President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made harsh criticisms of Israel during a meeting with his Egyptian counterpart, Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, on Thursday (15).
“Brazil vehemently condemned Hamas for the attack against Israel and the kidnapping of hundreds of people. We condemned the attack and called it a terrorist act. However, there’s no explanation for Israel’s behavior, with the pretext of defeating Hamas, be killing women and children, things never seen before in any war I heard about,” said Lula.
The Brazilian president’s statement was made amid Israel’s attack on the city of Rafah, on the border with Egypt, where about 1.4 million Palestinians, many of them refugees, are sheltered. On Tuesday (13), Brazil made public its worries with the new phase of the military operation focused on Rafah. In an official statement, Itamaraty – another name for Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs – warns that Israel’s actions “will have serious consequences, in addition to new civilian victims, [and] a new wave of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians forcibly displaced people.”
A massacre promoted by Israel against the Palestinian population in Rafah has been also criticized by the country’s closest allies, such as the USA.
“I want to say to President Al-Sisi that it’s a huge joy to come back to Egypt in such an important moment of the world’s politics, in a moment in which we should be talking about increasing the world’s food production, economic growth, distribution of income and generation of jobs. However, we are talking about wars,” Lula said.
Lula defends “new geopolitics in the UN”
In his statement, the Brazilian president defended a new geopolitics in the UN with the participation of African and Latin American countries. “The right to veto must end, and the members of the UN Security Council must be pacifist players, and not actors who foment war," said Lula referring to the actions of the United States in the Council. The country used its veto power against a ceasefire proposal presented by Brazil at the beginning of hostilities.
"The only thing you can do is ask for peace through the press, but it seems to me that Israel has the primacy of not complying with any decision coming from the UN leadership," said Lula.
Read Lula’s full statement in Egypt here.
