UN secretary general says Israel’s rejection of two-state solution "unacceptable"

Israel’s “clear and repeated rejection of the two-state solution” is unacceptable, and could only prolong the conflict in Gaza, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, has said, at the launch of a highly charged security council debate focusing on aid shipments to Gaza.

Guterres told the meeting in New York on January 22 that the denial of a Palestinian state will only embolden extremists everywhere and indefinitely extend the conflict, The Guardian reports.

“Last week’s clear and repeated rejection of the two-state solution at the highest levels of the Israeli government is unacceptable,” Guterres told the council.

“This refusal, and the denial of the right to statehood to the Palestinian people, would indefinitely prolong a conflict that has become a major threat to global peace and security,” he said.

He said a two-state solution is the only way out of the endless cycle of fear, hatred and violence, adding it is the only way to address the legitimate aspirations of Israelis and Palestinians.

Guterres said: “The entire population of Gaza is being subjected to destruction on a scale and speed unprecedented in history. Nothing can justify the collective punishment of the people of Gaza.”

He also condemned “the deliberate killing, the wounding, the kidnapping of civilians, the use of sexual violence against them,” by Hamas.

He said: “More than half a million people face hunger in Gaza. 2.2 million people are living in inhumane squalid conditions struggling to make it through another day.”

Guterres said that disease was spreading as hospitals collapsed, warning that Palestinians in the embattled territory not only risk being killed by bombardment but by cholera, dysentery and hepatitis.

Despite all the efforts of UN staff and partners, “no effective humanitarian aid operation can function under the conditions that have been forced on Palestinians in Gaza and those doing everything possible to help them”.

Guterres said that 6,000 Palestinians had been arrested and added he was deeply troubled by reports of inhumane treatment of detainees.

He called for an immediate ceasefire to ensure aid gets to where it is needed, to facilitate the release of hostages and to lower the tensions throughout the Middle East.

Guterres warned that the risks of broader regional escalation were now becoming a reality, pointing to violence in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq.

Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador to the UN, said that, from the G77 meeting in Kampala to the EU foreign ministers in Brussels and the UN in New York, the world was calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.

He accused Netanyahu of being driven by only one goal – his own survival – and said there was a dividing line between those who want peace and those who want to deny it.

Speaker after speaker from around the globe but especially the Middle East lined up to call for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire and a rapid pathway move to a two-state solution.

The Jordanian foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, said: “Stop this massacre. Adopting a binding Security Council resolution forcing the end of this misery is the least that you can do now. Partial solutions will not achieve this peace.

“All of you support the two-state solution that the Israeli government is undermining.”

He said the future of the region cannot be taken hostage by the political ambitions and radical agendas of Israeli extremists.

Abdallah Bou Habib, the Lebanese foreign minister, urged countries not to fall into an Israeli trap of extending the war to his country. “Have not we learned anything from our past mistakes; is it not high time we acknowledge that we cannot cancel each other out?”

The United Arab Emirates envoy, Lana Zaki Nusseibeh, said: “We will not support a return to the failed status quo. Before, the two-state solution was the endpoint to where we envisioned our diplomatic efforts would lead. Now it must be our starting point.”

Saudi Arabia’s foreign affairs minister, Waleed El-Khereiji, condemned Israel’s war machine.

The Iranian foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, said: “Instead of calling on others to exercise restraint, the US must compel the Israeli regime to stop the war and pull itself out of the trap that the Israeli regime has set to drag the US into direct conflict.”

“Security cannot be achieved by resorting to the use of force and committing the crime of genocide in Gaza. The killing of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank cannot continue until the so-called total destruction of Hamas, because that time will never come.”

Gilad Erdan, the Israeli envoy to the UN, faced a walkout by some Arab ambassadors as he started by saying the world was trying to treat cancer with aspirin, and said those advocating a ceasefire needed to realise it only meant the terror group Hamas would “remain in power, they would regroup and rearm, and soon Israel would face another attempted holocaust. Is this the outcome you would seek?”

He added: “This is not a war that Israel chose. But we will defend our future just as each of you would defend the future of your country.”

With the Iranian foreign minister attending the security council meeting, Erdan focused on the threat he said Iran posed, saying: “A spillover of the conflict is not happening magically. It was planned and instructed.”

Erdan said the recent US seizure of a boat heading to Yemen containing weapons “is clear proof who is masterminding this spillover. Iran always stands in the shadows and pulls the strings. Every country in the region has been affected by Iran’s tentacles of terror. It will stop at nothing to extend its Shiite hegemony.”