U.N. Chief on Hamas Massacre: ‘All Parties’ Must ‘Avoid Escalation'

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday appealed to “all parties, and those who have an influence over those parties,” to “avoid any further escalation and spillover” from the Israel-Hamas war. 

“I am concerned about the recent exchange of fire along the Blue Line and recent reported attacks from Southern Lebanon,” Guterres said, alluding to the danger of Lebanese Hezbollah and allied terrorist militia joining the war by attacking Israel. 

A false alarm on Wednesday claimed Hezbollah attacked by sending dozens of drones over the border. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) said the alarm, which was debunked after about 90 minutes of high tension, was caused by either “a technical fault or human error.” The scenario described in the alert was all too plausible.

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Guterres stressed the urgency of protecting civilians, calling on Hamas to release “all Israeli hostages held in Gaza” and demanding humanitarian corridors through the Israeli blockade.

“Crucial life-saving supplies — including fuel, food, and water — must be allowed into Gaza. We need rapid and unimpeded humanitarian access now,” he said.

According to Guterres, about 220,000 Palestinians have taken shelter at facilities run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The UNRWA reports eleven of its staffers have been killed in Gaza since Saturday.

“U.N. premises and all hospitals, schools, and clinics must never be targeted…I deeply regret that some of my colleagues have already paid the ultimate price,” Guterres said.

The United States was the largest donor to the UNRWA until the Trump administration reviewed credible evidence that UNRWA schools were being used by Hamas to indoctrinate Palestinian children with hatred of Jews and Israel. Critics noted that UNRWA facilities tend to be heavily staffed by Palestinians, many of whom have ties to Hamas or are sympathetic to its terrorist ideology.

Also, as with President Joe Biden’s $6 billion ransom payment to Iran — which is supposedly earmarked only for buying food and medicine — the enormous funding given to the UNRWA for aid to the Palestinian people freed up vast sums of money for Hamas to spend on weapons and other terrorist infrastructure. In June 2021, the UNRWA admitted that Hamas constructed a terror tunnel beneath one of its schools to be used for attacks on Israeli civilians. The U.N. organization previously admitted that Hamas stockpiled weapons in its facilities, including UNRWA schools for young children.

The Trump administration cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to the UNRWA in 2018, but President Joe Biden restored more than $700 million in funding to the jihadi-linked agency between 2021 and 2023, a decision that has come under renewed scrutiny after the barbaric Hamas attack last weekend.

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Israeli Energy Minister Israel Katz said Thursday that Gaza will be kept without power until Hamas releases its dozens of innocent hostages.

“Humanitarian aid to Gaza? No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened, and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli abductees are returned home,” Katz vowed.

“Humanitarian for humanitarian — and no one will preach morals at us,” he said.

The U.N. did indeed rush to preach morals at Israel while failing to unequivocally condemn the atrocities of Hamas, admit that fighting the terrorist gang would be impossible without isolating Gaza, or concede that all civilian casualties are a direct result of Hamas’s actions. 

U.N. Human Rights Chief Volker Turk said Tuesday that Israel’s siege of the Gaza Strip violates international law.

“The imposition of sieges that endanger the lives of civilians by depriving them of goods essential for their survival is prohibited under international humanitarian law,” he declared.

A group of “independent U.N. experts” on Thursday condemned Israel for inflicting “collective punishment” against the people of Gaza. 

The group denounced the “horrific crimes committed by Hamas,” including “the deliberate and widespread killing and hostage-taking of innocent civilians, including older persons and children,” as “heinous violations of international law and international crimes, for which there must be urgent accountability.”

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The experts then assailed Israel’s “indiscriminate military attacks against the already exhausted Palestinian people of Gaza” in equivalent terms, accusing the Israelis of comparable violations of international law.

“They have lived under unlawful blockade for 16 years and already gone through five major brutal wars, which remain unaccounted for,” the group complained.

“There is no justification for violence that indiscriminately targets innocent civilians, whether by Hamas or Israeli forces. This is absolutely prohibited under international law and amounts to a war crime,” the U.N. panel said, explicitly drawing a moral equivalence between the savagery of the surprise Hamas attack and Israel’s response.

The “Palestinian people of Gaza” energetically support Hamas, according to the latest polls, and gave the terrorists a decisive majority in the legislature in 2006, the last time the rulers of Gaza bothered to hold an election. Few of the world’s sinister regimes enjoy as much support from their populations as Hamas.

The U.N. experts did not propose any strategy for dislodging Hamas from power without damaging the populace, which Hamas deliberately uses as human shields for its local leadership and weapons caches. The high-level leaders of Hamas live in luxurious quarters in Qatar, not Gaza. The U.N. does not seem especially troubled by the contrast between their wealthy lifestyles and the squalor of the people they rule from afar.