Occupied Jerusalem, ALRAy - The European Union has deplored the extremist Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich's anti-Palestinian statements that he made in France as "wrong, disrespectful, and dangerous."

"The comments of Minister Smotrich go, once again, in the opposite direction and certainly cannot be tolerated," EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told reporters on Monday.

Borrell called on the Israeli occupation government to "disavow those comments and to start working together with all parties to defuse tensions."

Speaking at a memorial in Paris for Jacques Kupfer, an activist for the Israeli occupation's right-wing Likud party who died in 2021, Smotrich alleged there was “no such thing as a Palestinian because there is no such thing as the Palestinian people”.

"The Palestinian people is an invention that is less than 100 years old," he claimed.

Meanwhile, Jordan’s Foreign Ministry condemned Smotrich's inflammatory remarks, calling on the Israeli occupation to "take a clear and open position toward such extremism and the inflammatory and malicious statements by a serving minister."

Egypt also denounced the extremist Israeli minister's racist statements, which “deny the facts of history and geography … (and) undermine the efforts aimed at achieving calm between the Palestinian and Israeli sides.”

Palestinian Prime Minister, Mohammad Shtayyeh, said that Smotrich’s latest comments were “conclusive evidence of the extremist, racist, Zionist ideology that governs the current Israeli government”.

In a press statement Monday, Hamas denounced "in the strongest possible terms" Smotrich’s comments which "clearly reflect the fascist policies of colonial settlement expansion and forced eviction of the Palestinian people, on which the Israeli occupation state was founded."