Italy stands with Israel in its fight against Hamas’s antisemitic drive to uproot Jews from the Middle East, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu late Saturday night when the two met in Tel Aviv.
"We saw images that were incredible about what happened two weeks ago,” she said as she referred to the October 7 Hamas assault on southern Israel in which over 1,400 civilians and soldiers were killed, more than 5,000 injured and another 210 people were taken hostage. Some of those taken are believed to be Italian citizens.
She is among the European leaders who have harshly condemned the brutality of the attack that included burning adults and children alive, rape, and dismemberment.
This was more than an act of war, she told Netanyahu.
This “showed somebody who wants to cancel Jewish people from this region,” Meloni said, as she attributed their actions to antisemitism.
“That is something we have to fight yesterday and today,” she stated.
Italy supports Israel’s right to exist and defend itself, she said, stressing that “terrorism has to be fought.”
Meloni added that, “We believe and we think that you are able to do that in the best way, for we are different from those terrorists.”
Show of solidarity
It was important, she said, to visit Israel as a show of “solidarity” by the Italian government and the Italian people.
She was one of a host of world leaders who have arrived in Israel since October 7, including US President Joe Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides also arrived in Israel on Saturday night and met with Netanyahu and his Israeli counterpart Isaac Herzog. French President Emmanuel Macron is also due to arrive in Israel this week.
Meroni came to Israel after attending an international summit in Cairo on the Gaza war that began on October 7. Close to 5,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since then either from IDF aerial strikes or failed Palestinian rocket launches.
While in Cairo she met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi.
During her meeting with Abbas, Meroni confirmed Italy’s support for the PA as the “legitimate authority representing the Palestinian people, who certainly do not identify with Hamas. Support for the prospect of two states was also reiterated,” her office stated.
In Tel Aviv, Netanyahu compared Hamas to ISIS and asked Italy to lend its support to the ouster of the terror group from Gaza, which it has forcibly controlled since seizing control of the small enclave in 2007.
“We have to defeat this barbarism,” Netanyahu told her. “This is a test, a test of civilization – and we will win. And we expect all the countries that lined up to fight ISIS, to line up and fight Hamas because Hamas is the new ISIS,” he said.