Tomorrow, Tuesday, South Africa will chair an extraordinary virtual summit of the BRICS countries, which it includes along with Brazil, Russia, India, and China, devoted to discussing the Israeli war on Gaza and “the situation in Gaza and the Middle East.”

The presidency in Pretoria said on Monday that South African President Cyril Ramaphosa called, “in his capacity as Chairman of the BRICS group,” to hold an extraordinary joint meeting on the situation in Gaza on Tuesday at 12:00 GMT.

In turn, Chinese television announced that President Xi Jinping will participate in the BRICS summit via video, and will deliver a speech during the summit.

The Kremlin announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin will participate in the meeting. He said in a statement, “On November 21, the Russian President will participate in an extraordinary BRICS summit (via video technology) to discuss the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”

After the Israeli occupation began its war on Gaza, on October 7, the Kremlin called for a ceasefire, stressing that the only way to achieve permanent peace in the Middle East is to establish a Palestinian state.

The Israeli war on the Gaza Strip entered its forty-fifth day, and left behind a large number of massacres, which have claimed the lives of more than 13 thousand martyrs to date, most of them children and women.

Putin held the United States responsible for the bloody conflict, and accused it of monopolizing the Israeli-Palestinian peace process for years without succeeding in finding solutions.

The remaining heads of state of the BRICS group will participate in the virtual meeting, in addition to representatives of the countries that were invited to join in January during the group’s last summit in Johannesburg, namely Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the UAE.

The President of South Africa will open this meeting, in which each country present will have a speech, according to a presidential statement.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres will also attend the meeting, at the end of which the leaders are expected to adopt a “joint statement on the situation in the Middle East, especially in Gaza.”

Ramaphosa had previously announced that his country had submitted a complaint to the International Criminal Court in order to investigate war crimes committed by the Israeli occupation in the Gaza Strip. He said that his country believes that Israel is committing war crimes and genocide in the Gaza Strip, in which thousands of Palestinians were killed, in addition to the destruction of hospitals and public infrastructure.

The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, said last Friday that he had received a request from five countries to investigate the situation in the Palestinian territories.

Karim Khan confirmed that the request came from South Africa, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Comoros and Djibouti.

The South African government announced, at the beginning of this month, the recall of its diplomats in Tel Aviv for consultations, expressing its concern about the atrocities committed by the Israeli occupation in Gaza.

(Agence France-Presse, Reuters, Al-Arabi Al-Jadeed)