Gaza deal the only good news amid Hormuz collapse and worsening climate crisis, UN chief says
NEW YORK CITY: The only good news to emerge from the Middle East in recent days was US President Donald Trump’s announcement of an agreement under which Hamas would relinquish its weapons and Israel withdraw its forces from Gaza, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, said on Friday as he warned that the region and the wider world “cannot afford more war.”
He told reporters in New York that the fighting “must stop on all fronts in the region,” international navigational rights and freedoms in and around the Strait of Hormuz and Bab Al-Mandab “must be fully restored,” and “diplomacy must prevail.”
Regarding recent attacks against Saudi Arabia by Iran-backed militias inside Iraq, and fears that Iraq might be harnessed as another proxy in the war with the US, Guterres told Arab News that the UN fully supported the Iraqi government’s desire for its country “not to be instrumentalized by anybody, and for the state to have the monopoly of the use of force inside Iraq.”
The world is six months into a military escalation in the Gulf, he said, a conflict that began as a regional crisis but was “increasingly becoming a driver of global instability.” Trade through the Strait of Hormuz has collapsed, energy markets have been upended, and the prices of food and key fertilizers have surged as supply chains buckle worldwide, he added.
