Excerpts on question of Palestine from the Secretary-General António Guterres’ Press Conference – UN Headquarters, 18 September 2024

18 September 2024

Following is the transcript of UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ press conference in New York today:

Good morning.

We are just days away from The Summit of The Future and the opening of the general debate.

Discussions on the outcome of the Summit are in the final stretch.

I will not go into the details, but I have one overriding message today:  an appeal to Member States for a spirit of compromise.

Show the world what we can do, when we work together.

Why is this so critical?

The Summit of The Future was born out of a cold, hard fact: international challenges are moving faster than our ability to solve them.  We see out-of-control geopolitical divisions and runaway conflicts — not least in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and beyond.

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Questions and Answers

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Question:  Hello, Secretary-General.  How are you?  Gabriel Elizondo from Al Jazeera English.  Thank you for the briefing.  I want to ask you about the UN agencies and their health right now, particularly, as you know, UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency), for example, under incredible strain with more than 200 staff members that have been killed in Israel’s continued war on Gaza.  But it’s not only UNRWA in Gaza.  It’s World Food Programme (WFP), other agencies in Africa and Sudan not getting the funding that they need, get under pressure from host Governments, also dealing with political pressures from the Security Council.  How do you ascertain the health of UN agencies as a whole, and what more can be done to bolster their effectiveness in the life-saving work that they do around the world?

Secretary-General: Well the UN agencies are healthy.  They need to be properly funded, but they are healthy.  They are doing the job.  They are working in a very effective way, and I’m proud of the work that our agencies and their staff is doing everywhere.

Of course, we quoted the very specific situation that has nothing to do with funding.  When we have around 200 members of the staff of not only UNRWA, but also other agencies that are killed in a war context, this is absolutely intolerable, and this is something that requires effective accountability.  So, we need, first of all, international humanitarian law to be respected in all conflicts, humanitarian workers to be protected in our world in all conflicts, UN and non-UN humanitarian workers.  And we need the humanitarian funding to be able to follow the dramatic increase in the needs because of the dramatic multiplication of conflicts and the dramatic impact of climate change that is accelerating in a very dangerous way.

So, what we see now is not that there was a meaningful decrease in the humanitarian funding, even if there are some negative signals in the horizon.  The problem is that the humanitarian funding did not follow the dramatic multiplication of the needs, which makes many of our humanitarian operations be in an extremely, extremely difficult situation to be able to respond to the dramatic problems of the populations they are in contact, because simply they have not enough resources to do so.

Spokesman:  Ibtisam, then Edie and Miriam.

Question:  Thank you, Mr. Secretary-General, here in the middle.  Yeah.

Secretary-General: Sorry, yes.

Question:  My name is Ibtisam Azem, Al-Araby Al-Jadeed newspaper.  As you know, more than 41,000 Palestinians, the majority of whom are civilians, were killed in Gaza, and still weapons are being delivered to Israel.  So, my question to you, do you believe that there should be weapon halt on delivery to Israel, and/or weapon embargo?  And what is your message to the Palestinians in general and the Palestinians in Gaza who feel that the world left them alone, being killed?

Thank you.

Secretary-General: Well, I have no illusions about the possibility of what you are requesting.  Knowing the world as it is today and knowing the decisions taken by the powers that are relevant, I have no illusions that that would be possible.  And that makes the situation be what it is.  And, obviously, there is something that needs to be underlined once more.  It’s that the level of death and destruction that we witness in Gaza is by far the largest that I’ve ever seen in my mandate as Secretary-General and that the violations of international humanitarian law are totally unacceptable.  I condemned as I did, and I feel that that condemnation was essential, the terror attacks by Hamas, but what’s happening today in Gaza is totally unacceptable.  And I follow with a lot of interest the work of the international courts in this regard.

Question:  Just a quick follow-up.  You say you have your… not illusion, but you have a moral authority and a position on the issue of weapon delivery.  So, you do… do you support it?  Do you think it would be beneficial to stop the war immediately?

