On February 19, 2024, Israel told Brazil that its President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva would not be welcome to the Jewish nation unless he apologized after he compared Israel’s military offensive in Gaza to Adolf Hitlers campaign to exterminate Jews.
“We will not back down.” Until the Brazilian president Lula apologizes and retracts his anti-Semitic words of incitement which he hurled at the Jewish people, he will be an unwelcomed personality in the state of Israel, the foreign minister of Katz told Brazil’s ambassadors Federico Mayer after he was summoned. Katz said that “Israel will not forget and forgive until Brazilian President apologized for his remarks, an Israeli media agency cited a statement from the country’s foreign ministry.
The Brazilian President Lula, told reporters in Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa, where he was attending an African Union summit that what is happening in the Gaza Strip is not a war, it is a genocide.”
“It was not a war of soldiers against soldiers. It was a war between a highly prepared army and women and children. Lula said. “What’s happening in the Gaza Strip with Palestinian people has not happened at any other moment in history. Actually, it has happened: When Hitler decided to kill the Jews,” he was quoted by an international media agency.
Meanwhile, Brazil was said to be summoning the Israeli envoy in the country, Daniel Zonshine over Lula’s comments. But Brazil was not keen to retract the President Statement on comparing the Israel-Hamas War with the holocaust sources told an international news agency said on February 18, 2024.
Lulas orders are that there will be no retraction and any answers will be given through diplomatic channels, sources said. Earlier, Israel’s Priem Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the 78-year-old leftist leader’s comments as shameful and grave and said his government had called in Brazil ambassador in protest.
But his comments drew praises from the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas which has described the remarks as an accurate description of what people were facing in Gaza Strip that it controls. Israel launched a deadly offensive on Gaza on October 7, 2023, following surprise attacks by Hamas in the Jewish nation. While around 1200 people have died in Israel, the ongoing war in Gaza has claimed the lives of over 29,000 people and injured around 69,000.
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