Brazil and Israel continue to trade jabs

The tit-for-tat diplomatic spat between Brazil and Israel continues to add new chapters. 

Israel’s top diplomat posted several jabs on social media at President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who recently compared Israel’s military actions in Gaza to the horrors of the Holocaust. On Friday, Brazil’s Foreign Affairs Ministry said the recent “massacre” in Gaza showed that the Israeli military operation under Benjamin Netanyahu’s government “has no ethical or legal limits.”

It is unusual for such diplomatic statements to name the heads of foreign governments. This is only the second time Brazilian diplomacy has referred to the “Netanyahu administration” in similar public statements. 

Last week, Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira said his counterpart in the “Netanyahu administration” had lied about Lula being a Holocaust denier.

At the African Union Summit in Addis Ababa on February 18, Lula said that “what is happening in Gaza and with the Palestinian people” is similar to “when Hitler decided to kill the Jews.”

Mr. Katz later claimed on social media that Lula had become a “full-on Holocaust denier,” a logical impossibility. For Lula to compare Israel’s actions in Gaza to the Holocaust, he must understand that the Holocaust happened. Mr. Vieira said that Mr. Katz “distorted Brazilian positions.”

In today’s statement, the ministry comments on the recent Israeli massacre of Palestinians at the Nabulsi roundabout in Gaza City.

Brazil, the text says, learned of “the shots fired by Israeli forces in northern Gaza, in a place where Palestinians were waiting to receive humanitarian aid. On this occasion, more than 100 people were killed and more than 750 injured by gunshots, trampling, or being run over.”

Israel has admitted that its forces fired into the crowd after the aid trucks were stormed, but humanitarian groups have said that Israeli restrictions on food aid in the region created intolerable conditions that set the stage for the incident.

Brazil’s statement says that “the crowds around the trucks transporting humanitarian aid demonstrate the desperate situation the civilian population of the Gaza Strip is subjected to, and the difficulties in obtaining food in the territory.”

The statement adds that Israel is under an obligation to comply with a recent decision by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to prevent violations of the Genocide Convention.

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