UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres should be forced to resign after he condemned Israel for committing “clear violations of international law” during the massacre in Gaza, top Israeli officials said last week.

Guterres called the 7 October Hamas attack “appalling,” and said there can be no justification in the deliberate killing and kidnapping of civilians. But he also said the attack “did not happen in a vacuum.” 

Nor, he said, did it justify Israel’s move to order “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 made the comments during a speech to the Security Council on Tuesday and said these Palestinians have already been “subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” 

“They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished,” he said.

His comments sparked a belligerent response from top Israeli officials. 

Gilad Erdan, Israel’s UN envoy, called the comments “shocking,” and then called for his immediate resignation. The Times of Israel reported that Foreign Minister Eli Cohen called off a meeting with the secretary-general.

“Hamas are the new Nazis. Just as the civilized world united to defeat the Nazis, just as the civilized world united to defeat [IS], the civilized world has to stand united behind Israel to defeat Hamas,” Cohen said. 

Benny Gantz, an MP and former army general, called him a “terror apologist.”

TRENDPOST: Guterres, knowing that any comment that is not pro-Israel means he may never work in this town again responded to the outcry by stating that his comments were taken out of context.

Israel also took issue with the UN head calling for a ceasefire in the conflict.

“Tell me, what is a proportionate response for the killing of babies, for rape [of] women and burn them, for beheading a child? How can you agree to a ceasefire with someone who swore to kill and destroy your own existence?” Cohen asked. 

We have noted that there is only one acceptable narrative in the West, and that is the Israeli side. (See “PROMOTE ISRAELI PROPAGANDA OR ELSE: ONLY ONE SIDE PERMITTED DURING ISRAEL WAR” 24 Oct 2023.)

But the world is complacent as a genocide unfolds in Gaza.

“What we are seeing in the Gaza Strip is unprecedented,” Juliette Touma of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, told the BBC. “Two million people are being strangled. Gaza is being choked with very, very little assistance that is coming from outside.”

Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said 7,000 people have been killed—about 40 percent children—in Gaza since the attack and the hospital system is near collapse because Israel stopped the flow of water, food supplies, and fuel. 

Moshe Feiglin, a former member of the Israeli Knesset, said in an interview last week that Israel has yet to even the score with Hamas because it did not burn Gaza down to the ground immediately after the attack earlier this month.

“Create a tremendous humanity crisis. Level the entire area, just as you did in Gush Katif and in Yamit. It seems like we know how to do it when we want to. And rebuild Gush Katif. That’s what needs to be done immediately. That’s the only answer. Anything less than that, and we’ll be defeated, and we’ll get the same things again and again; even in a worse way,” he said.