Israel calls for the resignation of the UN Secretary General and blocks visas for representatives of the international organization | International

The Israeli ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, and the Israeli Foreign Minister, Eli Cohen, call for the resignation of António Guterres, secretary general of the organization, after he proclaimed this Tuesday that the Hamas attacks do not come “from nothing”, but after the Palestinians have been “subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation”. Guterres opened the Security Council session dedicated to the situation in the Middle East with a speech in which he condemned the Hamas attacks, but also alluded to the roots of the conflict.

The highest representative of the UN added in his speech: “[los palestinos] They have seen their land constantly devoured by settlements and ravaged by violence; its economy, suffocated; its population, displaced and its homes, demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been fading.”

Following Guterres' words, the Israeli ambassador spread a message from the social network X, formerly known as Twitter, where he demanded: “I ask that you resign immediately. It makes no justification or sense to talk to those who show understanding for the most terrible acts committed against the citizens of Israel, and even less so by a declared terrorist organization (...). “It is truly sad that the head of an organization that emerged after the Holocaust expresses such horrible opinions.”

The Israeli authorities have also announced this Wednesday that they will deny the delivery of visas to UN representatives in retaliation for Guterres' words. Israel's permanent representative to the body noted: “Due to his words [en referencia a Guterres]"We will not give visas to UN representatives." Gilad Erdan has confirmed that the visa denial has already been implemented with the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Martin Griffiths. “The time has come to teach them a lesson,” Erdan stressed.

António Guterres criticized Hamas' actions against the civilian population on Tuesday after meeting with relatives of hostages captured by the Islamist group and reiterated the call for their release, in a brief message on his X account (formerly Twitter): “After meeting with families whose loved ones have been taken hostage, I reaffirm my call for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages held in Gaza (...). “Nothing can justify the killing, harming and kidnapping of civilians by Hamas.”

Guterres' words that bothered Israel in particular were at the beginning of the session, when he pointed out that the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7 "does not come from nowhere," but from "56 years of occupation," Efe reports. Ambassador Erdan considered these statements a justification for the attacks against civilians because “they show understanding for this campaign of mass murders of children, women and the elderly,” as he indicated in X.

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