IUML Rally: Shashi Tharoor, IUML clash over who the terrorist in Gaza conflict is

KOZHIKODE: Thousands of people converged on Kozhikode beach on Thursday afternoon in the largest pro-Palestine rally to take place in the country ever since the Israel-Palestine conflict began. The rally was organised by IUML.
The IUML activists, including hundreds of women, chanted “Solidarity with Palestine” and “Down with Zionism” on the beach, and held banners – inscribed in Arabic – that read “Indians with Palestine” and “End the genocide in Gaza”.
Inaugurating the rally, IUML state president Panakkad Syed Sadikali Shihab Thangal said “Israel was the biggest terrorist nation” in the world and added that the Indian government was “trying to whitewash Israel“.
Thangal said that while all Indian PMs, from Jawaharlal Nehru to Manmohan Singh, including Atal Bihari Vajpayee, had sided with justice and had taken a stand against the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the current central government was trying to dilute that stand.
However, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, who was the chief guest at the event, tacitly referred to Hamas as terrorists in his address, drawing a response from IUML leader M K Muneer.
“Terrorists attacked Israel on October 7 and killed 1,400 people and took 400 as hostages, and in retaliation Israel has killed over 6,000 people in bombings carried out in Gaza, which have still not stopped,” Tharoor said, adding, that the Israeli response to the attack was disproportionate and in contravention of human rights conventions.
Muneer, who was the last to speak, said “It is a fight for independence by Palestinians, but what Israel is doing is ethnic genocide. We are with the resistance of the people of Palestine, and we should be able to identify between resistance and attack.”