Colombian president Gustavo Petro slams international silence on Gaza conflict

Colombian President Gustavo Petro has joined growing voices to denounce the international silence on Israel’s war in Gaza, calling it a genocide.

“Anyone who defends this genocide or remains silent in the face of it has destroyed their own human condition,” Petro stated.

He criticised the Israeli army’s storming of Al Jazeera’s West Bank bureau and compared the global silence to Nazi propaganda. US Special Envoy Deborah Lipstadt accused Petro of normalising anti-Semitism, prompting his response:

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“Madam Ambassador, Palestinians are Semites…It is anti-Semitic to kill children by dropping bombs in Gaza and not to oppose it. The most anti-Semitic thing today is to repeat Hitler’s holocaust on humanity and especially on the Palestinian people.

“I am not an anti-Semite. Do not confuse and respect. I am not anti-Jewish. I believe in freedom of religion, and if I had been born in that era, I would have given my life in the armed resistance against the Nazis. But I do believe in the freedom that international law generates, the freedom that was built after Hitler was defeated by the Americans and Soviets and by all the peoples of the world: humanity,” he said.

The conflict began with Hamas’s October 7 attack, killing 1,200. Since then, over 41,400 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks. The attacks have also displaced the majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million population.