Clash between Chinese scholar and Israeli diplomat over Gaza goes viral

A heated exchange between a prominent Chinese international relations scholar and an Israeli military representative about the war in Gaza has gone viral on social media.

The fierce exchange happened on the sidelines of the annual Xiangshan forum in Beijing on Wednesday.

Yan Xuetong, dean of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University, was shown confronting Elad Shoshan, the military attaché with the Israeli embassy in Beijing, who claimed that the reason for the conflict was that “the terror organisation Hamas is still holding our hostages”.

“Your military people should [have shot] the terrorists. Not the children! Not the women! When [you] shot the women and the children, you lost the legitimacy to carry out any actions [for] that reason,” Yan said in the video.

The professor used a bank robbery as an analogy, asking Shoshan if the police should shoot bank employees and customers to get to the criminals.

Shoshan, who is with the Israeli delegation to the security forum, denied Yan’s claims that more than 70,000 civilians were killed by Israel in the war in Gaza. “We really do all that we can not to hurt the citizens,” he said, according to the clip.