UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. secretary-general will report to the Security Council next week that both Israel and Hamas are violating children’s rights and putting them at risk. A war to eliminate each other.
Every year the Secretary-General compiles a global list of nations and militias that threaten and intimidate children, ranging from the Kachin Independence Army in Myanmar to Russia during last year’s war in Ukraine.
Now Israel is joining them.
Antonio Guterres will send the list to the Security Council, which will decide whether to act. The United States is one of five permanent members with veto power and has been reluctant to take action against Israel, a longtime ally.
The other permanent member is Russia, but the Security Council took no action when the UN blacklisted Russian forces last year for killing boys and girls and attacking schools and hospitals in Ukraine.
Israel’s addition this month is likely to focus even more global attention on its prosecution of the Gaza war and further increase already strained relations between the country and the United Nations.
The preamble to last year’s UN report said it listed actors involved in “the killing and maiming of children, the rape and other sexual violence against children, and attacks on schools, hospitals and people in care.”
Secretary-General Guterres called Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Gilad Erdan, on Friday to tell him that Israel will be included in the report to be presented to the Security Council next week, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters on Friday.
The militant Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad groups are also set to be on the list.
Israel responded angrily, sending a video of Erdan berating Guterres, the man allegedly on the other end of the call, to media outlets and posting on X.
“Hamas will continue to exploit even more schools and hospitals, because this shameful decision of the Secretary-General only gives Hamas hope to survive, to prolong the war and to prolong the suffering,” Erdan said in a statement. “Shame on you!”
The Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations said adding Israel to the “list of shame” will not bring back the tens of thousands of our children killed by Israel over decades.
“However, this is an important step in the right direction,” Riyad Mansour said in a statement.
“The United Nations today put itself on history’s blacklist,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, calling the move a long-standing violation of the UN’s sovereignty. Israel and the United Nations And even the everyday mechanics of Israel’s negotiations with the United Nations are now fraught with tension.
The secretary-general’s normally calm spokesman changed his mild-mannered tone at the midday briefing when asked to speak about the latest developments.
“The call was a courtesy to the countries newly included in the appendix to the report,” Dujarric said. “The publication of portions of this recording on Twitter is shocking and unacceptable. Frankly, in my 24 years at this organization, I have never seen anything like this.”
The condemnation of the secretary-general’s decision appeared to unite Israel’s increasingly divided leadership, from the right-wing Messrs. Netanyahu and Erdan to Benny Gantz, a popular centrist in his war cabinet.
Gantz quoted Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who said, “It doesn’t matter what the goyim (non-Jews) say; what matters is what the Jews do.”
Israel has been facing tough times for a month International criticism of civilian casualties The attacks in Gaza have raised questions about whether enough has been done to thwart them in the eight-month war. Recent airstrikes in Gaza Dozens of civilians were killed.
A UN agency warned on Wednesday that more than one million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip could be pushed into unprecedented levels of hunger by the middle of next month if the fighting continues.
Severe restrictions on humanitarian access and the collapse of food systems in the region have exacerbated the hunger, the World Food Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations said in a joint report. Eight months of war between Israel and Hamas.
The murder rate of Palestinian women and children The war between Israel and Hamas An Associated Press analysis of Gaza Health Ministry data shows that infections are falling sharply in a trend that coincides with a change in Israeli battlefield tactics and also contradicts the health ministry’s own public statements.
This trend is significant because mortality rates for women and children are the best indicators of civilian casualties in one of the greatest wars of the 21st century. The most destructive conflictIn October, when the war began, it was over 60 percent, but by April it had fallen below 40 percent.
Yet the change went unnoticed by the United Nations and many media outlets for months, and the Hamas-linked Ministry of Health made no effort to set the record straight.
