Jordan’s Queen Rania has made a renewed call for the end of hostilities in Gaza, insisting that Israel has had ‘one October 7’ while Palestinians have had 156.
The 53-year-old royal, who was born to Palestinian parents, made the remarks on a CNN interview yesterday.
She also made calls for the war to end, saying as ‘traumatic as October 7 was’ for Israel, it doesn’t give the country the right to ‘commit atrocity after atrocity’.
The Jordanian queen openly admitted that it isn’t just Hamas that ‘hates’ Israelis, but normal Palestinians.
She said: ‘Palestinians do not hate Israelis because of who they are, they hate them because of what they’re doing to them.’
Queen Rania said: ‘Palestinians do not hate Israelis because of who they are, they hate them because of what they’re doing to them.’
The October 7 attack at the music festival in Israel sparked the current conflict in Gaza
In the interview, she told CNN interviewer Christiane Amanpour: ‘As devastating and as traumatic as October 7 was, it doesn’t give Israel license to commit atrocity after atrocity. Israel experienced one October 7, since then, the Palestinians have experienced 156 October 7s.’
In regard to recent calls for Israel to increase aid for Palestine, namely by Joe Biden in his State of the Union address last week, the Jordanian queen said: ‘Aid under bombardment does not stop the destruction, the death, and the heartbreak.
‘We cannot save people from hunger only then to bomb them to death.
‘There are no victories to be had as long as this war continues.’
The queen placed the blame on Israel for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, saying that Israel is responsible for cutting the people of Gaza off from basic necessities such as food, fuel, and water.
She also said that Israel has left the people of Gaza completely dependent on outside aid efforts, they continue to bomb and attack the people of Gaza as they are starving.
She says that the starvation of the people of Gaza is an Israeli-made disaster, arguing that it is ‘deprivation by design.’
She went on to talk about October 7 and how it wasn’t the beginning of the conflict.
She said: ‘We cannot save people from hunger only then to bomb them to death.’
The Jordanian queen was born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents before moving to Jordan
She said: ‘I think a lot of people need to know more about this conflict to really understand the intricacies of it, to understand that this is one of the greatest historical Injustices, to understand what the root cause of this issue is, to understand that this conflict did not begin on October 7, that that it was a result of years of occupation, of settlement expansion, of human rights abuses, of disregard for international law, and this is what led us to this point.’
The Anti Defamation League, a body which targets antisemitism, responded to the interview on X, writing: ‘Jordanian Queen Raina continues propagating false claims about Israel while diminishing the severity of Hamas’s attack on Israel.
‘In no way is Israel’s war against Hamas – a vile terror org that uses human shields – equivalent to the unprecedented October 7 brutal massacre.
‘Especially during the month of Ramadan, we hope Jordan will play a constructive role in de-escalating tensions.’
30,000 Palestinians have died since the October 7 attack and she says Israel has no right
This isn’t first time Queen Rania has used a CNN interview to broadcast her support for Palestine.
Last October she used an interview to launch a remarkable attack on the West in an where she criticized America’s support of Israel’s retaliatory strikes against Hamas and claimed there was a ‘double standard’ in global sympathy for the war’s victims.
She said she ‘of course’ condemned the killing of innocent Israelis by Hamas but, asked why Israel’s self-defense was not coming under the same level of global scrutiny and reserved all her sympathy for Palestinians.