President of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva threw away the speech he had prepared for the opening on Oct. 25 of a new tripartite Federal Council of governors, mayors and federal officials, whose mandate is to discuss domestic policies. Lula instead began by addressing the horror unfolding in the Middle East. Without naming either Israel or Palestine, he focused, as he has since Oct. 7, on the killing of children in the conflict.
“It’s not a question of discussing who is right and who is wrong. Who fired the first shot and who fired the second. The problem is this: It’s not a war, it’s a genocide that has already killed almost 2,000 children who have nothing to do with this war, who are the victims of this war, and, frankly, I don’t know how any human being is capable of war knowing that the result of this war is the death of innocent children,” he told the meeting, with passion.
