By Etgar Lefkovits,Jewish News Syndicate

Copyright thejc

Israel’s Miss Universe finalist has condemned a series of posts published on the social media accounts of her Palestinian counterpart over the war against Hamas in Gaza, arguing they represent a misuse of her public platform as a contestant in the international beauty contest. Miss Israel, Melanie Shiraz, who is competing in the pageant next month, took issue with a number of posts published on Nadeen Ayoub’s accounts, arguing: “This is not advocacy. This is fabrication.” One of the posts vastly inflated the Palestinian death toll in Gaza while another mislabels Masada, a World Heritage site in southern Israel’s Judean Desert, and Jerusalem as “Palestine.” According to the post shared by Ayoub, the death toll in Gaza is 680,000, more than 10 times the unverified figures cited by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. “There have been repeated posts amplifying fatality numbers so exaggerated they exceed even Hamas’s own inflated reports,” Shiraz said in a video released yesterday. “This is not advocacy. This is fabrication.” “With a large following and reach, she spreads lies so easily disproven that they corrode credibility,” she continued. “Worse, they shape the minds of impressionable young people, glorifying violence and pushing them toward conflict instead of peace.” Another video Ayoub shared on her Instagram feed includes images of Israeli children murdered by Hamas terrorists on October 7 2023, which, according to Shiraz, are subtly presented in a way that implies they were Palestinians. The post includes a clip of children killed in the war – among them the Bibas children, Ariel, four, and his baby brother Kfir, who were killed after being kidnapped by Hamas, as well as 12-year-old Noya Dan, an autistic Israeli girl abducted from her home in a southern Israeli kibbutz with her 80-year-old grandmother and subsequently killed. “To take these innocent Israeli children – murdered in their homes or in captivity – and present them as though they were Palestinian casualties is not an act of compassion,” says Shiraz in the video. “It is a theft of identity, a falsification of truth, and a calculated attempt to weaponise tragedy for political purposes.” Shiraz, a resident of Tel Aviv who grew up in the United States and studied at the University of California, Berkeley, before becoming a data scientist, said she felt it was her “moral duty” to speak out: “I cannot allow this false narrative to stand without a rebuttal.” Ayoub did not immediately return a request for comment today. The Miss Universe pageant is scheduled to take place in Thailand next month.