Israeli Defense Forces chief Aviv Kohavi has criticized comments by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi expressing doubts about the Holocaust. 

“You don’t have to be a historian or a researcher to understand the horrors of the Holocaust — you have to be a human being,” he said during a visit to the Nazi Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Poland on Monday in reaction to Raisi’s remarks. 

Quizzed over the Jewish holocaust and Israel’s “right to exist,” Raisi told CBS News that “Historical events should be investigated by researchers and historians. There are some signs that it happened. If so, they should allow it to be investigated and researched,” and evading the question by bringing up the rights of Palestinians “forced to leave their homes and motherland.” He also said Israel’s accords with some Arab states meant those states “were stabbing the very idea of Palestine in the back.”

“Anyone who lies and denies the painful and solid truth of history, easily lies today, and will naturally lie in the future,” Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Kohavi added, referring to Raisi. 

“This is another reminder that such people should not be allowed to possess any capacity of any kind for development of weapons of mass destruction,” the IDF noted in reference to the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.

"We stand here today on human ground, while our military boots carry the ground of Israel, the country we protect. We created a home, not just for the Jewish people, but for those who worked with us — Druze, Christians and Muslims."