Colombia’s president denounces silence over Israeli genocide in Gaza

BOGOTA, Colombia (AA) – Colombian President Gustavo Petro denounced the silence over Israel’s war on Gaza, insisting that a genocide is taking place in Palestine.

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

“It would seem as if (Nazi propaganda minister Joseph) Goebbels is the one who directs the world’s communications so that tens of thousands of journalists are silenced in the face of their murdered colleagues and 20,000 babies torn to pieces by bombs,” he added.

He also denounced the Israeli army’s storming of the Al Jazeera television news network’s occupied West Bank bureau in Ramallah early Sunday, in which they ordered the office to be shut for 45 days.

The president’s comments come a day after the US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, Deborah Lipstadt, questioned Petro’s criticism of the Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip.

“President Gustavo Petro’s continued rhetoric normalizes anti-Semitism. We cannot accept it. We cannot tolerate it. We must condemn these harmful narratives,” Lipstadt said in a message published on the social media account of the US Embassy in Bogota.

Petro responded to Lipstadt on his X account.

“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.

Israel launched a destructive military campaign in the Gaza Strip in response to an Oct. 7 attack by the Palestinian group Hamas, which killed 1,200 people.

It has since killed more than 41,400 Palestinians in Gaza, displaced the majority of the 2.3 million population of the coastal enclave, and left many of them starving by its blockade of international aide.