The president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, insisted this Friday that Israel is committing “genocide” in the Gaza Strip, in the midst of a diplomatic crisis between the two countries after the progressive leader compared the Israeli offensive to the Holocaust.
“What the Government of Israel is doing with the Palestinian people is not a war, it is a genocide because it is killing women and children,” said the president at an event in Rio de Janeiro, in his first public demonstration since the beginning of the crisis between Brazil and Israel.
Accompanied by Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira, the Brazilian head of state raised his tone and stated that he does not change his “dignity for falsehood”, in response to the accusations that the Israeli Foreign Minister has leveled against him in recent days. Katz.
«Soldiers are not dying, women and children are dying inside hospitals. If that is not a genocide, I don’t know what a genocide is,” said the progressive leader.
The diplomatic crisis was unleashed last week after a press conference by Lula in Ethiopia, after participating in a summit of the African Union, in which he considered that the confrontation “between a very prepared army and women and children” had not occurred. happened before in history, except “when Hitler decided to kill the Jews.”
Israel’s response was to declare Lula persona non grata until he recants and summon the Brazilian ambassador to Israel, Frederico Meyer, to the Holocaust Museum (Yad Vashem) in Jerusalem, which Brazil considered a confrontation.
In response, the Brazilian Government recalled its ambassador in Tel Aviv for consultations and summoned the Israeli ambassador in Brasilia to protest what happened.
Added to this were Katz’s harsh attacks against the Brazilian president in the following days.
In one of them, the head of Israeli diplomacy said that Lula’s controversial comparison was “a shame for Brazil and a spit in the face of Brazilian Jews.”
His Brazilian counterpart, Mauro Vieira, then responded harshly by calling Katz’s comments “unacceptable”, “liars” and “unworthy”, which he described as “a shameful page in the history of Israel’s diplomacy”.
Lula had not commented on the matter until this Friday, in which he also returned to defend a “free and sovereign” Palestinian State that can live “in harmony with Israel.”
Regarding the comparison of the war in Gaza with the Holocaust, which also generated protests by the opposition led by former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, Lula asked that they “read” the entire press conference “instead of judging him” for what Katz says .
The Brazilian head of state also criticized the United Nations Security Council because “today it represents nothing, it does not make any decision, nor does anything for peace.”
«Today there is a lot of hypocrisy and little politics in the world. “We cannot accept the war in Ukraine, just as we cannot accept the war in Gaza, or any war,” he demanded.
He recalled that Brazil is committed to carrying out a reform of the Security Council since in his opinion “it does not act in a democratic manner” by having members with the right to veto.
“It is not possible for people not to understand what is happening in Gaza,” where around 30,000 deaths have been recorded so far since last October, most of them women and children, he lamented.
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