The UN Security Council on Thursday evening gave its “full” support to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, whom Israel had described the day before as “persona non grata” for not having immediately condemned Iran’s strikes. Tuesday.
Without ever mentioning Israel, the five permanent members of the Council and the ten other non-permanent members “stressed the need for all member states [de l’ONU] to have a productive and functioning relationship with the Secretary General and to refrain from any action that undermines his work and that of his services”.
“Any decision that does not involve the UN Secretary General or the United Nations is counterproductive, particularly in the context of escalating tensions in the Middle East,” warned the 15 countries, including States -United States, China, Russia, the United Kingdom and France, in a written declaration from the Council chaired in October by Switzerland.
Relations between the UN and Israel, a state created by a UN resolution passed in 1947, are notoriously difficult and at their lowest since October 7, 2023, the date of the unprecedented attack by Palestinian Hamas which sparked the war in Gaza.
In the midst of an explosion of violence in the Middle East since the end of September, Antonio Guterres was declared “persona non grata” by Israel on Wednesday: his head of diplomacy, Israel Katz, criticizes him for not having “unequivocally condemned the heinous attack of Iran” to missiles on Tuesday and accuses him of being an “anti-Israeli secretary general who supports terrorists, rapists and murderers”.
On Wednesday, during a daggers-drawn session at the Security Council, in the presence of the Israeli and Iranian ambassadors, Mr. Guterres took care to “condemn, once again, forcefully, the massive missile attack by Iran on Israel.
However, he had sent the two enemies back to back by denouncing “the sickening cycle” of violence in a region on the edge of the “precipice”.
While the Council has been paralyzed for a decade, Mr. Guterres immediately received the support of the 15 members, including the United States, judging the measure of their Israeli ally “unproductive”.
Same tone at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which regretted on Thursday “the unjustified, serious and counterproductive decision taken by Israel”. The head of European diplomacy Josep Borrell also called for “rejecting the attacks” against Mr. Guterres.
