The United Nations aid chief came into the limelight as he made a negative statement that the Palestinian militant group was ‘not a terrorist group for us’.
During an interview with Sky News on Wednesday, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths said, “I have worked with numerous different terrorist groups, Hamas is not a terrorist group for us, of course, as you know. It’s a political movement”.
He was asked if it was reasonable for Israel to insist that Hamas never be a member of the Palestinian government in future. He made the remarks in support of ‘Hamas’.
Just to clarify: Hamas is not on the list of groups designated as terrorist organizations by the United Nations Security Council.
This doesn't make their acts of terror on 7 October any less horrific and reprehensible, as I've been saying all along.
— UN Relief Chief (@UNReliefChief) February 15, 2024
‘It is very difficult to remove such groups without a solution which includes their aspirations’, he added.
He said in the interview, ‘If you want to have security with your neighbours, you must have a relationship based on some shared values’.
He received backlash for his statement and later posted on X, clarifying his comments in the interview.
“Just to clarify: Hamas is not on the list of groups designated as terrorist organizations by the United Nations Security Council,” Griffiths said in a posting on X.
He added, ‘This doesn’t make their acts of terror any less horrific, as I have been saying all along’.
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a press briefing that the top UN officials including Griffiths have been convicted of a ‘terrorist attack’ by Hamas and said, ‘there could be no justification for them’.
Israel’s foreign minister Israel Katz reacted to Griffiths’s comments about the Palestinian group. He took to his official X account and said, “Shame on him”.
“The United Nations reaches new lows every day”, Katz said taking a dig at Griffiths and Guterres.
He vowed, “We will eliminate Hamas with or without them”. “Jewish blood is not cheap”, he added.
Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan also shut Griffiths, and called the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs “a terror-excusing, Hamas-promoting, victim-blaming organization.”
“The UN’s pro-Hamas stance is finally exposed on live TV,” Erdan wrote on X.
“Is the brutal murder of hundreds of civilians, not terror? Is the systematic rape of women, not terror? Is attempting Jewish genocide not terror?”
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