the land of Palestine is deeply rooted in history and does not await false evidence and evidence from the colonizer," the foreign ministry said in a statement.
She also condemned "Netanyahu's attempts to transform the reality of the conflict from political to religious conflicts at times, and other ethnic ones."
The statement said that Netanyahu's "scorns smelled of abhorrent racism towards the Palestinian people, which epitomizes racist anti-Semitism, with all the meaning of the word."
Netanyahu wrote on Twitter on Monday that a new study of a nuclear weapon recovered from an ancient Palestinian site in the city of Ashkelon confirms "what we know from the Bible that the origin of the (ancient) Palestinians in southern Europe."
"There is no connection between the old Palestinians and the present Palestinians whose ancestors came from the Arabian Peninsula to the land of Israel thousands of years ago," he said.
Netanyahu was referring to a study published in the journal Science Advances claiming that a recent analysis of DNA showed that the ancient Palestinians came from southern Europe more than 3,000 years ago.