Portugal maintains its defense of the two-state solution, Israel and Palestine, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation said today in Maputo, after activists vandalized the ministry’s headquarters in Lisbon.
“The Minister for Foreign Affairs is in Brussels today for a meeting of the Foreign Affairs Council and will have the opportunity to comment on this (…), but without forgetting what Portugal’s support for the two-state solution has been,” said Francisco André, questioned by Lusa on the sidelines of a two-day visit to Maputo.
“And, specifically, and Portugal’s financial support, which is quite visible, for the United Nations Agency operating in Gaza, as we all know,” he added, referring further comments on today’s incident to Minister João Cravinho.
Activists in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance smashed several windows of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Lisbon at dawn today and painted the words “Israel kills, Portugal supports” on the building’s gate, the PSP confirmed.
In a note sent to Lusa, a group of activists in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance and with the Collective for the Liberation of Palestine, Climáximo and the Lisbon Student Climate Strike pointed out what they consider to be the “support of the Portuguese government, and particularly the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for a colonial project that for more than 75 years has been based on the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people”.
“In the last four months, this support has become even clearer,” says the group, recalling that since October 7, 2023 – the time of the surprise attack by the Islamist movement Hamas against southern Israel – Minister João Cravinho “was quick to show his solidarity with the Zionist regime.”
“On several occasions, he defended Israel’s right ‘to defend itself’, [Portugal’s] ‘duty of solidarity with Israel’ and underlined ‘the friendship between Portugal and Israel’,” he stresses.
In the note, the members of this group report the phrase painted on the gate of the MFA building, as well as the breaking of glass, information confirmed by the PSP and the GNR, which guards the building.
Speaking to Lusa, a GNR source confirmed that at 03:00 the officers who were inside the building realized that glass had been broken and a phrase painted on the gate, recalling that no one was arrested.
“The officers were inside and by the time they realized there was broken glass and the sentence had been painted over,” explained the source, adding that the only way to identify the perpetrators now is to use video surveillance footage.
“It wasn’t the first night that we had elements of the pro-Palestinian movement there,” he said.
In the note released today, the group calling for the action recalls that even when, in January, the International Criminal Court agreed to rule on the South African government’s petition regarding the crime of apartheid committed by the Zionist regime, “the Portuguese government never came out in support of that complaint”.
“On the contrary, in the same week that the trial began in The Hague, João Cravinho announced that the Portuguese army would take part in the military attack on the Huthis, a Yemeni group that has carried out various resistance actions in solidarity with the Palestinian people,” he adds.
The activists also consider that, at the beginning of February alone, “when more than 25,000 Palestinians had already been killed in the Gaza Strip and almost two million had become refugees”, João Cravinho criticized Israel, quoting phrases from the ruler at the time, considering that Israel’s attitude was not just one of self-defence.
