UN’s Guterres says Israel’s conduct of war in Gaza ‘fundamentally wrong’
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres being interviewedi during the Reuters NEXT conference in New York City on 3 December 2025
Alastair McCready and News Agencies report in Al Jazeera on 4 Dec 2025:
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has condemned the way Israel has waged its war on Gaza, describing it as “fundamentally wrong” and saying “there are strong reasons” to believe that Israeli forces have committed war crimes in the Palestinian territory.
Guterres made the comments on Wednesday in an interview with Reuters Editor-in-Chief Alessandra Galloni at the news agency’s NEXT conference in New York.
“I think there was something fundamentally wrong in the way this operation was conducted with total neglect in relation to the deaths of civilians and to the destruction of Gaza,” Guterres said.
“The objective was to destroy Hamas. Gaza is destroyed, but Hamas is not yet destroyed. So there is something fundamentally wrong with the way this is conducted,” he said.
When asked if he believed Israeli forces may be guilty of carrying out war crimes since the conflict began more than two years ago, Guterres said that “there are strong reasons to believe that that possibility might be a reality”.
Responding to Guterres’s comments, Israel’s UN ambassador Danny Danon accused the UN chief of using his “elevated platform to lambast and condemn Israel and Israelis at every opportunity”. “The only crime committed is the moral abomination that more than two years after the horrific massacres of October 7, the UN secretary-general has still not visited Israel,” he told Reuters.
In October 2024, then-Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz, now the country’s defence minister, declared Guterres “persona non grata” in Israel, accusing him of giving “backing to terrorists, rapists, and murderers” for failing to condemn Iran’s missile attack on the country that month.
More than 70,000 people have died in Gaza since October 7, 2023, when Israeli forces launched an all-out assault in response to a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel that saw more than 1,200 people killed and 251 taken captive.