‘Unrealistic’ that UN could play role in Gaza’s future but could monitor potential ceasefire, says Guterres

The head of the United Nations says that the UN has offered to monitor any ceasefire in Gaza and demanded an end to the worst death and destruction he has seen in his more than seven-year tenure.
Secretary-general Antonio Guterres said that it is “unrealistic” to think the UN could play a role in Gaza’s future, either by administering the territory or providing a peacekeeping force, because Israel is unlikely to accept a UN role.
But he said “the UN will be available to support any ceasefire”. The United Nations has had a military monitoring mission in the Middle East, known as UNTSO, since 1948, and he said, “from our side, this was one of the hypotheses that we’ve put on the table”.
“Of course, we’ll be ready to do whatever the international community asked for us,” Mr Guterres said.
“The question is whether the parties would accept it, and in particular whether Israel would accept it,” he told the Associated Press in an interview.
Israel’s military assault on Gaza, triggered by Hamas’ attacks in southern Israel on October 7th has stretched for 11 months, with recent ceasefire talks failing to reach a breakthrough and violence in the West Bank reaching new highs.
Stressing the urgency of a ceasefire now, Mr Guterres said: “The level of suffering we are witnessing in Gaza is unprecedented in my mandate as secretary-general of the United Nations … I’ve never seen such a level of death and destruction as we are seeing in Gaza in the last few months.”
At least 40,988 Palestinians have been killed and 94,825 others injured in Israel’s military offensive, the enclave’s health ministry, which does not differentiate between fighters and civilians in its count, said on Monday
The war has caused vast destruction and displaced around 90 per cent of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million, often multiple times.
Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his government have accused the UN of being anti-Israel and have been highly critical of UN humanitarian operations in Gaza.
Facing protests at home and increasing urgency from allies, Mr Netanyahu has pushed back against pressure for a ceasefire deal and declared that “no-one will preach to me”.
Looking beyond a ceasefire, Mr Guterres stressed that a two-state solution to the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not only viable, “it’s the only solution”.
The United States and others support Palestinian statehood, but Mr Netanyahu, who is leading the most conservative government in Israel’s history, has opposed calls for a two-state solution.
Mr Guterres asked rhetorically whether the alternative is viable.
“It means that you have five million Palestinians living there without any rights in a state,” he said. “Is it possible? Can we accept an idea similar to what we had in South Africa in the past?”
“So the two-state solution is, in my opinion, a must if we want to have peace in the Middle East.”
The comments from Mr Guterres come as an Israeli air strike in northern Gaza has killed a senior aid official and four members of his family. Gaza’s civil defence group, which fights fires and rescues people trapped in rubble, said its deputy director for northern Gaza, Mohammed Morsi, had been killed in the strike.
The organisation said four members of his family also died in the bombing of Mr Morsi’s house in the urban Jabaliya refugee camp, northeast of Gaza City.
Earlier on Monday, it was reported that overnight Israeli strikes across central Syria killed 25 people, according to a UK-based war monitor’s updated tally.
Among the people killed were “five civilians, four soldiers and intelligence personnel and 13 Syrians working with pro-Iran groups”. Three more bodies were unidentified, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said following attacks that destroyed military and scientific facilities where Iran-backed armed groups were said to have been present.
The strike in Syria reportedly targeted several sites near the cities of Homs, Hama and Tartus. The attacks damaged a highway in Hama province, sparking fires. Local media also reported strikes around the coastal city of Tartus, along with the city of Homs.
Since the start of the civil war in Syria in 2011, Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes there, targeting pro-Iranian groups in particular.
Elsewhere, Jordan’s foreign ministry has said it believes the killing of three Israeli civilians at a border crossing in the occupied West Bank was an individual act. A gunman crossing from Jordan carried out the shooting before security forces shot him dead on Sunday, Israeli authorities said. – AP/Reuters/Guardian