Venezuelan Acting President Delcy Rodríguez meets with a "humanitarian" delegation from the Israeli settler entity and members of the Jewish community on Tuesday, July 21, 2026. Photo: IG/@presidencialve.
Caracas (OrinocoTribune.com)—Venezuelan Acting President Delcy Rodríguez has led a working meeting with a delegation from the Israeli settler colonial entity, under the guise of the completion of its support operations in the country after the catastrophic June 24 earthquakes.
During the meeting this Tuesday, July 21, Rodríguez formally bid farewell to the delegation and conveyed an official recognition to the genocidal state for their technical and logistical deployment in the affected areas, mirroring similar farewell ceremonies held for other international emergency relief teams.
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The Venezuelan government thanked the Zionist delegation for its work on the ground, which was carried out alongside the local Jewish community in Venezuela, according to the Presidential Press Office.
Since Tel Aviv first announced its intention to send a “humanitarian” delegation to Venezuela, a wave of shock, rejection, and condemnation erupted across domestic and international social media platforms, given the military background of the personnel and the genocidal reputation of the Israeli child-killing forces.
The delegation was supposedly part of a broader response involving more than 30 nations and multilateral organizations that assisted Venezuela with search and rescue operations following the disaster.
The Venezuelan government made the excuse that, given the immense scale of the natural catastrophe, rejecting international aid would have been irresponsible. Nonetheless, the Venezuelan public has questioned the decision to hold a personal, high-level meeting between the acting president and the delegation.
According to the presidential press office, the delegation concluded its tasks after providing operational assistance in emergency response. The team included civil engineering professionals who focused on evaluating collapsed structures, diagnosing building vulnerabilities, and designing a technological tool to monitor infrastructure conditions in the state of La Guaira, the region hardest hit by the quakes.
The spokesperson for the delegation, Roni Kaplan—an Uruguayan-Israeli captain and Spanish-language spokesperson for the Zionist army—spent considerable time in recent days appearing on opposition-leaning local media outlets in Venezuela, tearfully describing his experiences and the destruction caused by the earthquake. However, Kaplan is known internationally as a key apologist for the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Last June, several Uruguayan social organizations requested that their country’s Attorney General investigate him for complicity in Israeli war crimes and genocide.
Numerous analysts characterized the presence of the delegation as a propaganda operation intended to lay the groundwork for restoring diplomatic relations, which were severed by President Hugo Chávez in 2009 following Zionist military aggression against the Palestinian people. Consequently, news of the delegation’s departure was met with relief, particularly as Kaplan’s earlier media statements had suggested an intention to remain in Venezuela long term.
This was not the first high-level interaction between the acting president and the genocidal delegation. Rodríguez had previously met in person with the Zionist delegation and leaders of the local Jewish community on July 8. At the time, Israeli settler colonial media outlets reported that Venezuelan officials had requested an extension of their stay for an additional two weeks. As with Tuesday’s meeting, that initial encounter sparked widespread public criticism.
US embassy briefed on post-earthquake recovery plans
On Wednesday, Public Works Minister Juan José Ramírez held a working meeting in La Guaira with representatives of the US empire’s embassy to finalize technical details regarding the regional cleanup and restoration plan following the June 24 earthquake.
During the session, Ramírez presented “strategies, operational capabilities, and the scope of work carried out in the territory for sanitation, debris removal, and prioritized attention to affected communities,” the minister reported.
Ramírez claimed that these efforts demonstrate the Venezuelan government’s commitment to establishing high-level technical mechanisms to ensure a coordinated, transparent, and efficient post-disaster response.
The regular briefings provided to the US empire’s diplomats have drawn sharp criticism from sectors of the Chavista movement, who view the coordination as an erosion of national sovereignty. However, government officials maintain that the unprecedented magnitude of the disaster leaves no room to decline international technical assistance.
Following the US military aggression on January 3 that resulted in the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Deputy Cilia Flores, analysts agree that Venezuela has been forced to make tactical concessions under pressure from US imperialism to avert total foreign occupation and the further destruction of the nation.
Special for Orinoco Tribune by staff
OT/JRE/AU
