France hits back at US over Gaza accusations

The French foreign ministry clapped back at Marco Rubio over the U.S. secretary of state’s claims that France’s plan to recognize a Palestinian state scuttled Gaza truce talks.

“The recognition of the State of Palestine did not cause the breakdown of hostage negotiations,” reads a post on a new X account, called French Response, which a French government spokesperson confirmed is linked to the foreign ministry in Paris.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot on Friday announced his ministry would launch French Response as part of a strategy to “push back against all those abroad who want to damage France’s image.”

Rubio said earlier this week that French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to recognize Palestinian statehood had blown any chance of successful ceasefire talks between Israel and the Hamas militant group, echoing similar accusations made last month. Hamas walked away from negotiations “the minute, the day that the French announced their thing,” according to Rubio.

The French Response account’s messages highlight the time stamps of social media posts by Macron and Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to argue that “negotiations had already collapsed before France’s announcement.”

It also pointed to a declaration at a July United Nations conference, spearheaded by France and Saudi Arabia, which read that the “recognition and realization of the State of Palestine are an essential and indispensable component of the achievement of the two-state solution.”

And it listed a message by U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff announcing that the U.S. would pull out of ceasefire talks, saying Hamas wasn’t acting in good faith.

Barrot’s ministry is bolstering its capacity to detect disinformation through “monitoring hubs” on social networks and created the “automated response account” in order to “counter the spurious attacks targeted at us,” the minister said in remarks published by BFM TV.

Macron announced in July that France would recognize Palestinian statehood. The U.K., Canada, Australia and Belgium have since made similar announcements.

Thousands of Palestinians have been killed in Israeli airstrikes and shootings following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel in which 1,200 people were killed and another 251 taken hostage.

As of late August, the death toll in Gaza stood at more than 63,500 people, including nearly 10,000 women and more than 18,000 children, according to numbers recorded by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, sourced from the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry.

On Saturday, Israel told Gaza residents to move to a “humanitarian area” in the south as it prepared to take over Gaza City, AFP reported. Al-Mawasi, on Gaza’s southern coast, has previously been designated a humanitarian zone, but has nonetheless been bombed repeatedly.

Joshua Berlinger contributed reporting.