UN Chief Guterres Denounces Israel Yet Again For ‘Heartbreaking’ Situation In Gaza

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres doesn’t think Israel has a right to defend itself against Hamas. He began calling for a ceasefire back in October, and keeps repeating that demand which, were Israel to agree to it, would leave the terror group Hamas still standing, still in control of Gaza, still able to inflict terror attacks on Israel. Now he has just denounced the “heartbreaking” loss of civilian lives that he blames on Israel, and says it is “unacceptable for Israel to oppose a Palestinian state.” More on Guterres’ latest condemnation of Israel — there have been so many — can be found here: “UN’s Guterres condemns Israel for ‘heartbreaking’ killings in Gaza,” by Elias Biryabarema, Reuters, January 21, 2024:

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Sunday denounced Israel for the “heartbreaking” deaths of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and called it unacceptable to resist statehood for the Palestinian people.

“Israel’s military operations have spread mass destruction and killed civilians on a scale unprecedented during my time as secretary-general,” Guterres said at the opening of a summit of the G77+China in the Ugandan capital Kampala.

There has been “very great,” but not “mass destruction” in Gaza, with about one-third of the housing stock either damaged or destroyed. But the only reason so many civilian structures have been hit by the IDF is Hamas’ practice of embedding itself beside, or within, or under, civilian buildings, including schools, mosques, apartment buildings, and private houses, where weapons, rocket launchers, command-and-control centers, and Hamas operatives have all been found. Men and weapons have been found by the IDF in the vast network of tunnels that Hamas built under Gaza. Guterres knows of this Hamas practice of using civilian buildings and tunnels to hide weapons, rocket launchers, and men, but has said nothing about it. Nor does he recognize the great care taken by the IDF to minimize civilian casualties, by warning civilians away from buildings or areas about to be targeted, utilizing every possible means of communication — messaging, emailing, telephoning, and leafletting. The IDF is the only army in the world that alerts its enemies — for Hamas obviously receives the same warnings that the civilians receive – of impending attacks, which is why British Colonel Richard Kemp has described the IDF as “the most moral army in the world.”

“This is heartbreaking and utterly unacceptable. The Middle East is a tinder-box, we must do all we can to prevent conflict from igniting across the region.”…

What is “heartbreaking and utterly unacceptable”? Is it the Jewish state’s fight for its existence against Hamas, that declares in its 1988 charter its goal of “obliterating” Israel, that is “utterly unacceptable”? In calling for a “ceasefire” back in October, Guterres was ready early on to rescue Hamas from the IDF. Isn’t it Hamas’ use of human shields that is “utterly unacceptable”? Guterres has never said so. Is the Hamas practice of launching missiles blindly at civilians in the towns and cities of southern Israel “utterly unacceptable”? Guterres has yet to say so.

Guterres says that “the Middle East is a tinder-box.” But who has made it so? It was not Israel that started this war in Gaza, but Hamas, when 3,000 of its operatives rushed into Israel on October 7 and proceeded to torture, rape, mutilate and murder more than 1,300 Israelis, and then to kidnap 260 Israelis. It was not Israel, but the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen, who have turned the Red Sea into a battleground, sending drones to attack commercial shipping, and affecting 15% of the world’s shipping, which now must avoid the Red Sea-Suez Canal route, and instead has been rerouted all around the Cape of Good Hope and northward along the western coast of Africa to the Mediterranean. It is the Houthis who have triggered a military response from the Americans, who have been busy attacking Houthi targets in Yemen. Israel has had nothing to do with this shadow war between the U.S. and, through its Houthi proxies, Iran.

Nor has Israel had anything to do with the Iranian-backed militia in Iraq who have been firing rockets at American bases in both Syria and Iraq.

Israel has nothing to do with the threat posed to the Egyptian regime of General El-Sisi by remnants of the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS still operating in the Sinai.

Israel had nothing to do with the virtual takeover of Lebanon by the Shi’a terror group Hezbollah, a group that has intimidated both Christian and Sunni Muslim Lebanese, as well as those Lebanese Shi’a who do not support its aggressive ways. It is Hezbollah, not Israel, that started the latest exchange of fire on Israel’s northern border that shows no signs of diminishing.

Israel’s campaign has killed more than 25,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Hamas-governed health authorities on Sunday, and displaced most of the enclave’s 2.3 million people from their homes.

It is impossible to verify the figures on dead and wounded in Gaza put out by Hamas, which has a long record of wild exaggeration. Think of how Hamas claimed that “500 civilians” had been killed in the so-called “Jenin massacre” in 2020. It turned out that there had been no massacre; that 52 Palestinians, at least 45 of whom were identified as Hamas members, had been killed, not 500. Or this past October, Hamas claimed again that “500 civilians” had been killed in an Israeli airstrike on Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza. It turned out that a rocket fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad had misfired and landed in the parking lot of the hospital, and not in the hospital itself. Furthermore, according to both Israeli and American intelligence, there were not 500, but between 10 and 50 people killed by that misfired PIJ rocket.

These are examples of how Hamas inflated numbers in the past, and they should make us wary of any figures it puts out now about casualties. No one really knows how many Gazans have been killed in this war; the media would do well to repeat that caveat before reporting on every Hamas claim about casualties. Whatever figures Hamas puts out should only be quoted by journalists after they have first stated that these figures are “according to Gaza’s Hamas-governed health authorities.” And journalists should also note that Hamas does not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths, no doubt hoping that the world will think of them all as civilian casualties. Finally, the media should always provide in the same paragraph the IDF’s estimates of the number of Hamas combatants it has killed. Too often that figure is left out.