Israel has accused UN Secretary-General António Guterres of “a new level of moral vileness” after making an unprecedented appeal to the Security Council for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and slamming his mandate as “a danger to world peace.”
“This is further evidence of the Secretary General’s moral distortion and bias towards Israel. The Secretary-General’s call for a ceasefire is in fact a call to maintain Hamas’ reign of terror in the Gaza Strip,” Israel’s ambassador to the UN said on Wednesday. , Gilad Erdan, on Platform X (formerly Twitter).
“I once again call on the Secretary-General to resign immediately. The UN needs a Secretary-General who supports the war on terrorism, not a Secretary-General who acts according to the script written by Hamas,” added Erdan, who has already had other cases when Guterres had to resign.
For the first time since taking office as head of the United Nations in 2017, Antonio Guterres on Wednesday invoked Article 99 of the United Nations Charter, which states that the secretary-general “may bring to the attention of the Council any matter which in his opinion may jeopardize the maintenance of peace and security throughout the world.”
In this sense, Guterres sent an unprecedented letter to the UN Security Council, calling on the body to “make every effort to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe” in the Gaza Strip, repeating his calls for a ceasefire that has “potentially irreversible consequences” for the Palestinians.
“The scale of human losses in Gaza and Israel in such a short period of time” prompted Guterres to resort exclusively to Article 99 of the UN Charter, according to his spokesman Stephane Dujarric:
“The Secretary-General is invoking one of the rare powers that the Charter gives him,” commented Dujarric, calling the move “dramatic” since the article in question had not been applied “for decades.”
“We would like the Security Council to call for a humanitarian ceasefire,” he added.
According to Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Guterres should have decided to “clearly indicate Hamas’ responsibility for the situation and call on terrorist leaders to surrender and return the hostages, thereby ending the war,” accusing the UN leader of supporting Hamas. a game.”
However, despite Israel’s accusations, the letter Guterres sent to the Security Council explicitly calls for the “immediate and unconditional release” of the Islamist group’s hostages.
Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen also commented on Guterres’ letter to the Security Council, assessing that the former Portuguese Prime Minister’s mandate “poses a danger to world peace.”
The invocation of Article 99 of the UN Charter and Guterres’ call for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip “constitute support for the terrorist organization Hamas and the murder of the elderly, the kidnapping of babies and the rape of women,” the minister wrote on Platform X.
António Guterres has already come under fire from Israel after he said the Hamas attack on October 7 “did not come out of nowhere” and that the Palestinian people had been “subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” After these statements, the Israeli government even called on Guterres to resign from his post at the UN.
Israel has been carrying out a large-scale ground offensive in the Gaza Strip since October 27, after three weeks of intense bombing, in response to an attack by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in southern Israel on October 7 that killed more than 1,200 people. ., mostly civilians, 5,000 wounded and about 240 hostages.
Israeli military operations have already killed more than 16,000 people in the Gaza Strip, 70% of whom are women and children, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry.