On Wednesday night (12), Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro (non-party) reaffirmed his pro-Israel stance by commenting on the ongoing conflicts between Israeli and Palestinian forces, which have left at least 74 dead in recent days. .
“The indiscriminate launching of rockets against Israeli territory is absolutely unjustifiable. The offensive provoked by the militants who control the Gaza Strip and the Israeli reaction has already left both sides dead and injured,” the president wrote in a social network .
“I express my condolences to the families of the victims and call for an immediate end to all attacks against Israel, expressing my support for the ongoing efforts to reduce tension in Gaza,” he added.
Bolsonaro is an ally of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who was in office in Brasilia in 2019. At the time, the president promised to move the Brazilian embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a city disputed between Palestinians and Israelis. The gesture would be a way of showing that Brazil considers the city as the capital of Israel, but it was not carried out under pressure from Arab countries.
Jerusalem is crucial to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On the one hand, Israel claims the whole city, including its eastern sector captured in the 1967 war, as its capital. The Palestinians, for their part, are seeking to make East Jerusalem the capital of a future state in the West Bank and Gaza.
At the center of the current clashes are freedom of worship in parts of the Jerusalem area known as the ancient city – which Palestinians say is hampered – and a court order that provides for the eviction of Palestinian families. of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, which, a regional court, is to return the land to the Jews.
The conflict between Hamas and Israel worsened on Wednesday (12), with reports of street clashes and further aerial bombardment in the Gaza Strip, hence, over the past two days, the Islamic group launched more than a thousand rockets against Israeli cities. , including the economic capital Tel Aviv.
In total, at least 74 people have died since Monday (10) – 67 in Gaza, according to the local health ministry, and 7 in Israel, according to Israeli medical officials.
Israel on Wednesday carried out hundreds of airstrikes in Gaza and said the offensive killed at least 16 intelligence chiefs and members of the military wing of Hamas, the group that controls the Gaza Strip. On the other hand, faction activists said they fired at least 220 rockets at the cities of Tel Aviv and Beer Sheva on Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning.
The spiral of violence has triggered a warning from the international community, which is trying to calm the situation and prevent the new phase of the conflict from leading to open war between the two sides. For this reason, the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia and China on Wednesday called for those involved and for an end to the attacks.
However, there is no consensus on what the next steps should be, as some countries – like the United States and Germany – are closer to Israelis, while others – mostly majority countries. Muslim, like Pakistan and Turkey – support the Palestinian cause.