The Palestinian Foreign Ministry has condemned the kidnapping of an infant girl from the Gaza Strip by the Israeli occupation army as evidence of the most heinous crimes and has demanded the immediate return of the baby.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, the ministry said that the Israeli army's abduction of an infant from the Gaza Strip is proof of the commission of the most egregious crimes against civilians without oversight or accountability.
The ministry added that this incident further solidifies the conviction that the occupation army is committing the most atrocious crimes of genocide, torture, direct killing, and abduction against defenseless civilians in the Gaza Strip without any accountability.
Addressing the grim nature of this and other incidents, the ministry posed several questions: "How was the infant transferred from the Gaza Strip into Israel? How was she smuggled or openly moved with many soldiers, officers, and leaders being aware of this operation? What is the fate of the infant and her family, and where are they now? And why hasn't this crime been publicly disclosed by the official Israeli institutions?"
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry has officially demanded that the Israeli authorities immediately hand over the infant to the Palestinian National Authority.
The Abduction of the Infant
An Israeli soldier revealed on Monday that a friend of his, an officer in the army, had kidnapped a Palestinian infant from the Gaza Strip following the death of her family due to the intense bombing carried out by the army on the enclave.
Regarding the same incident, another friend of the officer mentioned that the latter had taken the infant to a hospital in Israel, without naming the facility.
Soldier Shahar Mendelson disclosed the kidnapping incident during his talk on Army Radio about his friend, officer Harel Itach of the "Givati Brigade", who was killed in battles north of the Gaza Strip on the 22nd of November last year.
In response to a question about the infant, Mendelson said, "(Itach) had spoken to one of the friends during his service in Gaza and told him that in one of the houses he entered, he heard the crying of an infant and decided to send her to Israel."
The soldier did not clarify the location of the house in which Itach found the Palestinian child in the Gaza Strip.
Since the 7th of October last year, the Israeli occupation army has waged a devastating war on the Strip, resulting in 21,978 martyrs and 57,697 injured, along with immense destruction of infrastructure and an unprecedented humanitarian disaster.
