UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that the Hamas attacks did not come out of a vacuum, and that the Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.
He expressed grave concern about the clear violations of international humanitarian law (committed by the Israeli occupation) in Gaza, stressing that no party to an armed conflict is above this law.
He added that “protecting civilians does not mean ordering more than a million people to evacuate to the south, where there is no shelter, food, water, medicine or fuel, and then bombing the south itself”.
He added that the Palestinians have seen their land devoured by settlements and plagued by violence, their economy stifled, their people displaced and their homes demolished, and their hopes for a political solution to their plight vanishing.
He continued: “The grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas, and those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”
The Secretary-General also stressed the need to call on all parties to respect their obligations under international humanitarian law, to take constant care in the conduct of military operations to spare civilians from danger, to respect and protect hospitals and to respect the inviolability of UN facilities, which today shelter more than 600,000 Palestinians. He said: “Even war has rules.”
He expressed his concern about the continued bombardment of Gaza by Israeli occupation forces, the level of civilian casualties and the scale of destruction, and expressed his grief at the killing of 35 staff members of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) during the bombardment of Gaza over the past two weeks.
Israeli Anger
It seems that the UN Secretary-General’s condemnation of the Israeli occupation army’s violations of international law in Gaza has angered Tel Aviv. The Israeli occupation state’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, tore up the report of the Human Rights Council during a session of the General Assembly because it condemned the war crimes committed by the occupation against Palestinians. Gilad Erdan published a video clip and a series of tweets on his Twitter account criticising the Human Rights Council. He said it had condemned Israel in ninety-five resolutions compared with one hundred and forty-two resolutions against the rest of the world’s countries. Erdan also criticised the Human Rights Council report’s failure to address Hamas, and said the report’s place is the antisemitism dustbin.
The Israeli occupation authorities on Tuesday demanded that UN Secretary-General António Guterres “resign immediately”, while the occupation state’s foreign minister, Eli Cohen, refused to meet Guterres after his statements in which he said that “the Hamas attack did not come out of a vacuum”.
He posted on the “X” platform that “after 7 October there is no room for a balanced approach. Hamas must be wiped off the face of the earth”, and stressed that he would not meet the UN Secretary-General.
For his part, the Israeli occupation state’s representative to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, called on Guterres to “resign immediately”.
For the 19th day, the Israeli army has continued to launch intensive air strikes that have destroyed entire neighbourhoods in Gaza and killed 5,791 Palestinians, including 2,360 children, 1,292 women and 295 elderly people, and injured 16,297 people, according to the Ministry of Health in the Strip.
During the same period, Hamas killed more than 1,400 Israelis and injured 5,132, according to the Israeli Ministry of Health, and captured more than 200 Israelis, including high-ranking military personnel.
