TEHRAN- According to Iran’s foreign minister, the U.S. should stop acting hypocritically regarding the Gaza war and quit talking about a truce in the Gaza Strip while encouraging the Israeli regime to strike Rafah.

During a cabinet session on Sunday, Hossein Amir Abdollahian said that “the Americans must stop being hypocritical and talking about a ceasefire while encouraging the Zionist regime to attack Rafah.”

He said that Israel has created a dire situation in both northern and southern Gaza, especially in Rafah, and that it is still committing war crimes against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Amir Abdollahian went on to add that Hamas has put out a comprehensive proposal on behalf of the Gazan people to end the Israeli genocide in the region, lift the siege, negotiate a prisoner swap agreement, and rebuild the area devastated by conflict.

Iran’s top diplomat continued by saying that “the resistance leaders have warned that any military action against the residents of Rafah will have severe reciprocal consequences.”

Reiterating that the Israeli regime has failed to achieve its desired goals in Gaza, he added that “this is the reason it still continues to beat the drum of war and threat.”

Iran firmly supports any resolution to the current situation that would enhance regional security and protect the rights of the Palestinian people, Amir Abdollahian reaffirmed.

The people of Gaza have been forced to escape towards the Egyptian border city of Rafah in the south due to Israel’s continuous shelling of the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli military has said that it will begin a ground assault in addition to conducting airstrikes on the border city. 

As Israel contemplates extending its attack into Rafah, Egypt is building a walled enclosure along its border with Gaza, raising worries about possible Palestinian displacement.

Last week, the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson, Nasser Kanaani, sternly denounced the Israeli airstrikes that have killed scores of Palestinians in the southern Gaza city of Rafah.

In a statement, he censured the deadly “criminal airstrikes” the Tel Aviv regime has launched on residential areas in Rafah.  

The strikes conducted by the Israeli regime have infringed and derailed the ongoing ceasefire talks, contravening the ruling issued by the International Court of Justice.

He went on to add that the strikes on Rafah reveal the sinister Zionist intentions to violate all international legal norms.

Kanaani also warned of the dire ramifications of the Israeli ruthless savagery in the Gaza Strip and expressed serious concerns regarding the growing genocidal crimes against the Gazans.  

The spokesman stressed that the time is running out for the U.S. and other Western allies of Israel to rein in the Zionist officials’ maniacal behavior and act urgently to thwart the massacre of defenseless Palestinians in a bid to prove their sincerity in expressing concern about regional security and stability.

Such an invasion, Kanaani said, serves as “a proof to sinister intentions of Zionists who have repeatedly violated all the international legal norms with the purpose of discrediting them.”

Additionally, he called on the international bodies, governments and the world’s public opinion to heed the alarming consequences of any Israeli military action in Rafah for the residents and refugees in that area.

International organizations, and above all the United Nations, have a responsibility to stop the continuation of the Israeli regime’s onslaught on Gaza and prevent the deterioration of the human catastrophe, he concluded.

Food, water, sanitation and other basic needs are in unprecedented short supply for over one million Palestinians who have fled across the Gaza Strip to the territory’s southern city of Rafah, a UN special rapporteur has told Anadolu.

“More than one million people are concentrated in Rafah, having fled from other parts of Gaza. They are lacking very seriously in the basic necessities of life, from food and water and sanitation with the threat of diseases beyond anything that we have seen in any conflict in recent decades around the world, severe as those conflicts were,” explained Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN special rapporteur on the right to housing. “You never had a situation where a population was not even allowed to flee.”