Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on Tuesday that the Nazis committed a "reprehensible" crime against the Jewish people, when he was asked in a television interview whether he accepted that the Holocaust occurred.
"I am not a historian and when it comes to speaking of the dimensions of the Holocaust it is the historians that should reflect," Rouhani told CNN during a visit to New York where he spoke to the United Nations General Assembly.
"But in general I can tell you that any crime that happens in history against humanity, including the crime the Nazis created towards the Jews, is reprehensible and condemnable," he said, according to CNN's translation of his comments.
Israeli officials had sharply criticized Rouhani, a moderate cleric who has made diplomatic overtures to the West, for failing to renounce rhetoric by his hardline predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that expressed doubt about the Holocaust.
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