How Israel used Venezuela earthquake response for propaganda in Caracas
How Israel used Venezuela earthquake response for propaganda in Caracas
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Ana Maria Monjardino
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Tue, 07/21/2026 - 09:23
The country has been accused of humanitarian whitewashing while committing genocide in Palestine
A Venezuelan flag flies over the rubble of collapsed buildings as a rescue worker stands in Caraballeda after an earthquake, 20 July 2026 (Federico Parra/AFP)
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On 24 June 2026, a deadly twin earthquake spread havoc across Venezuela, destroying 80 percent of buildings in the coastal state of La Guaira alone. Multiple reports put the death toll above 5,000 amid widespread devastation across the nation.
The international response was prompt, with aid packages, engineers and rescue workers arriving from many countries.
Despite the absence of diplomatic relations since 2009, the State of Israel also sent a delegation from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Israeli military's Home Front Command to provide “aid and disaster response.”
Led by Yoed Magen, Israel’s ambassador-designate to Mexico, pro-Israel groups and the military's Brigadier General Elad Edri advertised humanitarian rescue efforts on social media in stark contrast to its role back in Gaza, where at least 73,000 people have been killed by Israel since October 2023 and the territory reduced to rubble by Israeli bombing.
“This has to be viewed in the wider context of Israel’s growing isolation on the international stage and their desperate attempt to cultivate whatever relationships they can," Tariq Kenney-Shawa, US policy fellow at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, told Middle East Eye.
“Israel’s humanitarian gestures are never anything more than that,” he said. “They are just gestures.”
On 3 July, Delcy Rodriguez, the acting president of Venezuela, announced during a press conference, “We received a highly specialised and professional team from Israel.”
She outlined their purported role, from assessing infrastructure to locating survivors, and personally thanked Venezuela’s chief rabbi, Isaac Cohen, for coordinating with the Israeli government.
Changing positions
Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yvan Gil, who has previously called his Israeli counterpart, Gideon Sa’ar, a “war criminal and genocidaire,” also expressed his gratitude to the state of Israel.
On 8 July, Rodríguez held a meeting with the Israeli delegation to discuss reconstruction and requested their presence for a further two weeks, prompting the dispatch of additional Israeli forces to “expand activities”.
This constituted the first official engagement between Caracas and Tel Aviv since former President Hugo Chavez severed diplomatic relations in 2009, a position maintained by former President Nicholas Maduro, who entered office in 2013 and remained there until his abduction by US forces on 3 January 2026.
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“Initially, Delcy Rodríguez maintained an anti-Israel stance, consistent with the position Venezuela’s ruling party has upheld for 27 years,” said Carlos Eduardo Pina, a Venezuelan political analyst at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
She initially rejected the US attack and Maduro’s abduction, condemning “the extremists who promoted this armed aggression” and alleging Zionist undertones.
Now “she is making a political calculation to ingratiate herself with the United States,” Pina told MEE.
“One of the factors that has most negatively impacted the current government's political elite in the eyes of the US public has been their relationship with Hezbollah and Iran, as well as their staunch, long-standing defence of Hamas," he said.
"Consequently, many Republican representatives, and some Democrats, have spent years criticising the Venezuelan government and using those ties to justify US actions against it,” Pina added.
“They are trying to distance themselves from those groups, while simultaneously attempting to forge a connection with Israel.”
But “this did not begin with the earthquake,” he said, adding that “work in this direction has been underway for several months".
"A rapprochement with Israel is also likely to impact or erode support among Delcy Rodriguez’s political base, so they can’t just do it overnight. It is a gradual process.”
Chronic hypocrisy
The practice of sending rescue and aid teams to areas devastated by natural disasters is not new, Kenney-Shawa says, but the Venezuelan case is "particularly ironic".
“They are responding to a devastating earthquake in which thousands of people are trapped under rubble across Venezuela and yet, in Gaza, we have 10,000 missing people who are also believed to be trapped under millions of tonnes of rubble from Israeli bombs and bulldozers.”
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The amount of debris produced by Israel’s genocide in Gaza is approximately 20 times the amount generated by conflicts globally since 2008.
This tactic was first employed in 1953, just five years after the Nakba, when an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced.
The newly-established Israeli military sent a humanitarian delegation to help the survivors of an earthquake in Greece, where they were hailed as “sailors of salvation” and a street on the island of Kefalonia was named “Israil” in their honour. It maintains that appellation to this day.
