Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said he did not mean to deny the privacy of the Holocaust during his press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Schulz, while the Israeli government attacked Abbas, and Schulz expressed his disgust.
Abbas issued a clarification in which he said that the Holocaust is the most heinous crime in modern human history.
He added, "It was not intended to deny the specificity of the Holocaust that was committed in the last century, as it is condemned in the strongest terms. Rather, what was meant was the massacres committed against the Palestinian people since the Nakba at the hands of the Israeli forces, crimes that have not stopped to this day."
In a press conference with Schulz in Berlin on Tuesday, Abbas said, "Since 1947 until today, Israel has committed 50 massacres in 50 Palestinian sites," adding, "50 massacres, 50 Holocausts."
This came in response to a journalist who asked Abbas whether he would apologize to Israel on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the attack on the Israeli sports mission at the 1972 Munich Olympics. He said that there are daily casualties that the Israeli army drops, and did not mention the attack on the Israeli Olympic mission.
After the press conference, Schulz told Germany's Bild newspaper, "Any underestimation of the Holocaust is intolerable and particularly unacceptable for us Germans."
Schultz renewed the condemnation today, and said in a tweet on Twitter that he was "disgusted" by what he described as the scandalous statements made by the Palestinian president, stressing that he condemns any attempt to deny the crimes of the Holocaust, as he put it.
He considered that "for the Israelis, the Germans in particular, any attempt to relativize the uniqueness of the Holocaust is intolerable and unacceptable."
Lapid: Mahmoud Abbas' accusations against Israel are a brutal lie (Reuters)
Israeli anger
In response to the Palestinian president's statements, Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid described Abbas' accusation of Israel perpetrating the occupation army's "50 Holocausts" while standing on German soil as not only a moral disgrace, but a "brutal lie."
Lapid added - in a tweet on Twitter - that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, including 1.5 million children.
For his part, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz said that Abbas' statement is an attempt to distort history, and that the unfortunate comparison is baseless.
Foreign Minister Naftali Bennett also denied agreeing to meet Abbas and conduct any political negotiations with him.
In turn, Israeli Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman considered Abbas a sworn enemy of the State of Israel, and that he wrote his doctoral thesis in Moscow on the topic of Holocaust denial.
He added that Abbas regularly files lawsuits with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, accusing Israeli soldiers of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Lieberman added, "Abu Mazen, who yesterday refused to condemn the massacre at the Munich Olympics and the killing of athletes 50 years ago, is a terrorist who practices political terrorism, and therefore he is more dangerous than all terrorist operatives in Hamas or Islamic Jihad."
Palestinian response
For its part, the Palestinian Foreign Ministry responded to the statements of the Israeli Prime Minister, describing them as an attempt to falsify history and commit more crimes against the Palestinian people.
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry said that the occupying power is not satisfied with committing crimes on a daily basis, but also does not tolerate any statements that remind the Israelis and the international community of the crimes it committed.
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry pointed out that Lapid and other Israeli officials' denial of the historical injustice indicates the intentions of the occupation not to stop committing more of its crimes.