With reluctant NDA government agreeing for a debate on Gaza violence in Parliament after being pushed to a corner by the opposition, an Israeli diplomat held a session with BJP leaders on Friday to brief them about the conflict.
Israeli deputy ambassador Yahel Vilan drove down to BJP headquarters at Ashoka Road and met senior leaders among others Ram Madhav and JP Nadda to give their side of the Palestine-Israel conflict that has snowballed leading to several killings in Gaza.
“I met BJP leaders to brief them about the situation,” Israel diplomat Yahel Vilan told mediapersons. Vilan claimed that Israel was under fire from Hamas for the last 10 days.
Despite that the Israel showed restrain but later had to retaliate to protect our citizens.
The BJP sources said that the diplomats gave their side of the story on the conflict to dispel what they claim was that Israel was being accused of pounding Gaza factoring in the terror activities of Hamas.
Parliament continued to face disruptions for the third day in a row on Friday, given the fact that opposition members realising that they are more in numbers stalled proceedings in Rajya Sabha. Though the government insisted that a debate would take place on Monday, the opposition did not give up their demand.
In the Lok Sabha, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) MPs staged a walkout demanding a debate. Since morning when the House assembled to take Question Hour, PDP leader Mehbooba Mufti kept on demanding a debate on the issue saying that 250 people, including children and women have died in Gaza strip.
In between shouting slogans “Stop killings in Gaza,” Mehbooba requested Speaker Sumitra Mahajan to call “spade a spade” as she felt that NDA’s attempt to keep a distance from Israel scaling up the conflict was not the policy of the country.
As Mahajan insisted that the PDP leader could not raise the issue without prior notice, the MPs eventually walked out of the House.
Due to communication gap between ministers, Prime Minister Narendra Modi government was left red faced since RS revised its list of business to include the topic for discussion at the insistence of Prakash Javadekar.
However, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj was not kept in the loop forcing her to write a letter to chairman requesting him to drop the issue from the agenda.
Chairman Hamid Ansari later overuled Sushma but left it to the government to fix time and duration for the debate.
