UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Sunday deplored the United Nations' “paralysis” over the war between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas in the Gaza Strip and said he regretted that the Security Council had not voted for a ceasefire.
Speaking at the Doha Forum in Qatar, Guterres said the Security Council was “paralysed by geostrategic divisions” and was jeopardizing its ability to find solutions to the war.
“The authority and credibility of the Security Council are seriously jeopardized by its delayed response to the conflict,” a reputational damage compounded by the U.S. veto Friday of a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, he said again.
The draft resolution was drafted following the UN Secretary-General's unprecedented invocation of Article 99 of the United Nations Charter, which allowed him to draw the Security Council's attention to a matter that “could jeopardize the maintenance of international peace and security.” .
“I repeated my call for a humanitarian ceasefire (…), unfortunately the Security Council did not do so,” Mr. Guterres lamented.
“I can promise I won’t give up,” he added.
The Americans, allies of Israel, reiterated their rejection of a ceasefire on Friday.
“We are at serious risk of the collapse of the humanitarian system,” Mr. Guterres further warned at the Doha Forum.
“The situation is rapidly becoming a catastrophe with potentially irreversible consequences for the Palestinians as a whole and for peace and security in the region.”
The Hamas Ministry of Health released a current global figure of 17,490 deaths in the Gaza Strip, most of them women and children.
According to Israeli authorities, 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed in the unprecedented attack on Israeli soil on October 7th.