NEW YORK (Palestine Foundation Information Center) UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for “silencing the guns” to honor the spirit of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that Monday marks the start of Ramadan, when “Muslims around the world celebrate and spread the values of peace, reconciliation, and solidarity.”
Yet in Gaza, “the killing, bombing, and bloodshed continue,” he said, with civilian killings and destruction in the territory “at a level that is unprecedented” in his more than seven years as UN secretary-general.
He warned that Israel’s threatened assault on the southern city of Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians have sought safety, “could plummet the people of Gaza into an even deeper circle of hell.”
Guterres said life-saving humanitarian assistance is only entering Gaza “in trickles,” and in the Ramadan spirit he called for the removal of all obstacles so food and other aid can be delivered with speed and on a massive scale.
“The eyes of the world are watching. The eyes of history are watching. We cannot look away,” said Guterres, who has been calling for a humanitarian ceasefire for months. “We must act to avoid more preventable deaths.… Desperate civilians need action — immediate action.”
The five-month Israeli aggression has driven around 90 percent of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people from their homes and pushed hundreds of thousands to the brink of famine. The health ministry said that at least 31,112 Palestinians have been killed since the war began.
