Qalibaf made the comments on Monday, after the official Palestine TV a day earlier aired footage showing Israeli soldiers subjected a one-year-old child in central Gaza to torture to pressure his father into making confessions during an interrogation.
“Iran is fighting for humanity. The world is either with Gaza and against this colonial terror regime, or it stands with the Epstein class and child torturers. There is no middle ground,” Qalibaf stressed in a post on X.
The footage showed injuries to the 18-month-old child, identified as Karim, whose father - Osama Abu Nassar - was stopped for interrogation at a military checkpoint near the al-Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip.
While Osama was being interrogated, Israeli soldiers burned one of the toddler’s legs with cigarettes and inserted a nail into his leg in front of his father, as confirmed by a medical report, Palestinian journalist Osama al-Kahlout reported.
According to Turkey’s TRT World, Osama was taking Karim to buy supplies, he was caught up in gunfire near his home and was forced by Israeli soldiers to leave his 18-month-old son on the ground and approach a nearby military checkpoint, where he was stripped and interrogated.
The International Committee of the Red Cross in al-Maghazi managed to hand Karim over to his family after being held in police custody for 10 hours, the report further said, adding that his father still remains in Israeli detention.
Since a US-brokered ceasefire between the Palestinian Hamas resistance movement and the occupying entity in October last year, at least 677 Palestinians have been killed and 1,813 others injured in Israeli attacks across the war-ravaged Palestinian territory, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.
Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza which was launched in October 2023 claimed the lives of more than 72,000 Palestinians and injured over 171,000 others, and caused widespread destruction of about 90 percent of civilian infrastructure in the Palestinian territory.
Press TV