By David Gritten BBC News


Israel has demanded that the UN’s secretary general retract comments he made about the Gaza war and apologise.

António Guterres said in a speech to the Security Council on Tuesday that he condemned unequivocally Hamas’s deadly attacks in Israel two weeks ago but that they “did not happen in a vacuum”.

Israeli ambassador Gilad Erdan accused him of “justifying terrorism” and called for his immediate resignation.

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    António Guterres said in a speech to the Security Council on Tuesday that he condemned unequivocally Hamas’s deadly attacks in Israel two weeks ago but that they “did not happen in a vacuum”.

    The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says more than 6,500 people have been killed in the territory since Israel retaliated with air and artillery strikes while massing troops for an expected ground invasion.

    He then told the council that it was “important to also recognise the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum”, adding: “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.”

    He warned that the failure to include fuel risked a disaster, explaining that hospitals would be left without power and drinking water would not be purified or pumped.

    The foreign minister of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, Riyad al-Maliki, demanded an end to what he called the “ongoing massacres being deliberately and systematically and savagely perpetrated by Israel” against the two million people living in Gaza.

    Mr Cohen said the killing of 1,400 men, women and children by Hamas constituted a massacre that would “go down in history as more brutal” than those committed by the Islamic State (IS) group.


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