U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stressed Monday in an interview with AFP that “nothing justifies the collective punishment” of Israel’s “unimaginable” suffering Gazans.
The secretary-general sharply criticized the way the Jewish state is conducting its war in the devastated Palestinian enclave, which next month enters its second year.
“This is unimaginable: the level of suffering in Gaza, the level of death and destruction is unparalleled in everything I have witnessed since I became secretary-general” in 2017, Guterres said.
But describing the deaths, destruction, hunger and disease in the besieged enclave, he pointed out that “the truth is that nothing justifies the collective punishment of the Palestinian people, and this is what we are witnessing dramatically in Gaza.”
The war in Gaza erupted after an unprecedented Hamas offensive on southern Israel that killed 1,205 people on the Israeli side, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli data. This number includes hostages who died in custody in the Gaza Strip.
