Polish FM: IDF soldiers ‘admit to war crimes,’ killed hostages; Sa’ar rejects ‘baseless’ accusations

Poland’s foreign minister says that Israeli soldiers “admit to war crimes” and killed Israeli hostages, in the wake of an IDF reservist putting a photo online of himself destroying a statue of Jesus in Lebanon.

“It’s good that Minister Sa’ar apologized quickly; there was something to apologize for,” wrote Radek Sikorski on X. “That soldier should be punished, but lessons should also be drawn regarding the way they are being trained.”

“IDF soldiers themselves admit to war crimes. They killed not only civilian Palestinians but even their own hostages,” he continues.

Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar rejects the “grave, baseless, and slanderous statements against the IDF.”

“What you wrote reveals profound ignorance and a deep lack of understanding,” he writes on X. “During every war, there are operational accidents, in which military forces are also harmed by fire from their own army.”

Sa’ar insists that “no Western army that fights terrorism more precisely and on the basis of better intelligence than the IDF, with a constant effort to minimize harm to non-combatants. The ratio of terrorist casualties to non-combatants is better than that of any other Western army. In fact — of any other fighting army in the world.”

“The IDF is a professional and ethical army,” he writes, adding that Western democratic armies learn from the IDF.

“I suggest that instead of preaching morality to others — you personally condemn the shameful antisemitic display we saw in the Polish parliament last week,” he says, referring to an MP unfurling an Israeli flag with a swastika in the middle instead of a Star of David.