MEXICO CITY — Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Monday called Israel’s siege on the Gaza Strip a “genocide,” marking a decisive shift in her government’s stance on the conflict — and putting it at odds with the United States.
Sheinbaum, who is one of a handful Jewish heads of state, has come under increasing pressure from members of her leftist coalition to more forcefully condemn Israel’s assault on the small Palestinian enclave, where at least 65,000 people have died and more than half a million are trapped in famine.
Speaking to journalists at her daily news conference, Sheinbaum said Mexico stands “with the international community to stop this genocide in Gaza.”
Claudia Sheinbaum, 63, is the first Jewish leader of Mexico, a nation that is overwhelmingly Catholic.
Her comments came amid a meeting in New York of the United Nations General Assembly, where several countries, including France, Britain, Canada and Australia, have formally recognized Palestine as a state. Mexico has formally supported Palestinian statehood for years.
Sheinbaum, 63, is the first Jewish leader of Mexico, a nation that is overwhelmingly Catholic. She grew up in a secular household and rarely talks about her Jewish identity.
Sheinbaum, who entered politics from the world of leftist activism, has long supported the Palestinian cause. In 2009, she wrote a letter to Mexican newspaper La Jornada fiercely condemning Israel’s actions in an earlier war with Gaza, where 13 Israelis and more than 1,000 Palestinian civilians and militants had been killed.
Sheinbaum evoked the Holocaust, saying “many of my relatives … were exterminated in concentration camps.”
“I can only watch with horror the images of the Israeli bombing of Gaza,” she wrote. “Nothing justifies the murder of Palestinian civilians. Nothing, nothing, nothing, can justify the murder of a child.”
The latest conflict broke out in 2023 after Hamas fighters broke through a border fence encircling Gaza and killed more than 1,000 Israelis, most of them civilians.
Israel responded with a punishing assault on Gaza from air, land and sea, displacing nearly all of the strip’s 2 million people and damaging or destroying 90% of homes.
Since taking office last year, Sheinbaum has repeatedly called for a cease-fire and reiterated Mexico’s support for a two-state solution in the region, but until Monday she had refrained from categorizing what is unfolding in Gaza as a genocide.
That was possibly to avert conflict with the United States, which has given more foreign assistance to Israel than any other country globally in the decades since World War II, and which has supported the war on Gaza with billions of dollars in weapons and other military aid.
Sheinbaum, whose nation’s economy depends heavily on trade with the U.S., has spent much of her first year in office seeking to appease President Trump on the issues of security and migration in order to avoid the worst of his threatened tariffs on Mexican imports.
Her comments on Gaza come amid growing global consensus that Israel is committing genocide.
The world’s leading association of genocide scholars has declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
The International Assn. of Genocide Scholars recently passed a resolution that says Israel’s conduct meets the legal definition as spelled out in the United Nations convention on genocide.
And this month, a U.N. commission of inquiry also found Israel has committed genocide.
An Israeli flag waves over debris in an area of the Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel last month. Israel’s assault on the Palestinian enclave has killed at least 65,000 people.
(Maya Levin / Associated Press)
“Explicit statements by Israeli civilian and military authorities and the pattern of conduct of the Israeli security forces indicate that the genocidal acts were committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as a group,” the commission wrote.
It added that under the Genocide Convention, other nations have an obligation to “prevent and punish the crime of genocide.”
Israeli officials dismissed the report as “baseless.”