Israel’s bombardment of Gaza entails “clear violations of international law,” according to the top United Nations official, who called for an “immediate ceasefire” as civilian casualties mount in the war against Hamas.
“Even war has rules,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Tuesday morning. “Let me be clear: No party to an armed conflict is above international humanitarian law.”
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The statement represented a stunning rebuke of Israel at the outset of a high-profile U.N. Security Council meeting, convened as U.S. forces in the Middle East and officials around the world brace for a possible expansion of the war. That crisis was ignited by an unprecedented Hamas attack, documented by terrorists who filmed their massacres of Israeli civilians, but Guterres argued that the crisis was rooted in Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians.
“It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation,” he said. “But the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”
President Joe Biden, who traveled to Israel last week following a cavalcade of other visits by senior U.S. officials, has adopted a more supportive posture in public while signaling that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to curb civilian casualties.
“You can’t look at what has happened here to your mothers, your fathers, your grandparents, sons, daughters, children — even babies — and not scream out for justice. Justice must be done,” Biden said during his trip to Tel Aviv. “But I caution this: While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. And while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”
Israeli officials have been frank about their position that Hamas cannot use human shields to deflect the Israel Defense Forces, which is tasked with destroying the group following the terrorist group’s massacre of more than 1,400 civilians in an Oct. 7 rampage across Israel.
“Israel is in the midst of a war that was launched by the Hamas terror group. It already regrets it,” IDF chief of staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi said on Tuesday. “And every minute that passes on the other side, we strike the enemy even more: killing terrorists, destroying infrastructure, collecting more intelligence for the next stage. … This is our state, our home, and we will defend it by every means.”
Those bombardments have come at a high price for the Palestinian civilians in Gaza, however, as a top IDF air force general has acknowledged that “there is always a military target, but we are not being surgical.” Guterres said that “at least 35” U.N. employees in Gaza have been killed in the strikes.
“I owe, to their families, my condemnation of these and many other similar killings,” he said. “The protection of civilians is paramount in any armed conflict. Protecting civilians can never mean using them as human shields.”
Israeli officials issued an evacuation order for the northern half of the Gaza Strip last week, but Hamas officials told the Palestinian civilians to ignore that order. Israeli forces, in any case, continue to conduct airstrikes around the area — including one that “hit a residential building some 200 meters (yards) from the U.N. headquarters in Rafah on Monday, killing and wounding several people, according to an Associated Press reporter at the scene.”
Guterres denounced Israel’s evacuation policy as woefully inadequate to its responsibilities to the civilians.
“Protecting civilians does not mean ordering more than 1 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,” he said. “I am deeply concerned about the clear violations of international humanitarian law that we are witnessing in Gaza.”
The vulnerability of Palestinian civilians is compounded by the fact that Egypt and Jordan refuse to accept any refugees. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi justified that policy last week on the purported belief that Hamas would turn refugee camps in Egypt into “a base for terrorist operations against Israel,” at the expense of the peace agreement that Egypt signed with the Jewish state in 1979. Israeli officials have allowed a limited amount of aid into the Gaza Strip — “We’re seeing at best 20 trucks a day at the moment,” a World Food Program official told Reuters — but they maintain that the wider crisis is Hamas’s responsibility.
“Hamas has stockpiled more than 1M Liters of fuel in Gaza, but is not providing it to hospitals in need,” IDF spokesman Jonathan Conricus wrote Monday evening on social media. “Hamas is accountable for the suffering in Gaza, not Israel.”
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Guterres, who visited the Rafah crossing on Saturday, called for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire” to allow aid into Gaza on a scale commensurate to the “enormous needs” of the civilian population.
“That aid must be delivered without restrictions,” he added.