Secretary-General: I think that that will not happen, and I’m more concentrated on the things in which I believe we can make a change in the immediate…

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Question:  Oh, yeah.  Senior Hamas officials have said recently that Hamas intends to maintain a dominant role in a post-war Gaza and that while Hamas is ready to work with the Palestinian Authority on civilian matters, Hamas’s military wing and internal intelligence forces are off limits and would remain under Hamas’s control.  Given the UN’s vision of a post-war Gaza under Palestinian Authority control, what is your view on whether Hamas’ expressed intentions, to maintain its control post the war are an obstacle to peace, as well as Hamas’ rejection of successive ceasefire proposals?

Thank you.

Secretary-General: Our position is very clear.  We hope that that will be an end to this horrible war, that finally there will be a ceasefire.  And in our opinion, it is important that that ceasefire creates the conditions for a transition for the Palestinian Authority to assume authority in Gaza, as well as in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and for that to be the basis for the construction of a two-State solution, a State of Palestine, the State of Palestine that, of course, will be ruled according to its own constitution and its own rules.  But for us, there is a legitimate authority, which is the Palestinian Authority, and we believe that it’s essential to have the Palestinian Authority, with a position of control both in Gaza and West Bank as a preparation for the two-State solution.

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Question:  [in Portuguese] Muito obrigada, secretário-geral.  I’ll switch back to English now because I know we don’t have a Portuguese translator yet.  This is Augusta Saraiva with Bloomberg News.  I wanted to follow-up, on Valeria’s question on your relationship with Israel.  Right now, what do you think, what is necessary for the UN to man its relationship with Israel?  And in practice, how much worse is the fact that there’s no direct line between you and Prime Minister Netanyahu making things on the… how much harder is it making things on the ground for the UN?

Secretary-General: There is a relationship between Israel and the UN.  I have a special envoy in Jerusalem that is the UN authority, in contact with the government and the institutions of Israel.  We have a country team in the occupied Palestinian territories that, of course, is in permanent contact with the Israeli authorities. The Security Council has decided that there will be a special coordinator, and I appointed Sigrid Kaag, [who] is in permanent contact with Israel authorities.  And, I myself have been in contact in different moments with several, high-ranking Israeli officers.  So, the contact exists, the relationship exists.  It is true that the action of the UN agencies, the humanitarian agencies, namely in Gaza, has suffered a systematic set of obstacles from the Israeli authorities.  And it is also true that my position and the position of the United Nations bodies in relation to what is happening in Gaza, independently of the condemnation that we made about the Hamas attack, is [that] what is happening in Gaza is unacceptable.

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Question:  Thank you, Mr. Secretary-General, Abdelhamid Siyam from the Arabic daily Al Quds Al Arabi.  Sir, in a few minutes, the GA will vote on a comprehensive resolution introduced by the Palestinian State, as you know.  And this resolution is like a blueprint for ending occupation within 12 months.  The resolution includes many instructions to you personally and to the UN and UN agencies to deal with Israel according to this resolution.  Are you planning to cooperate?  Would you put that record, in three months, how the UN will behave after this resolution, and what are you planning to deal with Israel according to that illegal occupation, illegal settlement must be evacuated and must end within 12 months.

Thank you.

Secretary-General: First of all.  We fully abide by the decisions of the International Court of Justice.  We fully respect also and recognize the need for them to be respected by everybody the opinions issued by the International Court of Justice, and I will implement any decision of the General Assembly in that regard.

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Question:  Secretary-General, I’m Serife, Anadolu Agency.  I have the urge to ask in Turkish, but I won’t.  Leave it to the future maybe.  Please allow me to offer my condolences to all the UN workers that have been killed in Gaza.  And as the number of casualties show, we can all see that the United Nations is trying its best to alleviate the situation in Gaza and deliver aid.  But as it has been mentioned before in this room as well, your voice is also your power.  So, I want to know if you feel the international community is doing enough, and do you have a specific and concrete call for the Member States regarding Gaza?

Thank you.

Secretary-General: Well, I don’t think it’s doing enough, and our call in relation to Gaza is to put pressure to stop the war as quickly as possible, and that has been our position since the beginning.  But, I would like to say something about what you have mentioned.  We insist that all humanitarian workers that are killed in a war situation should lead to a serious investigation and to effective accountability.  If this is true everywhere, it is particularly true in Gaza, where the number of humanitarians killed is unparalleled.  I’ve never seen any other part of the world in which so many people were killed.  And I think that if there is something the international community should be strongly committed is to put all pressure for that accountability to take place.

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