The 2010 earthquake in Haiti also provided Israel ample PR potential.
“We always carry an Israeli flag and hang it wherever we work,” explained Shachar Zahavi, the CEO and founder of the Israeli NGO IsraAID, which was active in Haiti at the time, alongside the Israeli military. “We don’t do anything under the radar,” he added.
Yet, by contrast, Israel was continually killing and displacing Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank and, in Haiti itself, had sold arms to multiple 20th-century dictators.
'Great PR opportunities'
In Venezuela, non-governmental groups including IsraAID and Zaka, the group discredited for falsifying claims of beheaded babies and systematic sexual violence on 7 October 2023, have also rushed to the scene.
From clearing debris to assessing buildings, they are working under a "Humanitarian Coalition” led by an Israeli rabbi, Yosef Garmon.
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Garmon established the first Latin American branch of Zaka in response to the 2018 Volcan de Fuego eruption in Guatemala, one month after former president Jimmy Morales, a staunch Christian Zionist, moved the Guatemalan embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
They built houses for displaced families, establishing a community called “New Jerusalem” in the department of Escuintla, while the Israeli foreign ministry announced that it would send $10,000 in aid.
Only a few decades earlier, during the civil war and state-sponsored genocide of Guatemala’s Indigenous Maya.
Guatemala was the site of abhorrent and well-documented crimes and Israel served as an enabler of that killing
“Natural disasters provide a great PR opportunity,” said Ricardo Vaz, lead editor at Venezuelanalysis.
“If you go to a family that has lost everything, you give them a box of food and ask them to take a picture with a flag, then they will say yes.”
Manipulation and disinformation
Israel often sends the press team "with the cameras and the flags" to make it very clear that Israel is "coming to the aid" of the people, Kenney-Shawa says.
After all, “social media and the wider media infrastructure is the tip of their spear when it comes to propaganda,” he said.
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“Over the past couple of months it has been announced that Israel is going to quadruple the amount that they spend on social media propaganda because they recognise that support for Israel has cratered amongst young people.”
But pictures of diligent and dutiful Israeli soldiers amongst the rubble in La Guaira are inseparable from images of the rubble they are creating back in Gaza.
“I do not think any amount of images of Israeli aid workers helping people, whether it is in Venezuela or Haiti, is going to be successful in fundamentally saving their perception on the world stage,” argued Kenney-Shawa.
“Israel has fundamentally lost the argument when it comes to debating facts,” he explained.
So instead of persisting with intellectual debates in which they strive and fail to justify the genocide in Gaza, “they are trying to take advantage of soft power opportunities,” he told MEE.
From aid to arsenal
Israel’s appearance in Venezuela is also tightly bound to its increased presence across Latin America, from Honduras under President Nasry Asfura to Ecuador under Daniel Noboa and, following his inauguration on 7 August, Colombia under Abelardo de la Espriella.
Engulfed by a "war on narco-terrorism", this new right-wing order, led by US President Donald Trump, is rapidly renewing relations with Israel, from returning ambassadors to increasing trade in security equipment and surveillance technology.
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With Venezuela under de facto US control, “Israel's expertise in controlling insurgencies and developing high-tech spyware technology are things they can pitch to the Rodriguez government, or whoever comes next, in order to help the US consolidate its control here,” Vaz told MEE.
“There are already Israeli and US drones flying around," he said.
“We're honored that XTEND technology could support search and rescue efforts following the recent earthquake in Venezuela,” read a recent post by the drone manufacturer, Tel-Aviv-based tech firm XTEND.
“Our thoughts are with everyone affected, and our deepest respect goes to the teams working tirelessly to save lives.”
Back in Palestine, the very same devices are being used to scan buildings and launch ammunition. They have been used since the beginning of Israel’s genocide in October 2023, according to XTEND’s cofounder Aviv Shapira.
In collaboration with the Israeli military's Yiftach Brigade, a top-secret “startup” unit including scientists and engineers, “a warhead has been developed that is mounted on these drones, thus transforming them into a weapon.”
In August 2025, the company was awarded a bid to supply 5000 10-inch offensive FPV drones to the Israeli military
“There is a price to pay for genocide,” said Vaz, or at least there should be. But “the Delcy Rodríguez government seems to have chosen a path of least resistance,” he said.
“With that in mind, it seems like only a matter of time before it reestablishes ties with the Zionist entity.” With boots already on the ground and surveillance equipment overhead, the opportunity is ripe.
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