In a speech, Cyril Ramaphosa mentioned the "severe humanitarian crisis faced by Palestinians" and ignored Hamas's cruelty to Israeli hostages.
The fraught relationship between South Africa’s Jewish community and the country’s president has reached a new nadir Monday after he failed to acknowledge Hamas’s atrocities against Israelis in a speech about the war in Gaza.
On the day that President Cyril Ramaphosa noted the “severe humanitarian crisis faced by Palestinians in Gaza,” Hamas “paraded four coffins of Israeli civilian hostages in a macabre ceremony that violated basic human rights principles and every standard of basic human decency,” wrote Zev Krengel and Karen Milner, the president and national chairperson of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, respectively.
“It is reprehensible that on the very day these depraved acts shocked the world, once again exposing the brutality of Hamas, you chose to omit any mention of this in your comments regarding Palestine in your speech at the G20,” Krengel and Milner wrote about Ramaphosa’s Feb. 20 speech.
