The American movie Death on the Nileadapted from the novel by Agatha Christie and featuring Israeli actress Gal Gadot, has been banned from broadcasting in Kuwait, the country’s authorities said on Sunday.
A spokeswoman for the Kuwaiti Ministry of Information, Anouar Mourad, confirmed to AFP information from the local press according to which the film directed by Kenneth Branagh, which will soon be released in several countries, will not be authorized in theaters. of Kuwait, without explaining the reason for the ban.
According to the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Qabas, this decision was taken after calls for a boycott launched on social networks by Internet users, the heroine of the film Gal Gadot having defended Israel’s murderous offensive against the Palestinian enclave of Gaza in the summer of 2014.
During this devastating war – which resulted in the death of at least 2,251 Palestinians, most of them civilians, and left 74 dead on the Israeli side, mainly soldiers – Gal Gadot had praised the Israeli army on Facebook and attacked Hamas in power in Gaza.
In support of the Palestinian cause, Kuwait still refuses normalization with Israel, unlike several Arab countries in the region which have signed agreements with the Jewish state in recent years.
On September 15, 2020, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain became the first Gulf Arab countries to publicly normalize their relations with Israel, at the instigation of Washington.
These “Abraham Accords” had also resulted in similar pacts with Morocco and Sudan.
They have been denounced by the Palestinians as a “treason”, the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict having long remained a prerequisite for any normalization of relations between Arab countries and Israel.
In May 2021, Kuwait summoned the Czech ambassador who had expressed on social networks his support for Israel during the deadly clashes between the Jewish state and Hamas in Gaza. He eventually apologized.