he biggest attack on Israel by Palestinian militants in years was caused by U.S. foreign policy failures, the former President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev has said, as Russian social-media users celebrated the outbreak of violence.
Medvedev is the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, and served as head of state between 2008 and 2012. He linked the U.S. to the actions by those from the military wing of the Palestinian Islamic political party Hamas, who entered Israeli towns and fired rockets from the Gaza Strip it controls to the west of Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel is “at war” and vowed that Hamas will “pay a price it has never known”, amid reports that at least 20 people have been killed, the border fence has been breached and Israelis taken hostage. Newsweek has as yet not verified these figures.
Medvedev has regularly posted anti-Western and anti-U.S. invective, mostly regarding the West’s support for Kyiv in the war that Moscow started. However, on Saturday, he turned to the wider geopolitical issue of the U.S. role in the Middle East. Medvedev wrote on Telegram that the outbreak of clashes “is an event that could have been expected.”
“The conflict between Israel and Palestine has been going on for decades. And the U.S. is a key player there,” he wrote.
“Instead of actively working on a Palestinian-Israeli settlement, these idiots have crept into our country and are helping neo-Nazis with all their might, pitting two close peoples against each other,” Medvedev said.
This repeats Kremlin rhetoric that part of its justification of the war in Ukraine was to “denazify” its neighbor, a reason widely dismissed by the global community.
“What can stop America’s obsession with fomenting conflict around the world? Apparently, only civil war,” Medvedev added. When contacted for comment, the U.S. State Department referred Newsweek to its statement, which said that it “unequivocally condemns the appalling attacks by Hamas terrorists against Israel, including civilians and civilian communities.” “There is never any justification for terrorism. We stand in solidarity with the government and people of Israel,” the statement added.
