Palestinians walk past a house hit in an Israeli strike in the Bureij refugee camp, in the central Gaza Strip, on October 8, 2024.    (Photo by Reuters)

Managua, October 12 (RHC)-- The government of Nicaragua has stated that it is breaking off diplomatic relations with Israel over the ongoing genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, which has killed over 42,000 people, more than half of them women and children.

Nicaraguan Vice President Rosario Murillo announced the move to state media on Friday.  The Central American nation’s Congress had, earlier in the day, passed a resolution requesting Nicaragua take action to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the Gaza war.

The conflict, the Nicaraguan government said, now also “extends against Lebanon and gravely threatens Syria, Yemen and Iran.”

Murillo, who is President Daniel Ortega’s wife, said her husband instructed the government to sever diplomatic relations with the “fascist” and “genocidal” Tel Aviv regime.

Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to intensified Israeli atrocities against Palestinians in the West Bank.

The regime’s bloody onslaught on Gaza has so far killed at least 42,150 Palestinians and injured another 98,117 individuals. Thousands more are also missing and presumed dead under rubble.

Nicaragua has twice before cut relations with Israel – once in 2010 under Ortega and also in 1982 under the Sandinista revolutionary government led by Ortega following the country’s 1979 revolution.  The rupture of diplomatic relations comes at a time when Israel is under growing isolation on the global stage amid a brutal campaign in Gaza and expanding attacks across West Asia, including in Lebanon.

Condemnation of Israel’s yearlong war on Gaza is relatively widespread in Latin America, where leaders in countries such as Brazil, Colombia and Chile have fiercely criticized the Tel Aviv regime’s brutalities in the Palestinian coastal sliver.

On Friday, the Palestinian mission to the United Nations announced that those three nations had helped spearhead a letter of support for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, whom Israel declared persona non grata last week.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro cut diplomatic ties with Israel in May, calling the administration of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu “genocidal.”   Brazilian leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva also recalled the country’s ambassador to the occupied territories that same month.