Israeli FM: Meeting with UN head canceled after defending Hamas massacre

Israel’s Foreign Minister Eli Cohen accused UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres of justifying Hamas’ October 7 attack and canceled his meeting with him.

“I will not meet with the UN secretary-general. After October 7, there is no room for a balanced approach. Hamas must be erased from the world!” Cohen stated.

Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan called for him to resign.

Guterres “who shows understanding for the campaign of mass murder of children, women, and the elderly, is not fit to lead the UN,” Erdan said.

“There is no justification or point in talking to those who show compassion for the most terrible atrocities committed against the citizens of Israel and the Jewish people. There are simply no words,” he added. 

He spoke after Guterres condemned both the IDF aerial bombing of Gaza and Hamas’ infiltration into Southern Israel in which over 1,400 civilians and soldiers were killed in a brutal manner that included burning victims alive, dismembering them and raping them. 

Rising Palestinian death toll, according to Hamas reports

According to Hamas close to 6,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. Israel has said that some of the death are due to failed Palestinian rocket launches.

“The relentless bombardment of Gaza by Israeli forces, the level of civilian casualties, and the wholesale destruction of neighborhoods continue to mount and are deeply alarming,” Guterres said. 

“Protecting civilians does not mean ordering more than one million people to evacuate to the south, where there is no shelter, no food, no water, no medicine and no fuel, and then continuing to bomb the south itself,” Guterres said.

He spoke of the long history of Palestinian suffering. 

“The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation,” Guterres said.

“They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished.  Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing,” he explained.  

“But the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas,” Guterres said.

He added, “And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”  

Guterres spoke at the monthly UN Security Council on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that drew an unusual amount of high-level diplomatic participation.

Cohen flew from Israel with a delegation of bereaved families from the attack, including those whose loved ones are among the 222 people Hamas captured and brought to Gaza as hostages.

He called on the Security Council to condemn Hamas, to insist on the immediate release of the hostages and in the interim to allow for the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit them.

Cohen also called out Qatar despite its behind-the-scenes involvement in diplomatic efforts to secure the release of the captives.

“Qatar which finances and harbors Hamas leaders could influence and

enable the immediate and unconditional release of the hostages held by the terrorists,” Cohen said.

“You, members of the international community, should demand from Qatar to do just that. This meeting should conclude with a clear message, BRING THEM HOME!,” he said.

Cohen began his remarks by holding up a pasteboard with photographs of the children who had been killed and reading out some of their names.

To honor the dead, Cohen read out loud a few lines from the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. To underscore the nature of the mass killings, he played a tape recording in Arabic of one of the terrorists bragging to his father that he had killed ten Jews.

He told his father he was speaking to him from a telephone he had taken from a Jewish woman after killing her and her husband.

“I killed ten with my own hands,” the terrorist told his father in a recording that was translated from Arabic into Hebrew by the IDF.

“The blood of the Jews are on me,” he said.

Cohen told the UNSC that the had heard he calls for Israel to enact a proportional response. “I hear the calls for ceasefire. Tell me – what is a proportionate response For the killing of a baby? For the rape of a woman? For the beheading of a child?,” Cohen said.

This is a moment, Cohens said, that “calls for moral clarity” as he explained that there is no room for ambiguity.

This will be the UN’s darkest hour if it does not take a stand against Hamas, he said.

Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki called on the world to take a moral stand in support of the Palestinian people. 

“You do not believe that our lives are less worthy, less sacred, more expendable,” Maliki said.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said “we all recognize the right, indeed the imperative for states to defend themselves against terrorism. That’s why we must unequivocally condemn Hamas’ barbaric attack.”