The United Nations aid chief on Thursday came under fire following a TV interview where he said that Palestinian militant group Hamas was “not a terrorist group for us.”
UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths, during an interview with Sky News on Wednesday (Feb 14), said, “I’ve worked with many, many different terrorist and insurgent groups, Hamas is not a terrorist group for us, of course, as you know. It’s a political movement.”
Griffiths made the remarks on being asked if it was reasonable for Israel to insist that Hamas never be a member of a future Palestinian government.
“It is very, very difficult to dislodge these groups without a negotiated solution which includes their aspirations,” he added.
“If you want to have safety and security with people who are gonna inevitably continue to be your neighbour in some form or another, you are going to have to create a relationship based on some shared values,” he said in the interview.
After receiving the backlash, he took to his social media and put out a post clarifying his comments in the interview.
“Just to clarify: Hamas is not on the list of groups designated as terrorist organizations by the United Nations Security Council,” Griffiths said in a posting on X.
Just to clarify: Hamas is not on the list of groups designated as terrorist organizations by the United Nations Security Council.
This doesn’t make their acts of terror on 7 October any less horrific and reprehensible, as I’ve been saying all along.
— Martin Griffiths (@UNReliefChief) February 15, 2024
“This doesn’t make their acts of terror on 7 October any less horrific and reprehensible, as I’ve been saying all along,” he added.
Later, the spokesman for secretary-general Antonio Guterres, in a press briefing, stressed that the top UN officials including Griffiths have condemned “abhorrent terrorist attack” by Hamas stating that “there could be no justification for them.”
“As we’ve said many times here, and the Secretary-General himself not too long ago, for the United Nations, the designation of an entity as a terrorist group or terrorist organization can only be made by the Security Council,” the spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, added.
‘Shame on him’
Reacting to Griffiths’ comments about the Palestinian group, Israel’s foreign minister Israel Katz took to his official X account and said, “Shame on him”.
Taking a dig at Griffiths and Guterres, Katz said, “The United Nations reaches new lows every day.”
“We will eliminate Hamas with or without them,” he vowed. “Jewish blood is not cheap.”
Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan also slammed Griffiths, calling the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs “a terror-excusing, Hamas-promoting, victim-blaming organization.”
“The UN’s pro-Hamas stance is finally exposed on live TV,” Erdan wrote on X. “Is the brutal murder of hundreds of civilians, not terror? Is the systematic rape of women, not terror? Is attempting Jewish genocide not terror?”
(With inputs from agencies)
