Geneva: Israel’s long-contentious relationship with the United Nations has since October 7 spiralled to new depths, amid insults and accusations and even a questioning of the country’s continued UN membership.
Addressing the UN General Assembly on Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused the world body of treating his country unfairly.
“Until this anti-Semitic swamp is drained, the UN will be viewed by fair-minded people everywhere as nothing more than a contemptuous farce,” he thundered.
The past year has seen repeated accusations from within the UN system that Israel is committing “genocide” in its war in Gaza, while Israeli officials have made charges of bias and have even accused the UN chief of being “an accomplice to terror.”
The heat has been turned way up in a war of words that has raged between Israel and various UN bodies for decades.
And temperatures have risen further in recent days amid Israel’s escalating strikes on Hezbollah in Lebanon.
“There has been a great deterioration” in the relationship, said Cyrus Schayegh, an international history and politics professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute.
“It has gone from fairly bad to really bad.”
Since Hamas’s deadly attack inside Israel nearly a year ago, UN-linked courts, councils, agencies and staff have unleashed a barrage of condemnation and criticism of Israel’s devastating retaliatory operation in Gaza.
“We feel the UN has betrayed Israel,” the country’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva Daniel Meron told AFP.
Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures that include hostages killed in captivity.
Of the 251 hostages seized by militants, 97 are still held in Gaza, including 33 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed more than 41,500 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The UN has described the figures as reliable.
Israel has especially taken aim at UNRWA, the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, but its ire has been felt across the UN system, and up to the UN chief.
Israeli calls for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to resign began just weeks after October 7, when he asserted that the attack “did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.”
Even before October 7, Israel complained of UN bias, pointing for instance to the towering number of resolutions targeting the country.
Since the creation of the UN Human Rights Council in 2006, more than a third of the over 300 condemnatory resolutions have targeted Israel, Meron pointed out, describing this as “mind-boggling.”
Critics meanwhile highlight that from the time a General Assembly vote paved the way for Israel’s establishment in 1948, the country has ignored numerous UN resolutions and international court rulings, without consequences.
Israel has always snubbed resolution 194, which guarantees the Palestinians expelled in 1948 from the territory Israel conquered the right to return or to compensation.
It has also ignored rulings condemning its forceful acquisition of territory and the annexation of East Jerusalem after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and the continuing and expanding settlement policy in the West Bank, among others.
By allowing Israel to remain in “non-compliance with international law, the West has been basically making the Israelis believe that they are above international law,” Geneva Graduate Institute political sociology professor Riccardo Bocco told AFP.
Ravina Shamdasani, spokeswoman for the UN rights office, also said a lack of accountability in the Middle East crisis appeared to have made “the parties to the conflict more brazen.”
“We rang the alarm bells multiple times and now there is the impression that impunity reigns,” she told AFP, lamenting increasing attacks on UN bodies and staff expressing concern over the situation.
“This is unacceptable.”
UNRWA has faced the harshest attacks.
It saw a series of funding cuts after Israel accused more than a dozen of its 13,000 Gaza employees of involvement in the October 7 attack.
Agency chief Philippe Lazzarini has accused Israel of conducting “a concerted effort to dismantle UNRWA,” which has suffered dramatic human and material losses in Gaza, with more than 220 staff killed.
Netanyahu demanded earlier this year that UNRWA, which he said “perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem (and) whose schools indoctrinate Palestinian children with genocide and terror ... be replaced by responsible aid agencies.”
Francesca Albanese, the UN independent rights expert on the Palestinian territories, who has faced harsh criticism and calls for her ousting from Israel amid her repeated accusation it is committing “genocide” in Gaza, recently suggested the country was becoming a “pariah.”
“Should there be a consideration of its membership as part of this organization, which Israel seems to have zero respect for?” she rhetorically asked journalists last week.
Meron slammed Albanese as “anti-Semitic and really an embarrassment to the UN.”
Other experts warned that Israel’s disregard for the UN was threatening the broader respect for the organization.
Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, the UN expert on the right to drinking water, warned of the consequences when UN bodies “make decisions and nothing is respected.”
“We are blowing up the United Nations if we don’t react.”
Israel-UN relations sink to new depths
https://arab.news/n5tf2
Israel-UN relations sink to new depths
- The past year has seen repeated accusations from within the UN system that Israel is committing “genocide” in its war in Gaza
Ukraine’s Sumy region on edge as Russian advance closes in
They are worried about the Russian drones that have been striking the area with increasing regularity, more than three years into Moscow’s invasion.
“I’m afraid. Nobody knows what could happen to the bus we take,” Galyna Golovko, 69, told AFP at the small shop she runs near the bus stop.
Golovko said she never goes out in the morning or evening when Russian drones criss-cross the sky.
“It’s scary how many drones fly in the morning.... In the morning and in the evening it’s just hell,” she said.
The border with the neighboring Russian region of Kursk is just 17 kilometers (11 miles) away.
The Sumy region was the starting point for a Ukrainian incursion into Kursk last year.
