In his final United Nations General Assembly address as U.N. secretary-general, António Guterres accused Israel of “bulldozing the path to peace” in Judea and Samaria and “raising the specter of ethnic cleansing.”
The U.N. chief kicked off the annual high-level debate week telling attendees that “so-called ceasefires” across the Middle East “have amounted to little more than ‘lesser fires.’”
He appealed to world leaders gathered in New York City to “send a clear message” that “the fighting must stop” and that “humanitarian aid must flow” while “navigational rights and freedoms must be fully restored in accordance with international law” in the Strait of Hormuz.
Guterres also said that there has been an “onslaught on Palestinians in Gaza, with a scale of killing and destruction unlike anything I have witnessed in all my years as secretary-general.”
The United Nations has said that an estimated 500,000 people have been killed in Ethiopia in the Tigray War between 2020 to 2022. That number is almost seven times larger than the number of victims in Gaza that Hamas officials claim.
Guterres has been secretary-general since 2017.
The secretary-general noted the “abhorrent terror attacks by Hamas on Oct. 7” but didn’t differentiate between Palestinian civilians and terrorists killed in Gaza.
