La Paz: Bolivia on Tuesday said it was severing diplomatic ties with Israel over its “disproportionate” attacks in Gaza, as two other Latin American countries recalled their ambassadors over the mounting humanitarian crisis.
Bolivia “has decided to cut diplomatic relations with the State of Israel, in repudiation and condemnation of the aggressive and disproportionate Israeli military offensive being carried out in the Gaza Strip,” deputy foreign minister Freddy Mamani told a press conference.
Minister of the Presidency Maria Nela Prada also announced the country was sending humanitarian aid to Gaza.
“We demand an end to the attacks” in the Gaza Strip “which have so far caused thousands of civilian deaths and the forced displacement of Palestinians,” she said at the same press conference.
The government of leftist Luis Arce is the first in Latin America to cut ties with Israel since the divisive conflict erupted with the Hamas attacks on October 7, which Israeli authorities say killed more than 1,400 people.
Bolivia only announced it was restoring ties with Israel in 2019, a decade after they were cut over previous attacks on the Gaza Strip.
Hamas hailed Bolivia’s decision on Tuesday, saying it “holds it in high esteem”.
A statement by the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem on Wednesday sought to play down Tuesday’s decision by Bolivia, saying “relations between the countries had been devoid of content anyway” since a government handover there. Accusing Bolivia of “capitulation to terrorism and to the ayatollah regime in Iran”
The leaders of both Colombia and Chile also spoke out Tuesday against the Israeli offensive on Hamas, which the Hamas-controlled health ministry says has now killed more than 8,500 Palestinians — two-thirds of them women and children.
“I have decided to recall our ambassador to Israel (Margarita Manjarrez) for consultation. If Israel does not stop the massacre of the Palestinian people, we cannot be there,” Colombia’s leftist President Gustavo Petro wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Chile, which has the largest Palestinian population outside the Arab world, also said Tuesday it was recalling its ambassador to Israel in protest against Israel’s “unacceptable violations of international humanitarian law.”
Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, whose country holds the rotating presidency of the UN Security Council, has urged a cease-fire.
He said the “terrorist attack” by Palestinian militants against Israel did not justify killing “millions of innocents” in Gaza.
“Just because Hamas committed a terrorist attack against Israel doesn’t mean Israel has to kill millions of innocents,” he said in a live address on social media.
Bolivia cuts ties with Israel over Gaza strikes, others recall envoys
https://arab.news/9gsjg
Bolivia cuts ties with Israel over Gaza strikes, others recall envoys
- Government of leftist Luis Arce is the first in Latin America to cut ties with Israel since the divisive conflict erupted with the Hamas attacks
Only 4% women on ballot as Bangladesh prepares for post-Hasina vote
- Women PMs have ruled Bangladesh for over half of its independent history
- For 2026 vote, only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates
DHAKA: As Bangladesh prepares for the first election since the ouster of its long-serving ex-prime minister Sheikh Hasina, only 4 percent of the registered candidates are women, as more than half of the political parties did not field female candidates.
The vote on Feb. 12 will bring in new leadership after an 18-month rule of the caretaker administration that took control following the student-led uprising that ended 15 years in power of Hasina’s Awami League party.
Nearly 128 million Bangladeshis will head to the polls, but while more than 62 million of them are women, the percentage of female candidates in the race is incomparably lower, despite last year’s consensus reached by political parties to have at least 5 percent women on their lists.
According to the Election Commission, among 1,981 candidates only 81 are women, in a country that in its 54 years of independence had for 32 years been led by women prime ministers — Hasina and her late rival Khaleda Zia.
According to Dr. Rasheda Rawnak Khan from the Department of Anthropology at Dhaka University, women’s political participation was neither reflected by the rule of Hasina nor Zia.
“Bangladesh has had women rulers, not women’s rule,” Khan told Arab News. “The structure of party politics in Bangladesh is deeply patriarchal.”
Only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates for the 2026 vote. Percentage-wise, the Bangladesh Socialist Party was leading with nine women, or 34 percent of its candidates.
The election’s main contender, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, whose former leader Zia in 1991 became the second woman prime minister of a predominantly Muslim nation — after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto — was the party that last year put forward the 5 percent quota for women.
For the upcoming vote, however, it ended up nominating only 10 women, or 3.5 percent of its 288 candidates.
The second-largest party, Jamaat-e-Islami, has not nominated a single woman.
The 4 percent participation is lower than in the previous election in 2024, when it was slightly above 5 percent, but there was no decreasing trend. In 2019, the rate was 5.9 percent, and 4 percent in 2014.
“We have not seen any independent women’s political movement or institutional activities earlier, from where women could now participate in the election independently,” Khan said.
“Real political participation is different and difficult as well in this patriarchal society, where we need to establish internal party democracy, protection from political violence, ensure direct election, and cultural shifts around female leadership.”
While the 2024 student-led uprising featured a prominent presence of women activists, Election Commission data shows that this has not translated into their political participation, with very few women contesting the upcoming polls.
“In the student movement, women were recruited because they were useful, presentable for rallies and protests both on campus and in the field of political legitimacy. Women were kept at the forefront for exhibiting some sort of ‘inclusive’ images to the media and the people,” Khan said.
“To become a candidate in the general election, one needs to have a powerful mentor, money, muscle power, control over party people, activists, and locals. Within the male-dominated networks, it’s very difficult for women to get all these things.”
