UN’s Guterres denounces Israel for ‘heartbreaking’ civilian deaths in Gaza

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres denounces Israel for the “heartbreaking” deaths of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and says it is 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 says at the opening of a summit of the G77+China in the Ugandan capital Kampala.

“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,” he says.

Guterres adds that denying Palestinians the right to statehood “would indefinitely prolong a conflict that has become a major threat to global peace and security,” in comments a day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed back against a report that he’d told US President Joe Biden he has not ruled out the creation of a Palestinian state.

Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza was triggered by the October 7 terror onslaught in southern Israel in which thousands of Hamas-led terrorists burst into the country by land, air and sea, slaughtering some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and seizing around 240 hostages under the cover of thousands of rockets.

In response to the deadly assault, Israel launched an aerial campaign and subsequent ground operation, vowing to destroy Hamas and end its 16-year rule in the Gaza Strip.

The Hamas-run health ministry in the Gaza Strip says 25,105 people have been killed inside the enclave since the start of the war with Israel.

The numbers provided by the Hamas-run ministry cannot be independently verified, and are believed to include both civilians and Hamas members killed in Gaza, including as a consequence of terror groups’ own rocket misfires. The IDF says it has killed over 9,000 operatives in Gaza, in addition to some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.