NEW YORK CITY: The war and humanitarian crisis in Gaza loomed large over the opening of the 80th session of the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, as its newly elected president, Annalena Baerbock, called on world leaders to confront global suffering with a renewed sense of urgency, unity and resolve.
“Can we celebrate while parents in Gaza are watching their children starve?” she asked in a stark address that captured the somber tone of what she described as “no ordinary session” of the UN’s main deliberative body.
Her remarks came amid a backdrop of mounting global crises, wars, displacement, hunger, rising sea levels, democratic backsliding, and growing skepticism about the effectiveness of multilateralism.
Baerbock, a former foreign minister of Germany and the first woman to preside over the General Assembly in nearly two decades, delivered a wide-ranging critique of the international system’s failures, invoking the humanitarian suffering in countries from Afghanistan to Ukraine, Darfur to the Pacific Islands.
“Instead of celebrating,” she said of the occasion of the UN’s 80th anniversary, “one might rather ask: where is the United Nations, which was created to save us from hell?”
