This past week, in some of his strongest criticisms of Israel since October 7th and the onset of the ensuing war with Hamas, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres excoriated Israel over what he said were its intolerable humanitarian aid and military policies in Gaza and how Israel was thereby delinquent in meeting its responsibilities towards the Palestinians.
But like so many other critics of Israel, he was just blowing so much smoke. Can he really be serious in arguing that Israel is generally and affirmatively responsible for the well-being of Hamas’s civilian population when it is in the middle of a shooting war with Hamas? For heaven’s sake, as we note below, until Israel counterattacked more than 70% of Gazans initially supported the Oct.7th attacks on Israel!
Nor do Guterres’s particular points make any more sense.
Guterres complained that Israel is blocking entry of all aid into Gaza while at the same time resuming its pre-ceasefire relentless full court military press: “More than an entire month has passed without a drop of aid into Gaza. No food. No fuel. No medicine. No commercial supplies…. [Yet the] floodgates of [military] horror have reopened. Gaza is a killing field – and civilians are in an endless death loop.”
But again, where does it say that Israel has to take care of the civilian population of its sworn and menacing enemy?
And, of course, it has long been known that Hamas has regularly treated Israeli aid trucks rolling into Gaza as mobile supermarkets, making available to them, the staples necessary for their survival.
Nor is there even a shortage in Gaza. As a spokesman for the Israeli government said in response to Guterres’s claims: “As always, you don’t let the facts get in the way when spreading slander against Israel…. There is no shortage of humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip; over 25,000 aid trucks have entered the Gaza Strip in the 42 days of the cease-fire.”
He went on to say that, this was the reality in Gaza today, even though “Hamas used much of the aid to rebuild its war machine.”
It is also noteworthy that Hamas’s casualty figures – clearly manipulated to paint Israel as a predator nation – continue to be discredited but still used by the UN. As we have noted here before Hamas routinely uses civilians as human shields and places military weapons in civilian areas further skewing their casualty figures and rendering them unreliable.
Moreover, the results of several recent independent analyses of its own figures have forced Hamas to revise its casualty figures, removing thousands of names from its official list of war fatalities.
“Hamas’s new March 2025 fatality list quietly drops 3,400 fully ‘identified’ deaths listed in its August and October 2024 reports – including 1,080 children. These ‘deaths’ never happened. The numbers were falsified – again,” said Salo Aizenberg of the organization Honest Reporting.
And the analyses also revealed that 72% of those killed between ages 13 and 55 were males – a demographic largely composed of combatants. These updated figures contradict Hamas’s earlier claims that most casualties were women and children.
But, perhaps the most compelling development informing the overall issue of what responsibilities Israel has to the Palestinian residents of Gaza is the reported decline of Palestinian belief that they will ultimately achieve a state of their own as exemplified by the recent sporadic street protests and a poll explaining why it happened. A Wall Street Journal article the other day provided important context.
It is no secret that Hamas hoped that the Oct. 7th attack would bolster the Palestinian pursuit of statehood after several Arab states joined in the Abraham Accords and were headed towards building ties with Israel thereby relegating Palestinian statehood to the back burner. Indeed, at the time, upwards of 70% of Palestinians approved of the attack according to most polls.
But things changed radically as Israel proceeded to demolish Gaza in the course of its targeting of Hamas. New polling soon showed that popular support for the Oct.7th attack had quickly plummeted to only 39% in Gaza.
Taking all this into account, it seems incompatibility between legitimate war aims and undue compassion for enemy populations is something that has totally eluded the Secretary General. Or has it?
