Tel Aviv.-The Israeli Foreign Minister, Israel Katz, announced this Wednesday that his country has decided to declare the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, persona non grata, and prohibit his entry into the country, since it considers that he did not condemn “in a manner “unequivocal” the Iranian attack on Tuesday.
«Whoever cannot unequivocally condemn Iran’s atrocious attack against Israel does not deserve to set foot on Israeli soil. “This is an anti-Israel secretary general who supports terrorists, rapists and murderers,” Katz warned in a statement in which he made the announcement.
Last night, minutes after the end of the attack, Guterres condemned “the growth of the conflict in the Middle East with one escalation after another” and reiterated the need for a ceasefire.
«This has to stop. “We absolutely need a ceasefire,” he wrote without directly mentioning Iran.
Minister Katz also accused the UN leader of not having denounced the atrocities of Hamas during the multiple attack on October 7 and “the sexual atrocities committed” by its militiamen.
A report from the UN Office for Human Rights, on February 23, found that the Islamist group Hamas, and other Palestinian armed groups, committed large-scale violations of International Law on October 7 and 8, between them abuse, sexual assault or torture.
Likewise, on October 24, 2023, Guterres in a session of the UN Security Council condemned the attack by the Palestinian group that left 1,200 dead and 251 kidnapped, but clarified that these actions did not come from nowhere but after decades of occupation.
Those statements, at the time, also caused indignation among the Israeli Government which, even then, declared the UN persona non grata.
“We will refuse to issue visas to UN representatives,” Israel’s ambassador to the organization, Gilad Erdan, adopted in retaliation.
This is not the first time that the Foreign Minister has taken action against political leaders who criticize Israeli policies. Last February, Brazilian President Lula da Silva was also declared persona non grata after describing the war in Gaza as a genocide comparable to the Nazi Holocaust.
The UN Security Council will meet urgently this Wednesday to discuss the escalation of hostilities in the region. Since the upsurge in violence, more than a thousand people have died in that country, according to the Ministry of Health.
Iran warned this Wednesday that it will bomb “all infrastructure” of Israel if it is attacked in retaliation for the launch of 200 missiles against Israeli territory, carried out in response to the assassination of the leaders of the Lebanese Hezbollah movement, Hasan Nasrallah, last week, and of the Palestinian Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, on July 31, and of an Iranian general.
The Lebanese crisis center stated, for its part, that more than 240,000 people, both Syrians and Lebanese, fled to Syria since September 23, when Israeli bombings began in Lebanon.
In the Gaza Strip, Israel continues its offensive, which began after the Hamas attack on October 7 that left 1,205 dead, mostly civilians, according to a count by the AFP agency based on official Israeli figures. Clarín.
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