Brazil recalled its ambassador in Israel for consultations as relations between the two nations quickly deteriorated after President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva compared the country’s military campaign in Gaza with the killing of the Jewish population during the Holocaust, Report informs via Bloomberg.
The decision to pull Ambassador Frederico Meyer from Tel Aviv, confirmed in a statement from Brazil’s foreign ministry, came just hours after the Israeli government summoned him to the Museum of the Holocaust, where he was reprimanded for Lula’s comments on Sunday.
Israel also said the Brazilian president was not welcome in the country until he took back his remarks.
Brazil and several other developing nations have lobbed steady criticism at the Israeli government over the escalating death toll in Palestine. But Lula’s remarks add drama to a meeting of foreign ministers from the Group of 20 that Brazil will host later this week in Rio de Janeiro. Even before the comments, disagreements about both wars — Russia’s in Ukraine and Israel’s in Gaza — were already likely to dominate the agenda.
The dispute is the latest that could make the typically-uneventful G-20 meeting more explosive. It will also put US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in the same room with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov less than a week after the death of opposition leader Alexey Navalny in a maximum-security prison in Russia.
Israel has been at war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip since the Oct. 7 invasion of southern Israel, during which some 1,200 people were killed and more than 200 were taken hostage. Since the fighting began, more than 28,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to health officials in the Hamas-run territory.