Ukraine held swathes of the territory for eight months, until a spring offensive by Russian forces supported by North Korean troops pushed them back.
Moscow has since advanced toward the city of Sumy, taking several villages along the way and forcing mandatory evacuations of civilian residents.
At the Stetskivka bus stop, an elderly woman said she had packed up in case Russian troops arrive in town, where Ukrainian soldiers have replaced a pre-war population of 5,500 people.
The town is just 10 kilometers from the front line, and residents said there is heavy fighting nearby.
Beyond Stetskivka, “everything has been destroyed, there is not a single village,” Golovko said.
On her shop counter, there was a plastic box with a few banknotes — donations for a local family that lost its home, destroyed by a Russian glide bomb.
Ten kilometers to the south lies Sumy, a city that had 255,000 inhabitants before the war.
So far, restaurants are crowded and there seems little concern about the Russian advance.
But buildings in the city bear the scars of Russian bombardments.
And, when the sounds of car horns go down in the evenings, explosions can be heard in the distance.
The streets are lined with concrete bunkers against the increasingly frequent strikes from Russia, which has said it wants to set up a “buffer zone” to prevent future Ukrainian incursions.
“The enemy is trying to advance,” said Anvar, commander of the drone battalion of the 225th regiment, which is leading the defense of the region.
“We are pushing them back. Sometimes we advance, sometimes they do,” he told AFP in an apartment that serves as a base for his unit.
“We still have troops in the Kursk region. Nobody has tried to drive them out,” he said, calling the conflict in the region a “war of positions.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday said the Russian offensive in Sumy had been stopped, just a day after Russian forces said they had captured another village in the region.
Sitting next to Anvar, one of his men soldered microprocessors in silence, except for electronic clicking that made the room feel like a laboratory.
Surrounded by 3D printers and piles of batteries, the members of the brigade are busy transforming Chinese drones into flying weapons.
“It is now a drone war,” the commander said.
Anvar said that Russia was continually sending “cannon fodder” along this part of the front to try and overwhelm Ukrainian troops.
“I know people who have gone mad because of the number of people they manage to kill in a day.”
Russian soldiers “continue marching calmly” amid the bodies of their fallen comrades, he said.
In Stetskivka, Golovko voiced confidence that Ukrainian soldiers would hold the line and said she was “not going anywhere.”
“I will stay at home,” she said tearfully, beating the counter with her fist.
“I have traveled to Russia. We have friends there, and relatives. Everything was fine before.
“One day, this madness will end. The madness that Putin unleashed will end,” she said in a shaky voice.
fv/dt/jhb
‘Hidden treasure’: Rare Gandhi portrait up for UK sale in July
- Gandhi, one of the most influential figures in India’s history, led a non-violent movement against British rule
- 1931 painting by British-American artist Clare Leighton is believed to be the only oil portrait Gandhi sat for
LONDON: A rare oil painting of Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, which is believed to have been damaged by a Hindu nationalist activist, is to be auctioned in London in July.
Gandhi, one of the most influential figures in India’s history, led a non-violent movement against British rule and inspired similar resistance campaigns across the world.
He is the subject of tens of thousands of artworks, books and films.
But a 1931 painting by British-American artist Clare Leighton is believed to be the only oil portrait he sat for, according to the painter’s family and Bonhams, where it will be auctioned online from July 7 to 15.
“Not only is this a rare work by Clare Leighton, who is mainly known for her wood engravings, it is also thought to be the only oil painting of Mahatma Gandhi which he sat for,” said Rhyanon Demery, Bonhams Head of Sale for Travel and Exploration.
The painting is a “likely hidden treasure,” Caspar Leighton, the artist’s great-nephew, told AFP.
Going under the hammer for the first time next month, the painting is estimated to sell for between £50,000 and £70,000 ($68,000 and $95,000).
Clare Leighton met Gandhi in 1931, when he was in London for talks with the British government on India’s political future.
She was part of London’s left-wing artistic circles and was introduced to Gandhi by her partner, journalist Henry Noel Brailsford.
“I think there was clearly a bit of artistic intellectual courtship that went on,” said Caspar, pointing out that his great-aunt and Gandhi shared a “sense of social justice.”
The portrait, painted at a crucial time for India’s independence struggle, “shows Gandhi at the height of his power,” added Caspar.
It was exhibited in London in November 1931, following which Gandhi’s personal secretary, Mahadev Desai, wrote to Clare: “It was such a pleasure to have had you here for many mornings doing Mr.Gandhi’s portrait.”
“Many of my friends who saw it in the Albany Gallery said to me that it was a good likeness,” reads a copy of the letter attached to the painting’s backing board.
The painting intimately captures Gandhi’s likeness but it also bears reminders of his violent death.
Gandhi was shot at point-blank range in 1948 by disgruntled Hindu nationalist activist Nathuram Godse, once closely associated with the right-wing paramilitary organization RSS.
Godse and some other Hindu nationalist figures accused Gandhi of betraying Hindus by agreeing to the partition of India and the creation of Muslim-majority Pakistan.
