German Chancellor Olaf Scholz with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv. Photo: Reuters/Maya Alleruzzo

In a plea for continued humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz asserted during a solidarity visit to Israel on Tuesday that the “Palestinians are not Hamas and Hamas has no right to speak for them.”

Addressing a press conference held jointly with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv, Scholz argued that Gaza’s civilian populace were being used as “human shields by Hamas.”

“We are continuing our humanitarian aid to alleviate the suffering of the civilian population,” he emphasized.

After leaving Israel, Scholz will travel to Egypt, where he will meet with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to discuss the humanitarian situation.

Scholz’s comments are a further sign that European leaders along with top EU officials frown on the notion of freezing aid to the Palestinians. In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas onslaught against Israel, the EU was plunged into a dispute on the aid question when one of its commissioners, Olivér Várhelyi, announced that all payments had been “immediately suspended” before being swiftly overridden by his colleagues.

At the same time, Scholz emphasized Germany’s commitment to Israel’s well-being, pointing out that the Jewish state’s security was a “raison d’etat” for the democratic federal republic that emerged from the ashes of World War II. Speaking about rising antisemitism in Germany, the chancellor said that hatred of Jews “has no place in Germany,” describing the revival of Jewish life in the country as a “gift.”

“It is very important to say this today here during these difficult times in Israel: Germany’s history and the responsibility it had for the Holocaust requires us to maintain the security and existence of Israel,” Scholz declared.

He added that the “brutal [Hamas] attack on innocent citizens, the execution of citizens, murders of babies, abduction of women, men, and children, and humiliation and parading of Holocaust survivors, freezes the blood.”

Warning that the region was on the “brink of disaster,” Scholz told the Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah and its backers in Iran to stay out of the conflict.

Prior to departing for Israel, Scholz made clear that he supported Israel’s right to act militarily against Hamas. “The Hamas attack was an act of terrorism that had terrible consequences, that killed an incredible number of people and humiliated an incredible number of people. And that is why Israel has every right to defend itself,” he said.

In his remarks, Netanyahu invoked the Sept. 1941 Nazi massacre of thousands of Jews at Babyn Yar, near the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, as an analogy for the Hamas slaughter.

“The rape and murder of women; the abduction of families, the tearing of grandmothers and Holocaust survivors into captivity; the death pits that remind us of Babyn Yar, where jeeps surround a depression in the ground where they crowd young people in, and they shoot them with machine-guns — this is the savagery that we only remember from the Nazi crimes of the Holocaust,” Netanyahu stated.

“Hamas are the new Nazis, Hamas is ISIS, in some instances worse than ISIS,” he added.