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

“It’s good that [Foreign] Minister [Gideon] Sa’ar apologized quickly; there was something to apologize for,” Radek Sikorski wrote 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,” Sikorski continued, referring to the war in the Gaza Strip.

Israel vehemently denies it has committed war crimes or genocide in Gaza, and says it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities, stressing that Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.

Sa’ar rejected the “grave, baseless, and slanderous statements against the IDF.”

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

Sa’ar insisted that there is “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........

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