Israel will reassess relations with the UN, after the organization’s secretary general, António Guterres, stated that the attacks by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas “did not come out of nowhere,” Israeli ambassador Gilad Erdan told Lusa on Tuesday. .
“We will definitely have to do an evaluation of our relations with the UN. We have been complaining for a long time,” Israeli ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan told Lusa in New York when asked about the future of relations between Israel and the United Nations after calling on Guterres to resign from his position.
“After what the leader of this organization (Guterres) just said this morning, supporting terrorism, there is no other way to explain it. Obviously, our Government will have to reevaluate relations with the UN and its employees stationed in our region” , added the diplomatic representative.
Shortly before, Erdan had called on Guterres to resign “immediately” from his position, accusing the UN leader of being “biased” in relation to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, hostilities that are strongly destabilizing the Middle East region.
Guterres’ resignation was later supported by Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen, who canceled a meeting scheduled for today with the UN Secretary-General.
The Israeli Government’s outrage was expressed at the opening of a UN Security Council meeting dedicated to the current conflict in the Middle East, when Guterres unequivocally condemned the “unprecedented” “acts of terror” on October 7 perpetrated by Hamas in Israel, but admitted that it was “important to recognize” that the Islamist group’s attacks “did not come out of nowhere,” highlighting that the Palestinian people “were subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.”
“They have seen their land continually devoured by settlements and devastated by violence; their economy has been suffocated; their people have been displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their situation have been fading,” Guterres continued, in the same intervention.
The UN leader stressed, however, that “the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the terrible attacks by Hamas,” further stressing that “these terrible attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”
Source: TSF
