Jerusalem official slams Sky News anchor for suggesting Israel is committing ‘genocide’

‘If anybody’s committing a war crime here, a double war crime, it is Hamas and not Israel,’ said Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum.

By JNS

Britain’s Sky News TV channel chose not to air a segment of an interview with Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum in which she defended Israel’s actions in Gaza against Hamas.

“For some reason @SkyNews took down this part of my interview shortly after they shared it. I wonder why? Thank God for screen recording #hamascommitsgenocide,” Hassan-Nahoum tweeted on Tuesday.

In the unaired segment, the interviewer cited comments from Jordan’s foreign minister who claimed that some of Israel’s actions in Gaza could be “tantamount to genocide.”

“Well, he obviously hasn’t looked at the law books. International law, first of all, obligates a country to defend itself from a massacre,” Hassan-Nahoum, a U.K.-trained lawyer, responded.

“There’s no genocide going on. Israel is basically waging a war that it was forced into by the massacre of Oct. 7. We are there to eliminate the infrastructure of Hamas, which has inculcated itself within the civilian population in order to use the civilian population to protect themselves. And so, if anybody’s committing a war crime here, a double war crime, it is Hamas and not Israel,” she remarked.

BBC international editor Jeremy Bowen has said that he has no regrets about falsely reporting last month that a hospital in Gaza was destroyed in a blast, which the BBC initially speculated was caused by an Israeli strike.

It was later determined that a failed Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket launch caused the blast, which hit the parking lot next to the Al-Ahli Hospital, leaving the building standing.

Bowen admitted that he misled viewers by saying that the hospital was “flattened” in his reporting. “Oh yeah, well I got that wrong,” he said during an interview on the British public broadcaster that aired on Saturday.