Many traumatised Israelis have compared October 7 with the horrors of the Holocaust, but the head of the national memorial to the genocide disagrees, AFP reports.

Dani Dayan, chairman of Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem memorial centre, stressed that the attack, although appalling, was fundamentally different from Nazi Germany’s mass murder of six million Jews.

“I do not accept the simplistic comparison with the Holocaust even if there are similarities in the genocidal intentions, sadism and barbarism of Hamas,” Dayan told AFP.

“The crimes that took place on October 7 are on the same level as Nazi crimes, but they are not the Shoah,” said the former Israeli diplomat, using another term for the Holocaust.

“We cannot compare it with the period of the Holocaust because there is an army here which is fighting and making Hamas pay the price,” he said.