Israel’s Foreign Minister Eli Cohen accused UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres of justifying Hamas’ October 7 attack and canceled his meeting with him.
“I will not meet with the UN Secretary General. After October 7th there is no room for a balanced approach. Hamas must be erased from the world!,” Cohen stated.
Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan called for him to resign.
Guterres “who shows understanding for the campaign of mass murder of children, women, and the elderly, is not fit to lead the UN,” Erdan said.
“There is no justification or point in talking to those who show compassion for the most terrible atrocities committed against the citizens of Israel and the Jewish people. There are simply no words,” he added.
He spoke after Guterres condemned both the IDF aerial bombing of Gaza and Hamas’ infiltration into Southern Israel in which over 1,400 civilians and soldiers were killed in a brutal manner that included burning victims alive, dismembering them and rapping them.
Rising Palestinian death toll, according to Hamas reports
According to Hamas close to 6,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. Israel has said that some of the death are due to failed Palestinian rocket launches.
“The relentless bombardment of Gaza by Israeli forces, the level of civilian casualties, and the wholesale destruction of neighborhoods continue to mount and are deeply alarming,” Guterres said.
“Protecting civilians does not mean ordering more than one million people to evacuate to the south, where there is no shelter, no food, no water, no medicine and no fuel, and then continuing to bomb the south itself,” Guterres said.
He spoke of the long history of Palestinian suffering.
“The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation,” Guterres said.
“They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing,” he explained.
“But the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas,” Guterres said.
The he added, “And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”
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