Director of "A Seperation" Raps Israel’s Gaza Offensive
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Academy Award-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi on Saturday slammed Israel’s military assault against people of Gaza as the embodiment of “dictatorial” behavior.
“I believe they (Israelis) have made the assumption that others are disturbing their life and must be destroyed, and this causes them to commit such crimes every so often,” he told reporters in Tehran, waiting at a center to donate blood to Gazans.
“But” he added “this is a self-centered and dictatorial behavior.”
The ongoing Israeli crimes in Gaza “have distressed the whole world,” farhadi noted, and expressed the hope that such “slaughter” would end immediately.
Asghar Farhadi is the Oscar-winning director of “A Separation,” the only Iranian film receiving Academy Award.
International calls for an end to the bloodshed in Palestine intensified after Israel’s shelling on Wednesday of a UN-run school in Gaza's Jabalya refugee camp that killed 15 people. It was the second time that the Israeli military targeted UN-run schools in less than a week. The schools are seen as the only shelters for the Palestinians living in the blockaded territory.
Israeli warplanes have been pounding numerous sites in the Gaza Strip since July 8, followed by a ground offensive against the impoverished Palestinian land ten days later.
So far, more than 1,600 Palestinians have been killed while almost 9,000 have been injured. Most of the casualties have been civilians, including a large number of women and children.