\n<\/p>\n
Guterres said Israel\u2019s war has been waged with \u2018total neglect\u2019 with respect to civilian deaths and Gaza\u2019s destruction.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has condemned the way Israel has waged its war on Gaza, describing it as \u201cfundamentally wrong\u201d and saying \u201cthere are strong reasons\u201d to believe that Israeli forces have committed war crimes in the Palestinian territory.<\/p>\n Guterres made the comments on Wednesday in an interview with Reuters Editor-in-Chief Alessandra Galloni at the news agency\u2019s NEXT conference in New York.<\/p>\n list of 3 items<\/span>end of list<\/span><\/section>\n \u201cI think there was something fundamentally wrong in the way this operation was conducted with total neglect in relation to the deaths of civilians and to the destruction of Gaza,\u201d Guterres said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe objective was to destroy Hamas. Gaza is destroyed, but Hamas is not yet destroyed. So there is something fundamentally wrong with the way this is conducted,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n When asked if he believed Israeli forces may be guilty of carrying out war crimes since the conflict began more than two years ago, Guterres said that \u201cthere are strong reasons to believe that that possibility might be a reality\u201d.<\/p>\n Responding to Guterres\u2019s comments, Israel\u2019s UN ambassador Danny Danon accused the UN chief of using his \u201celevated platform to lambast and condemn Israel and Israelis at every opportunity\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThe only crime committed is the moral abomination that more than two years after the horrific massacres of October 7, the UN secretary-general has still not visited Israel,\u201d he told Reuters.<\/p>\n In October 2024, then-Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz, now the country\u2019s defence minister, declared Guterres \u201cpersona non grata\u201d in Israel, accusing him of giving \u201cbacking to terrorists, rapists, and murderers\u201d for failing to condemn Iran\u2019s missile attack on the country that month.<\/p>\n More than 70,000 people have died in Gaza since October 7, 2023, when Israeli forces launched an all-out assault in response to a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel that saw more than 1,200 people killed and 251 taken captive.<\/p>\n A fragile United States-brokered ceasefire \u2013 a\u00a020-point peace plan pushed by US President Donald Trump \u2013 has been in place since October 10. But Israeli forces have repeatedly violated the truce with strikes and demolitions, claiming to be targeting Hamas infrastructure in Gaza.<\/p>\n Israel\u2019s most recent violations on Wednesday resulted in seven Palestinians being killed, including two children aged eight and 10, in attacks on the coastal enclave.<\/p>\n According to Gaza\u2019s authorities, Israeli forces have violated the ceasefire at least 591 times since it came into effect, killing at least 360 Palestinians and wounding 922 others.<\/p>\n In his Reuters interview, Guterres also praised the US for being instrumental in improving aid access in Gaza, saying the humanitarian situation has \u201cconsiderably improved\u201d because of pressure exerted by Washington on Israel.<\/p>\n \u201cThey have leverage that, of course, we [the UN] do not,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u201cThere is an excellent cooperation in the humanitarian aid between the UN and the US, and I hope that this will be maintained and developed,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Israel has continued to restrict the entry of aid into Gaza, despite a key condition of the initial phase of Trump\u2019s peace plan being that it let humanitarian aid into the enclave and open the vital Rafah crossing separating it from Egypt.<\/p>\n On Wednesday, a military unit called Israel\u2019s Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) said the \u201cRafah Crossing will open in the coming days exclusively for the exit of residents from the Gaza Strip to Egypt\u201d.<\/p>\n The announcement, signalling only one direction of travel, has raised fears that Gaza residents could be permanently displaced, something far-right ministers in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s hardline government have promoted for months.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Guterres said Israel\u2019s war has been waged with \u2018total neglect\u2019 with respect to civilian deaths and Gaza\u2019s destruction. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has condemned the way Israel has waged its war on Gaza, describing it as \u201cfundamentally wrong\u201d and saying \u201cthere are strong reasons\u201d to believe that Israeli forces have committed war crimes in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4284,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle-east-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4283\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Recommended Stories <\/h2>\n
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