The UN secretary-general is due to report to the Security Council next week that Israel and Hamas are violating children’s rights and putting them at risk in their war to eliminate each other.
Each 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.
UN revise Gaza death toll: women and children killed down nearly 50% since previous report
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.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks at a Security Council meeting at UN Headquarters on April 18, 2024. Guterres will report to the Security Council next week that Israel and Hamas are violating children’s rights and putting children at risk in their war to eliminate each other. Secretary-General Guterres called Israeli UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan on Friday, June 7, 2024, to inform him that Israel would be included in the report. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)
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 membership 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.”
U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters that Secretary-General Guterres called Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Gilad Erdan, on Friday to tell him Israel would be included in the report to be presented to the Security Council next week.
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” would not bring back 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 has today put itself on history’s blacklist,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, adding that the move intensified a long-standing feud between Israel and the UN and that even day-to-day negotiations between Israel and the UN were 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 secretary-general’s condemnation of the 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 faced harsh international criticism for months over civilian casualties in Gaza and whether it has done enough to prevent them in the eight-month war. Two recent airstrikes in Gaza killed dozens of civilians.
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.
The hunger has been exacerbated by the eight-month war between Israel and Hamas that has severely restricted humanitarian access and caused the collapse of local food supply systems, the World Food Programme and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization said in a joint report.
The rate of Palestinian women and children killed in Israel’s war with Hamas appears to be falling sharply, an Associated Press analysis of Gaza Health Ministry data has found, a trend that coincides with changes in Israeli battlefield tactics but also contradicts the health ministry’s own public statements.
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This trend is significant because the mortality rate of women and children is the best indicator of civilian casualties in one of the most devastating conflicts of the 21st century. In October, when the war began, the mortality rate was over 60 percent. By April, it had fallen to 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.
