TEL AVIV: Israel's Foreign Minister Israel Katz slammed the UN Secretary General's decision to include the IDF (Israel Defence Forces) in a blacklist of countries and entities that harm children during conflict, saying Israel rejects this move "with disgust" and calling it "shameful." Katz pointed out that the decision to include the IDF on the list is entirely up to the UN Secretary General and is "further evidence of his hostility towards Israel and his deliberate disregard, and not for the first time, of the Hamas attack on October 7 and Israel's right to self-defence. This is the same UN Secretary General who chose to ignore Hamas' sex crimes, despite the report written on the subject by UN Special Representative Patten."
"The Secretary-General's report regarding Israel and the Palestinians is based on unverified and distorted data, part of an industry of distorted and biased reports by organizations such as OCHA (UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), which just recently reduced the number of children and women killed in the war in Gaza by half in one day without any explanation and relies on data from the Ministry of Health of Hamas. Israel will expose these distortions of these reports to the world," said Katz.
"The IDF is the most moral army in the world - and no fictitious report will change that," he declared, adding that the move will have "consequences" for Israel's relations with the UN.
