Colombian President Gustavo Petro (left) met with Palestinian envoy Riyad Mansour at the emergency conference [Getty]
Colombia has hosted a keynote meeting of the Hague Group this week with ministers and envoys from 30 countries working to coordinate legal and diplomatic action against Israel over its war in Gaza.
The two-day summit in Bogotá involved eight founding members, Colombia, South Africa, Cuba, Bolivia, Namibia, Senegal, Malaysia and Honduras, who formed the coalition in January to defend international law and Palestinian rights.
It marks the first time the group has met outside Europe, with participants aiming to turn “years of rhetorical condemnation” into binding measures.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who broke off diplomatic relations with Israel in May over the “war of extermination” in Gaza, said the initiative was a shift “from statements to collective action”.
Writing earlier this month in The Guardian, he argued that governments like his “have a duty to confront Israel” despite the risk of retaliation from Western allies.
South Africa has already faced US aid cuts and politically motivated investigations after filing a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
The Bogotá meeting followed months of escalating legal and diplomatic pressure. In July 2024, the ICJ ruled Israel’s settlement expansion unlawful, and by the end of the year, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant.
Delegates in Bogotá focused on pushing states to enforce those ICC warrants, halting arms sales to Israel, and blocking Israeli military-linked vessels from entering occupied ports.
“What we want is to disrupt the flow of weapons and resources that allow Israel to keep punishing Palestinians,” Colombian deputy foreign minister Mauricio Jaramillo told El País.
Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, urged states to cut military, trade and diplomatic ties with Israel, warning that Gaza faces “a genocide beyond dispute”.
Colombian foreign minister Rosa Yolanda Villavicencio added that the devastation in Gaza was “an unambiguous genocide”.
The meeting gathered officials from China, Qatar, Turkey, Algeria, Indonesia, Spain, Brazil and Ireland, alongside Palestinian UN envoy Riyad Mansour.
Following the meeting, a US State Department spokesperson accused the Hague Group of “weaponising international law to push radical anti-Western agendas”, describing the coalition as an attempt to “delegitimise Israel” and ultimately target the United States and its allies.
The Trump administration has already sanctioned Albanese for her criticism of Israel’s actions.
But participants in Bogotá dismissed the US response. Anil Shilin, a former State Department official who resigned over Gaza, told DropSite News the attending states were exercising their sovereign right to uphold the UN Genocide Convention.
