United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Wednesday accused Israel of seeking to carry out “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza, while hailing the refusal by Arab nations to accept Gazan war refugees. Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza, has locked its gates and refuses to allow Gazans to escape the war zone, unless they pay exorbitant fees that can be as much as $10,000 per person.
“The intention might be for the Palestinians to leave Gaza, for others to occupy it,” Guterres told The Guardian, speaking on the sidelines of the COP16 United Nations Biodiversity Conference in Cali, Colombia.
“But there has been—and I pay tribute to the courage and the resilience of the Palestinian people and to the determination of the Arab world—[an effort] to avoid the ethnic cleansing becoming a reality,” he stated.
“We will do everything possible to help them [the Palestinians] remain there and to avoid ethnic cleansing that might occur if there is not strong determination from the international community,” he added.
The Jewish state has vehemently denied charges of ethnic cleansing as it fights Hamas terrorists in the coastal enclave, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeatedly stressing that Jerusalem is waging war on the terror organization that massacred some 1,200 innocent people on Oct. 7, 2023, and not with the people of Gaza.
The Israel Defense Forces has taken unprecedented steps to protect civilians in Gaza, including through the establishment of humanitarian zones.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II stressed at a press conference on Oct. 17, 2023, 10 days before the start of the Israeli ground campaign against Hamas, that Amman and Cairo would not accept any refugees from the Gaza Strip.
“There will be no refugees in Jordan and no refugees in Egypt,” Abdullah stated following a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin. “That is a red line, because I think that is a plan by certain of the usual suspects to try and create de facto issues on the ground,” he said.
Earlier this month, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz formally declared Guterres persona non grata in the Jewish state, referring to the U.N. secretary-general as “a stain on the history of the United Nations” due to his refusal to condemn Iran’s unprecedented missile attacks on Israel.
“Anyone who cannot unequivocally condemn Iran’s heinous attack on Israel, as almost every country in the world has done, does not deserve to step foot on Israeli soil,” Katz declared, noting that the U.N. chief has repeatedly failed to condemn the massacre committed by Hamas, and has led any efforts to declare it a terrorist group.
