Israel demands UN chief resign over Hamas attack comments

Israel has demanded that the UN's secretary general retract comments he made about the Gaza war and apologise.

António Guterres said in a speech to the Security Council on Tuesday that he condemned unequivocally Hamas's deadly attacks in Israel two weeks ago but that they "did not happen in a vacuum".

Israeli ambassador Gilad Erdan accused him of "justifying terrorism" and called for his immediate resignation.

On Wednesday, Mr Guterres rejected "misrepresentations" of his statement.

But Mr Erdan said in reply that the UN chief "once again distorts and twists reality", and repeated his call for Mr Guterres to resign.

On 7 October, some 1,500 Hamas gunmen infiltrated southern Israel from Gaza. They killed at least 1,400 people, most of them civilians, and took another 222 people as hostages.

The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says more than 6,500 people have been killed in the territory since Israel retaliated with air and artillery strikes while massing troops for an expected ground invasion.

Addressing a meeting of the UN Security Council in New York on Tuesday, Mr Guterres urged all parties in the war to respect and protect civilians.

"I have condemned unequivocally the horrifying and unprecedented 7 October acts of terror by Hamas in Israel. Nothing can justify the deliberate killing, injuring and kidnapping of civilians - or the launching of rockets against civilian targets."

He then told the council that it was "important to also recognise the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum", adding: "The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation."

He described how Palestinians had "seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished".

"But the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people."

Mr Guterres also said he was deeply concerned about "the clear violations of international humanitarian law that we are witnessing in Gaza".

He expressed alarm at Israel's continuous bombardment of Gaza, as well as the level of civilian casualties and "wholesale destruction of neighbourhoods".

Without naming Hamas, he stressed that "protecting civilians can never mean using them as human shields".

And without naming Israel, he 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."

The UN chief also appealed for a humanitarian ceasefire to make the delivery of aid to Gaza easier and safer, and to facilitate the release of the hostages.

He called the crossing from Egypt of 62 lorries carrying food, water and medical supplies since Saturday "a drop of aid in an ocean of need".

He warned that the failure to include fuel risked a disaster, explaining that hospitals would be left without power and drinking water would not be purified or pumped.

The foreign minister of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, Riyad al-Maliki, demanded an end to what he called the "ongoing massacres being deliberately and systematically and savagely perpetrated by Israel" against the two million people living in Gaza.

Visiting Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen criticised Mr Guterres in his speech to the Security Council, asking him: "In what world do you live":[]}