Yair Lapid
Yair Lapidצילום: מירי צחי/TPS

MK Yair Lapid (Yesh Atid) attacked the leftist conference scheduled tomorrow at the Knesset building led by Knesset Members Michal Rozin (Meretz), Ayman Odeh and Dov Khenin (Joint Arab List) and Ksenia Svetlova (Zionist Union).

The conference will be held under the title "Children under Occupation" and organizations such as B'Tselem and Breaking the Silence were invited, as were children from East Jerusalem.

"Zionist Union's lost it," Lapid said in response. "They joined a coalition and invited Breaking the Silence, B'Tselem, and all the BDS supporters to the Knesset to participate in 'Children under Occupation'," adding that these days such a conference is a "gift to Israel's enemies".

Following Lapid's criticism, left-leaning Knesset members from his party will not be able to participate in the event.

According to a report in Yediot Aharonot, the conference will discuss "various aspects of the lives of children under Israeli occupation: poverty, restrictions on movement, lack of electricity, water and education, as well as child arrests, discriminatory laws that hinder family unification and the effects of the blockade on the Gaza Strip."

"Fifty-one years of occupation have left an entire generation of children without a future,” the invitation to the event reads. “The governments are producing a smokescreen for the direct impact of the occupation on the civilian population in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. Children on both sides of the conflict did not choose to be born into a bloody reality, and we can’t create a different future for them without dialogue. The only way out of the cycle of violence is to end the occupation."