Colombia’s foreign ministry urged for urgent peace talks to end an armed conflict that has killed more than 1,200 people in Israel and occupied territories in Palestine since Saturday.
In a press statement, the foreign ministry urged for a “peace process leading to peaceful coexistence, within mutually agreed and internationally recognized secure borders.”
The statement was a response to an incursion by the armed Hamas group that killed at least 700 people in Israel, according to authorities from that country.
Another 550 were killed in retaliatory attacks on the Gaza strip by Israel’s armed forces, Palestinian authorities said.
In its statement, the Foreign Ministry expressed its solidarity with the victims of these attacks and their families.
Foreign Ministry
President Gustavo Petro ignored calls by Israel’s ambassador to Bogota, Gali Dagan, to support his country’s declaration of war in response to the deadly incursion by Hamas.
In an interview with radio station Blu, Dagan invited Petro to visit Auschwitz, a Nazi extermination camp in Poland, after the president suggested that the Gaza Strip was a concentration camp.
“I have already been to the Auschwitz concentration camp and now I see it mirrored in Gaza,” responded Petro on social media platform X.
The president and his cabinet have consistently pressed for a diplomatic solution to solve the territorial dispute between Israel and Palestine, whose governments both have ambassadors in Colombia.