BOGOTA   -  Colombian President Gustavo Petro has announced plans to cut diplomatic ties with Israel over its war in the Gaza Strip, which human rights advocates and other experts have warned could amount to genocide.

Speaking to a crowd marking International Workers’ Day in Bogota on Wednesday, Petro said countries cannot be passive in the face of the crisis unfolding in Gaza. “Tomorrow (Thursday) diplomatic relations with the state of Israel will be severed... for having a genocidal president,” Petro told a May Day rally in Bogota -- referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Petro has been a harsh critic of the assault on Gaza that followed an unprecedented Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, resulting in the deaths of some 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to Israeli figures.

Hamas militants also took about 250 hostages, 129 of whom remain in Gaza, including 34 Israel says are presumed dead. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 34,568 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory. On Wednesday, Petro told thousands of supporters that the world cannot accept “genocide, the extermination of an entire people.”

“If Palestine dies, humanity dies,” he said to loud applause from the crowd, some of whom flew pro-Palestinian banners. Israel responded by describing Petro as “anti-Semitic and hateful” and saying his stance amounted to handing a reward to Hamas. “The Colombian president has promised to reward Hamas murderers and rapists -- and today he delivered,” Foreign Minister Israel Katz said on X. “History will remember that Gustavo Petro decided to stand by the most despicable monsters humanity has known, who burned babies, murdered children, raped women and kidnapped innocent civilians,” Katz added.

In October, days after the start of the war, Israel announced it was “halting security exports” to Colombia after Petro accused Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant of using language about the people of Gaza similar to what the “Nazis said of the Jews.” Israel at the time accused Petro of “expressing support for the atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists, fueling anti-Semitism,” and summoned Colombia’s ambassador.

Bogota subsequently demanded that Israel’s envoy leave the South American country.

Petro, Colombia’s first leftist president, has also asserted that “democratic peoples cannot allow Nazism to reestablish itself in international politics.”

In February, he suspended Israeli weapons purchases after dozens of people died in a scramble for food aid in the war-torn Palestinian territory -- an event he said was “called genocide and recalls the Holocaust.”

Colombia’s armed forces, engaged in a decades-long conflict with leftist guerrillas, rightwing paramilitaries and drug cartels, use Israeli-made weapons and aircraft.

The country has a history of strong diplomatic and military relations with Israel and the United States.