DOHA(Palestine Foundation Information Center)Speaking virtually at the Doha Forum on Sunday, the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said that the unprecedented attack by Hamas on October 7 did not happen in a vacuum.
It was due to “decades and decades of a blockade [in Gaza] and decades and decades of unfulfilled promises to the Palestinians that they would have a state, living side by side with Israel in security and good neighborliness,” he said.
Lavrov said that Moscow is communicating exclusively with the political bureau of the Hamas Movement and that “these contacts made it possible to reach an agreement to release Russian hostages.”
The Russian foreign minister also said that it is unacceptable that Israel is using Hamas’s October 7 attack as justification for a collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza.
He also called for an international monitoring mission to go to Gaza to assess the humanitarian situation.
More than 18,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 70 percent of them women and children, prompting rights bodies and experts to call it a “genocide.”
