Brazilian President Lula repeats accusations of genocide against Israel. These six maps show how little has changed at the front in the past year

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has again accused the Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip of genocide. “What the government of the State of Israel is doing is not war, it is genocide,” he said on Saturday evening (local time) in Rio de Janeiro. “Children and women are being murdered.” He supports the establishment of a free and sovereign Palestinian state. “May this Palestinian state live in harmony with the State of Israel,” the left-wing head of state said.

The Gaza war was sparked by a massacre on October 7 last year, in which terrorists from Hamas and other groups killed 1,200 people in Israel and abducted another 250 as hostages to Gaza. Israel responded with massive air strikes and a ground offensive. Nearly 30,000 people have been killed and around 70,000 injured in Israeli military operations since the start of the war, according to Hamas’s health authority.

When it comes to the dead, authorities make no distinction between fighters and civilians. The figures cannot currently be independently verified.

Lula caused a diplomatic scandal last weekend when he compared the Israeli military operation in Gaza to the Holocaust. “What is happening to the Palestinian people in Gaza has never happened at any other time in history. “That already happened: when Hitler decided to kill the Jews,” he said at the African Union summit in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz subsequently declared him persona non grata and summoned the Brazilian ambassador to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. The government in Brazil, in turn, has summoned the Israeli ambassador and recalled its representative in Israel for consultations.

“No one will separate our people – not even you, Lula,” Israeli Foreign Minister Katz wrote on news platform X, formerly Twitter, above a painted photo showing Israelis and Brazilians arm in arm. Katz had also demanded an apology from Lula and that he take back his comments. Lula has now rejected that. “I will not trade my dignity for a lie,” he said. (sda/dpa)