President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made harsh criticisms of Israel during a meeting with his Egyptian counterpart, Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, on Thursday, February 15.

“Brazil was a country that strongly condemned Hamas’ position in the attack on Israel and the kidnapping of hundreds of people. And we condemn it and call it a terrorist act. But there is no explanation for Israel’s behavior, under the pretext of defeating Hamas, to be killing women and children, something that has never been seen in any war that I know of,” said Lula.

The Brazilian president’s statement was made amid Israel’s attack on the city of Rafah, on the border with Egypt, where about 1.4 million Palestinians, many of them refugees, are sheltered. On Tuesday, February 13, Brazil made public its worries with the new phase of the military operation focused on Rafah. In an official statement, Itamaraty—another name for Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs—warns that Israel’s actions “will have serious consequences, in addition to new civilian victims, [and] a new wave of forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.”

A massacre promoted by Israel against the Palestinian population in Rafah has been also criticized by the country’s closest allies, such as the US.

“I want to say to President Al-Sisi that it’s a huge joy to come back to Egypt in such an important moment of the world’s politics, in a moment in which we should be talking about increasing the world’s food production, economic growth, distribution of income and generation of jobs. However, we are talking about wars,” Lula said.

Lula defends “new geopolitics in the UN”

In his statement, the Brazilian president defended a new geopolitics in the UN with the participation of African and Latin American countries. “The right to veto must end, and the members of the UN Security Council must be pacifist players, and not actors who foment war,” said Lula, referring to the actions of the United States in the Council. The country used its veto power against a ceasefire proposal presented by Brazil at the beginning of hostilities.

“The only thing you can do is ask for peace through the press, but it seems to me that Israel has the primacy of not complying with any decision coming from the UN leadership,” said Lula.

Read Lula’s full statement in Egypt here.

This article was originally published on Brasil de Fato.