UN’s Guterres says Israel’s conduct of war in Gaza ‘fundamentally wrong’

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has condemned the way Israel has waged its war on Gaza, describing it as “fundamentally wrong” and saying “there are strong reasons” to believe that Israeli forces have committed war crimes in the Palestinian territory.

Guterres made the comments on Wednesday in an interview with Reuters Editor-in-Chief Alessandra Galloni at the news agency’s NEXT conference in New York.

“I think there was something fundamentally wrong in the way this operation was conducted with total neglect in relation to the deaths of civilians and to the destruction of Gaza,” Guterres said.

“The objective was to destroy Hamas. Gaza is destroyed, but Hamas is not yet destroyed. So there is something fundamentally wrong with the way this is conducted,” he said.

When asked if he believed Israeli forces may be guilty of carrying out war crimes since the conflict began more than two years ago, Guterres said that “there are strong reasons to believe that that possibility might be a reality”.

Responding to Guterres’s comments, Israel’s UN ambassador Danny Danon accused the UN chief of using his “elevated platform to lambast and condemn Israel and Israelis at every opportunity”.

“The only crime committed is the moral abomination that more than two years after the horrific massacres of October 7, the UN secretary-general has still not visited Israel,” he told Reuters.

In October 2024, then-Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz, now the country’s defence minister, declared Guterres “persona non grata” in Israel, accusing him of giving “backing to terrorists, rapists, and murderers” for failing to condemn Iran’s missile attack on the country that month.

More than 70,000 people have died in Gaza since October 7, 2023, when Israeli forces launched an all-out assault in response to a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel that saw more than 1,200 people killed and 251 taken captive.

A fragile United States-brokered ceasefire – a 20-point peace plan pushed by US President Donald Trump – has been in place since October 10. But Israeli forces have repeatedly violated the truce with strikes and demolitions, claiming to be targeting Hamas infrastructure in Gaza.

Israel’s most recent violations on Wednesday resulted in seven Palestinians being killed, including two children aged eight and 10, in attacks on the coastal enclave.

According to Gaza’s authorities, Israeli forces have violated the ceasefire at least 591 times since it came into effect, killing at least 360 Palestinians and wounding 922 others.

In his Reuters interview, Guterres also praised the US for being instrumental in improving aid access in Gaza, saying the humanitarian situation has “considerably improved” because of pressure exerted by Washington on Israel.

“They have leverage that, of course, we [the UN] do not,” he said. “There is an excellent cooperation in the humanitarian aid between the UN and the US, and I hope that this will be maintained and developed,” he added.

Israel has continued to restrict the entry of aid into Gaza, despite a key condition of the initial phase of Trump’s peace plan being that it let humanitarian aid into the enclave and open the vital Rafah crossing separating it from Egypt.

On Wednesday, a military unit called Israel’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) said the “Rafah Crossing will open in the coming days exclusively for the exit of residents from the Gaza Strip to Egypt”.

The announcement, signalling only one direction of travel, has raised fears that Gaza residents could be permanently displaced, something far-right ministers in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hardline government have promoted for months.