According to Leighton’s family, the painting was attacked with a knife by a “Hindu extremist” believed to be an RSS activist, in the early 1970s.
Although there is no documentation of the attack, a label on the back of the painting confirms that it was restored in the United States in 1974.
Under UV light, Demery pointed out the shadow of a deep gash running across Gandhi’s face where the now-restored painting was damaged.
“It feels very deliberate,” she said.
The repairs “add to the value of the picture in a sense... to its place in history, that Gandhi was again attacked figuratively many decades after his death,” said Caspar.
The only other recorded public display of the painting was in 1978 at a Boston Public Library exhibition of Clare Leighton’s work.
After Clare’s death, the artwork passed down to Caspar’s father and then to him.
“There’s my family’s story but the story in this portrait is so much greater,” he said.
“It’s a story for millions of people across the world,” he added.
“I think it’d be great if it got seen by more people. Maybe it should go back to India — maybe that’s its real home.”
Unlike countless depictions of the man known in India as the “father of the nation” — in stamps, busts, paraphernalia and recreated artwork — “this is actually from the time,” said Caspar.
“This might be really the last truly significant picture of Gandhi to emerge from that time.”
Cyprus says it has been asked by Iran to convey ‘some messages’ to Israel
NICOSIA: Iran has asked Cyprus to convey “some messages” to Israel, President Nikos Christodoulides said on Sunday, as the east Mediterranean island appealed for restraint in a rapidly escalating crisis in the Middle East.
Christodoulides spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday and he has also spoken to the leaders of Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Greece, his office said.
Earlier, Christodoulides told journalists Iran had asked Cyprus to convey ‘some messages’ to Israel but he did not say who specifically the messages were from or what they said.
Cypriot officials offered no clarity on the nature of the messages, which came after the Cypriot foreign minister spoke to his Iranian counterpart on Friday night.
Christodoulides also said he was not happy with what he said was a slow reaction by the European Union to the unfolding crisis in the Middle East.
Cyprus, the EU member situated closest to the Middle East, had asked for an extraordinary meeting of the EU Foreign Affairs Council, he said. Projectiles sent by Iran to strike Israel were visible from various locations across Cyprus on Friday and Saturday night.
“It is not possible for the EU to claim a geopolitical role, to see all these developments and for there not to be at the very least a convening of the Council of Foreign Ministers,” Christodoulides told journalists.
Cyprus has offered to assist in the evacuation of third-party nationals from the region, and has called on all sides to refrain from actions which could escalate the conflict.
Hajj operations set ‘global benchmark’ in crowd management: Sri Lanka envoy
- Almost 1.7m people undertook Hajj pilgrimage this year
- Saudi authorities used AI systems to manage pilgrim flow
COLOMBO: Saudi Arabia’s organization of this year’s Hajj has set a new standard in crowd management through the use of advanced technologies, Sri Lanka’s envoy said on Sunday, as hundreds of thousands of pilgrims started to return home.
In the 2025 Hajj season, almost 1.7 million people undertook the spiritual journey that is one of the tenets of Islam. More than 1.5 million arrived in the Kingdom from abroad, according to data from the General Authority for Statistics.
Pilgrims started to arrive in May, ahead of the main rituals which this year fell on June 6-10. Many have already departed for their countries of origin but special post-Hajj flights will continue to operate until mid-July.
The way the temporary influx of people has been handled by the Kingdom has “set a global benchmark in crowd management and smart innovation,” said Ameer Ajwad, Sri Lanka’s ambassador to the Kingdom, who this year was part of his country’s Hajj contingent.
Technology has played a key role in monitoring footage from more than 15,000 cameras installed in and around the holy city of Makkah.
The monitoring systems were designed to detect unusual crowd movements and anticipate bottlenecks in foot traffic to help prevent stampedes.
“The Kingdom set an exemplary global benchmark for crowd management by using AI-based crowd monitoring, predictive analytics as well as preventing unauthorized entries,” Ajwad told Arab News.
“Innovations by using advanced technologies such smart tents, digital tools and AI systems were also introduced to facilitate this year’s Hajj arrangements.”
More than 420,000 workers from the public and private sectors, including security services, served pilgrims during this year’s Hajj, GASTAT data shows.
The envoy highlighted the “tireless services rendered by the Saudi security and military officers, as well as guides and volunteers,” and extended gratitude to the Ministry of Health for “providing world-class healthcare services to the Hajj pilgrims (from) around the globe, including heart surgery for a Sri Lankan pilgrim.”
About 3,500 Sri Lankans took part in the pilgrimage this year. Muslims constitute about 10 percent of the 22 million population of the island nation, which is predominantly Buddhist.
Greenland is a European territory, says French foreign minister
PARIS: Greenland is a European territory and it is normal that Europe and France show their interest, French Foreign Minister Jean Noel Barrot told RTL radio on Sunday when asked about French President Emmanuel Macron’s visit to the Arctic island.
Macron visits Greenland on Sunday, in a show of solidarity with Denmark that is meant to send a signal of European resolve after US President Donald Trump threatened to take over the island.
