Unhappy about EU calls to probe alleged Israeli police brutality against activists protesting the bloodshed on the Gaza border, Israel's Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz said the EU could go "to a thousand thousand hells."
Steinitz was giving an interview to a local radio station when he said of the EU, "Let them go to a thousand thousand hells," as cited by Haaretz. His response followed the EU’s call for a “swift investigation” into the Israeli police’s violent crackdown on protesters in Haifa last Friday. They had been criticising the State of Israel for the high death toll at the border with Gaza.
The protests resulted in the serious injury of Jafar Farah, director of the Haifa-based NGO Mossawa, which champions the rights of Israeli-Arabs.
The Israeli minister said he wished to send “to hell the European Union which doesn't really represent the European nations.”
He slammed the EU as “an organization that no-one is leading and is less friendly to Israel than the European states themselves.” Steinitz’s stance was backed by Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan who, in a response to the EU’s demand for a swift investigation, said that “Israel, as the only democracy in the Middle East, does not need moralistic warning calls from a biased and obsessive body like the EU."
In the same interview Israel’s energy minister also slammed the EU for cementing its relationship with Iran and maintaining the Iran nuclear deal.
Farah, whose knee had been broken at a Friday protest night, was taken into custody together with other 20 activists. “When I was brought to the police station with my son, I found him on the floor covered in blood. When I asked the police officer, ‘Who gave you the right to treat my son this way?’ his response was to break my knee,” Farah said in an interview with Army Radio.