- Israel's prime minister said Putin apologized for Russia's pro-Nazi accusations.
- Russia has repeatedly tried to use Nazism as a justification for its devastating war in Ukraine.
- Israel has taken a seemingly neutral stance of the war and has tried to play the mediator role.
Israel's prime minister said Russian President Vladimir Putin apologized to him after Moscow's top diplomat previously accused Israel of being pro-Nazi over its support of Ukraine.
"The Prime Minister accepted President Putin's apology for [Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov's remarks and thanked him for clarifying his attitude towards the Jewish people and the memory of the Holocaust," Naftali Bennett's office said in a Thursday statement after a phone call with Putin.
Lavrov falsely suggested last weekend that Adolf Hitler was Jewish, the latest attempt from Moscow to try to justify war in Ukraine as a campaign against neo-Nazis. Russia also accused Israel of being pro-Nazi by showing support for Kyiv.
Israel's government called Lavrov's remarks "unforgivable" and "the lowest form of racism."
The Kremlin made no remarks about an apology after Putin's Thursday call with Bennett, according to the Times of Israel.
But Bennett's office said that along with the apology, Putin also promised to allow an evacuation from the besieged Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, where a small band of Ukrainian resistance and civilians have been holed up for weeks.
Israel's evacuation request — which would involve a United Nations and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) humanitarian corridor — comes a day after Bennett spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Hundreds of civilians have already been evacuated from bombarded Mariupol to the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia in recent days through a joint UN and ICRC operation.
Israel has taken a seemingly neutral stance throughout Russia's war against Ukraine — providing humanitarian assistance and condemning Russian atrocities, though stopping short of unveiling any sanctions or providing military aid to Ukrainian forces.