Brazil’s president once again alleged Saturday that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians, doubling down on the rhetoric after stirring controversy last week by comparing Israel’s war with the Hamas terror group in Gaza to the Holocaust “when Hitler decided to kill the Jews.”.
The Health Ministry in Gaza said Saturday that the bodies of 92 Palestinians killed in Israeli bombardments were brought to hospitals over the past 24 hours, raising the overall toll in nearly five months of war to 29,606 including children and women. The total number of wounded rose to nearly 70,000.
An Israeli airstrike hit a house in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, killing at least eight people. including four women and a child, health authorities said. An Associated Press journalist saw the bodies at Abu Youssef al-Najjar hospital.
NEW GENOCIDE ALLEGATIONS
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said that he wouldn’t give up his “dignity for falsehood,” an apparent reference to calls for him to retract comments comparing Israel’s conduct in Gaza to the Nazi Holocaust in World War II.
“What the Israeli government is doing is not war, it is genocide,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Children and women are being murdered.”
Last month, South Africa filed a landmark case with the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of genocide against Palestinians. The court issued a preliminary order two weeks later, ordering Israel to do all it can to prevent death, destruction and any acts of genocide in Gaza.
HUMANITARIAN CRISIS GROWS
The rising civilian death toll and worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza have amplified calls for a cease-fire. Hunger and infectious diseases are spreading and about 80% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced, with about 1.4 million crowded into Rafah on the border with Egypt.
“There are choking, skyrocketing prices. It’s terrifying. There is no source of income. The area is very overcrowded,” said Hassan Attwa, a displaced man from Gaza City who now shelters in a tent on the sand in Mawasi in the south. “The garbage, may God bless you, is not collected at all. It stays piled up. It turns into a mess and clay when it rains. The situation is disastrous in every sense of the word.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to fight until “total victory,” but dispatched the delegation to Paris to seek the release of hostages in exchange for a temporary truce.
Negotiators face wide gaps and an unofficial deadline — the start of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan around March 10.
MORE SETTLEMENTS
Meanwhile, Netanyahu and his conservative government drew an angry response from the United States, its closest ally, over plans to build more than 3,300 new homes in settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday that he was “disappointed” to hear of the Israeli announcement. “It’s been long-standing U.S. policy under Republican and Democratic administrations alike that new settlements are counterproductive to reaching an enduring peace,” he said. “They’re also inconsistent with international law.”
The Biden administration also restored a U.S. legal finding dating back nearly 50 years that Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories are “illegitimate” under international law.
