Bolivia has become the first country to cut ties with Israel since the start of its latest conflict with Hamas, with the South American nation’s leftwing government attributing its decision to alleged war crimes and human rights abuses being committed in the Gaza Strip. The decision was announced at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon by María Nela Prada, a minister in President Luis Arce’s administration. “We demand an end to the attacks on the Gaza Strip which have so far claimed thousands of civilian lives and caused the forced displacement of Palestinians,” the minister told reporters in her country’s de facto capital, La Paz. Bolivia’s deputy foreign minister, Freddy Mamani Machaca, said the decision represented “a repudiation and condemnation of the aggressive and disproportionate Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip and its threat to international peace and security”. Bolivia’s move comes after the former president Evo Morales called for his country to sever ties with Israel because of the “horrific situation facing the Palestinian people”. Writing on X, formerly known as Twitter, earlier this month, Morales demanded Israel be classified as a “terrorist state” and for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and “his accomplices” be denounced to the international criminal court for genocide and war crimes. Bolivia previously broke off relations with Israel in 2009 after the county’s invasion of the Gaza Strip but re-established ties in 2020 under the rightwing president Jeanine Áñez. Bolivia is not the first South American country to express anger at Israel’s reaction to Hamas’s 7 October attacks. Colombia’s leftwing president, Gustavo Petro, recently likened Israel’s actions to those of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis, drawing a rebuke from Israel’s foreign ministry, which accused him of putting Jewish lives in danger and encouraging “the horrific acts of Hamas terrorists” with his “hostile and antisemitic statements”. The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, last week criticized what he called “the insanity of the prime minister of Israel [in] wanting to destroy the Gaza Strip but forgetting that there aren’t just Hamas soldiers there but also women and children who are the big victims of this war”. “Just because Hamas committed a terrorist act against Israel, it doesn’t mean Israel has to kill millions of innocent people,” Lula added in another interview.