“We saw the horror, we smelled the smell of death,” says MP Pierre-Henri Dumont, returning from Israel

“We saw the horror, we smelled the smell of death”, says Thursday, October 19, MP Pierre-Henri Dumont, LR deputy for the 7th constituency of Pas-de-Calais, spokesperson for the Republicans in the National Assembly and returning from a parliamentary mission to Israel. He was a guest on the show Ma France on France Bleu. Ten LR, Renaissance and Horizons deputies as well as former Prime Minister Manuel Valls visited the site between Monday and Wednesday.

“We saw the horror, we smelled the smell of death, says Pierre-Henri Dumont. We were in the morgue a few kilometers from Tel Aviv where more than 300 bodies are stored in refrigerated containers, which have not been identified to this day because they are unidentifiable, because the Hamas terrorists charred the bodies. Sometimes in a pile there may be two or three bodies from a family huddled together awaiting death. People can be decapitated, disfigured, and collecting DNA is extremely complicated.”

“A crime against humanity”

Families who thought their loved ones were taken hostage “are gradually informed that they are, in reality, dead, relates the deputy, they have succeeded in being identified. It is an extremely long process, but we must be certain that the body which is returned, which sometimes is not not recognizable, does not even have the shape of a body, or indeed that of the person we suppose.

According to the elected official from Pas-de-Calais, what the deputies saw is similar to the crimes committed during the Second World War. “We were also able to see the pogrom which took place in general. 1,400 deaths, it is the first time since the Second World War that Jews have been killed because they are Jews, on such a scale. It is a Shoah by bullet, we must say the terms, such as there may have been during the Second World War, for example at Babi Yar in Ukraine.”

“In the Kibbutzs which were attacked and which we visited, it is the equivalent of Oradour-sur-Glane.”

Pierre-Henri Dumont, deputy Les Républicains

on France Bleu

The elected official believes that it is necessary “find the balance between the legitimate right and even the duty of Israel to defend itself against this terrorist organization and the preservation of human life, of the lives of civilians. We must say what happened. It is a crime against humanity. People were killed because of their religion. So all those in France who say that these are war crimes are using a euphemism, so that when there are civilian casualties, and there will be civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip, we can put an equal sign between them. This is not the case. There can be no euphemism about what happened in Israel is a crime against humanity.”