Gleisi calls the Israeli minister a “disgrace” after criticizing Lula’s mistake

PT’s national president, Gleisi Hoffmann, attacked Israel’s Foreign Minister, Israel Katz, for having mocked President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s (PT) miscalculation regarding the number of victims of the war in Gaza.

Last Wednesday (3), Lula stated in a speech that 12.3 million children died in Israel’s counterattack against Hamas, the correct figure being 12 thousand. The error did not go unnoticed by Katz, who said that “there should be a law that requires every person who wants to become president to learn how to count.”

The speech was not well received by Gleisi, who classified Katz’s statement as an “intolerable mockery”, and that Lula had just a “very understandable lapse”.

“The Israeli ambassador’s mockery of President Lula’s speech is intolerable. Even though the numbers were changed, in a completely understandable lapse, the cruel reality is that children are the biggest victims of the Netanyahu government’s massacre in Gaza. And Lula expressed humanity’s indignation, the same as that expressed by the UN Human Rights Council regarding the crimes committed by Israel’s far-right government,” Gleisi said on social media.

The PT leader also called Katz a “disgrace to the country he represents”.

Katz has become a strong critic of Lula since the president compared the Israeli reaction to Hamas with the Nazi Holocaust, classifying it as a “genocide” of Palestinians.

The PT member was declared “persona non grata” in Israel and was the target of constant apologies for the comparison – diplomat Celso Amorim, Lula’s special advisor for international affairs, spoke out against the retraction.

In his speech on Wednesday (3), during the National Conference on the Rights of Children and Adolescents, in Brasília, Lula also classified the bombings as an “insane war against humanity”.

“To the children, to the almost 40 thousand who died and were left fatherless and motherless because of Covid. Children in Brazil die from malnutrition because they still do not receive the necessary calories and proteins. But, above all, it is a tribute to the almost 12 million and 300 thousand children who died in the Gaza Strip, in Israel, bombed in an insane war against humanity,” he said.

According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, controlled by Hamas, around 12,400 children died among the more than 30,000 victims of the conflict. The numbers cannot be independently checked.