Israel Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman criticized EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton for making a parallel between the murder of Jews at a school in Toulouse with Gaza.
Speaking during a visit to China, the minister said that the comparison, made at a conference on Monday in Brussels on Palestinian youth, was "inappropriate"and that he hopes that she retracts her statement.
The children Ashton should be talking about, Lieberman said, "are the ones in southern Israel who live in constant fear of rocket attacks launched from Gaza."
"Israel is the most moral country in the world even as it is forced to fight against terrorists who act from within a civilian population," he said.
"The Israeli army does everything possible to avoid harm to that population, even though it supports terrorists," the minister added.
Catherine Ashton spoke about Palestinian children on Monday and compared the shooting at the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse, in which a professor and three children were killed, with Gaza, Syria and Norway.
She said: "Against all the odds, they continue to learn, to work, to dream and aspire to a better future. And the days when we remember young people who have been killed in all sorts of terrible circumstances – the Belgian children having lost their lives in a terrible tragedy and when we think of what happened in Toulouse today, when we remember what happened in Norway a year ago, when we know what is happening in Syria, when we see what is happening in Gaza and in different parts of the world – we remember young people and children who lose their lives."