The Israeli ambassador to Ethiopia, Avraham Neguise, was reportedly expelled from an annual conference on the Rwandan genocide held in the Mandela Hall at the African Union’s headquarters in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, on Monday, April 7.
Neguise was expelled after several delegations of different African countries objected to his participation in the conference, which was paused until he left the hall. As his participation was unexpected, the African Union is reportedly conducting an investigation to detect who invited him. Neguise served as a member of the Knesset with the far-right Likud party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from 2015 to 2019.
The expulsion of the senior Israeli diplomat is seen as part of a wider protest by many African countries against Israel’s genocidal aggression on the besieged Gaza strip, which has continued for over a year and a half, and claimed the lives of over 50,800 Palestinians, according to official estimates from Gaza’s Ministry of Health.
It is worth noting that the African Union joined a case filed in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) by South Africa against Israel’s genocide in Gaza in February 2025.
Israel condemned the expulsion of Neguise
Unabashed by his government’s continuous massacres against Palestinians, the spokesperson of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Oren Marmorstein, condemned the action taken by the African Union against Neguise calling it a distortion of history, which “harms the memory of the murdered.”
“It is outrageous that, at an event commemorating the victims of the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, to which the Israeli ambassador in Addis Ababa was invited, the chairman of the African Union Commission from Djibouti chose to introduce anti-Israel political elements,” Marmorstein stated.
Israel’s international isolation grows as the genocide continues in Gaza
As Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza continues unrelenting, more countries are demonstrating their condemnation of its war crimes through diplomatic, political, economic, and legal actions.
One day after the African Union expelled the Israeli ambassador from the conference, the Dutch Foreign Affairs Minister, Caspar Veldkamp, summoned the Israeli ambassador in the Netherlands over the situation in Gaza.
The move came after the Netherlands announced on Monday “a significant tightening of restrictions on the export of military and dual-use goods to Israel” over the situation in the besieged enclave.
