Merve Aydogan
23 September 2025•Update: 23 September 2025
HAMILTON, Canada
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Monday condemned Israel's ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip, saying it amounts to an effort to "exterminate the Palestinian people."
"The conflict between Israel and Palestine is the paramount symbol of the obstacles faced by multilateralism," Lula said, warning that "the tyranny of the veto sabotages the very reason for the UN's existence of avoiding atrocities like the ones that motivated its founding from happening again."
Stressing that the pillars of statehood have been systematically undermined in the Palestinian case, he said: "A state is based on three pillars: territory, population and government, all of which have been systematically undermined in the Palestinian case."
"How can we talk about territory in the face of an illegal occupation that grows with each new settlement? How do you keep a population in the face of the ethnic cleansing we are witnessing in real time?"
Pointing to the dire situation in Gaza, Lula declared: "There is no more appropriate word to describe what is happening in Gaza than ‘genocide.’"
Citing this, he announced that "Brazil decided to become a party to the case submitted by South Africa to the International Court of Justice."
"What is happening in Gaza is not only the extermination of the Palestinian people, but an attempt to annihilate their dream of a nation. Both Israel and Palestine have the right to exist," he said, while saluting countries that have recognized Palestine, as Brazil did in 2010.
Lula added that Brazil will strengthen controls on imports from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and continue to suspend defense material exports, including dual-use items that could be used "in crimes against humanity and genocide."
Lula's remarks come during a high-level international conference for the peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine and implementation of the two-state solution. During the conference, French President Emmanuel Macron announced an official decision to recognize the Palestinian state. Countries like Australia, Canada, Belgium and Malta have also officially announced their decision to recognize Palestine.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has been carrying out a genocide in Gaza, which has so far killed more than 65,300 Palestinians, most of them women and children.
