The United Nation's Palestine expert has compared Hamas terrorists to fighters with the French resistance during the Holocaust.

Richard Falk, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, made the comments in a piece posted on the Liberal Democrat Friends of Palestine website.

In an article that included repeated condemnations of Israel, Mr Falk asked his audience to "imagine the situation being reversed as it was during the Nazi occupation of France or the Netherlands during World War two".

"Resistance fighters were uniformly perceived in the liberal West as unconditional heroes, and no critical attention was given as to whether the tactics used unduly imperiled innocent civilian lives," he said.

"Those who lost their lives in such a resistance were honoured as martyrs. "[Khaled] Meshaal and other Hamas leaders have made similar arguments on several occasions, in effect asking what are Palestinians supposed to do in the exercise of resistance given their circumstances, which have persisted for so long, given the failures of traditional diplomacy and the UN to secure their rights under international law."

Mr Falk, who is an outspoken critic of Israel despite his UN role, also described the Western media as "stunningly oblivious to these complications of perception, almost never disclosing Israeli provocations in reporting on the timelines of the violence of the parties". He said it "fails to acknowledge that it has been the Israelis, not the Palestinians, that have been most often responsible for ending periods of prolonged truce".

In 2011 Mr Falk was roundly criticised for posting on his personal blog a cartoon depicting a dog wearing a kippah and an American flag, urinating on a statue of Blind Justice and eating human bones and blood.