PARIS: Hundreds of demonstrators rallied late Thursday outside a top French television station to protest the broadcast of an interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the Gaza war.
Wearing black and white keffiyeh scarves and waving Palestinian flags, protesters gathered peacefully outside the offices of private broadcaster TF1 in the western Paris suburbs.
Kept away from the building by a heavy police presence, the protesters chanted: “Gaza, Paris is with you,“ “Immediate ceasefire!” and “Israel, murderer.”
In the interview broadcast on TF1’s news channel LCI, Netanyahu defended his country’s devastating offensive in Gaza.
The Gaza war was sparked by Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,189 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
Militants also took 252 hostages, 121 of whom remain in Gaza, including 37 the army says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 36,224 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
In the interview, Netanyahu told LCI “the number of civilian losses compared to losses of (Palestinian) combatants is the lowest rate we have seen in an urban war.”
He rejected claims that Israel was targeting civilians or deliberately trying to cause a famine as “anti-Semitic slander”.
The interview came amid international indignation over an Israeli strike and resulting fire at a displacement camp in the Gaza city of Rafah on Sunday, which killed 45 people, according to Gaza officials.
Members of parliament from French far-left party France Unbowed had called for the demonstration when they heard the interview was planned.
