Words from Guterres? “Scandalous”, say families of Hamas hostages

“QWhat a shame to give legitimacy to crimes against humanity when it comes to Jews! The UN Secretary General’s statements are scandalous!”said the group of families of around 220 kidnapped in a statement.

Guterres stated today before the UN Security Council that Hamas’ attacks “do not come from nowhere” and recalled that the Palestinians were “subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.”

“Children were burned alive, women were raped, and civilians were tortured and murdered in cold blood. All with the aim of annihilating all Israelis and Jews in the area captured by Hamas,” the families noted.

They also considered that the UN Secretary General “shamefully ignores the fact that on October 7th a genocide was perpetrated against the Jewish people and even found an indirect way to justify the horrors that the Jews suffered”.

The families argue that legal experts have declared that Hamas’ “horrific acts,” which included massacres, torture and the taking of civilian hostages – including the elderly, women, children and babies – “constitute not only war crimes, but also crimes against the humanity”.

This brutal attack started the war between Israel and the militias in Gaza, which has already left more than 1,400 victims on Israeli soil – most of them civilians killed that same day in the biggest massacre in Israel’s history -, in addition to 222 kidnapped in the enclave and around 100 missing.

The intense and indiscriminate Israeli retaliatory bombings in the Gaza Strip caused around 5,800 deaths – at least 70% are women, children and the elderly – and more than 16,300 injured, the greatest human catastrophe also experienced in the punished enclave.

At today’s controversial Security Council meeting, Guterres unequivocally condemned the “unprecedented” and “acts of terror” of October 7 perpetrated by the Islamist group Hamas in Israel, stressing that “nothing can justify the murder, attack and kidnapping deliberate actions of civilians”.

However, the UN Secretary-General admitted that it was “important to recognize” that the Islamist group’s attacks “did not happen out of nowhere”, stressing that the Palestinian people “were subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation”.

“They have seen their lands continually devoured by settlements and ravaged by violence; their economy has been suffocated; their people have been displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their situation have been fading,” he continued Guterres.

The UN leader stressed, however, that “the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the terrible attacks by Hamas”, further stressing that “these terrible attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people”.

Following these words, the Israeli Government called for the resignation of the UN leader and canceled a meeting that Israel’s Foreign Minister, Eli Cohen, would have with Guterres today.

Given the cancellation of this meeting, Guterres’ office informed that the secretary-general will meet with representatives of the families of hostages detained in Gaza this afternoon.

“They will be accompanied by a representative of Israel’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations,” says a statement from Guterres’ spokesman.

Relatives of these hostages traveled to New York, in the company of the Israeli Foreign Minister, to participate in the UN Security Council meeting on the conflict in the Middle East.

After the meeting, Rachel Goldberg, mother of the young Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, one of the Hamas hostages, reported the suffering she has suffered since October 7, when the Islamist group took her son who was at a music festival in moment of the attack.

“The cruelest question I get every day, without intentional malice, is: ‘How are you?’ Imagine your own mother and then imagine her being told that there are only two options: either you’re dead or you’ve had your arm ripped off and you’ve been kidnapped at gunpoint to Gaza and no one knows where you are or you’ve bled to death. death 18 days ago, or if he died yesterday or if he died five minutes ago”, he said.

Witnesses told Rachael Goldberg that her son??????? He lost part of an arm when Hamas fighters threw grenades into a temporary shelter, but the young man tied some cloth around the wound and left the shelter before being placed in a van belonging to the Islamist group.

Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s mother lamented the lack of action to bring the hostages back to their families and lamented the “hatred poured out on Israel.”

Goldberg also said that Israel warned Palestinian civilians to move south to avoid being affected by Israeli retaliation, but, on the other hand, “no warnings were given to women, children, the elderly, music lovers and babies on the 7th of October, before the intentional massacres of innocent lives”.

Hours before Goldberg’s statements, Guterres had said that protecting civilians does not mean ordering more than a million people to move to southern Gaza, “where there is no shelter, no food, no water, no medicine, no fuel, and then continue to bomb the south itself”, in criticism of the order issued by the Israeli authorities.

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