MADRID /PNN /
Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares Wednesday stated that his country “completely rejects” Israel's declaration of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as a ‘Persona Non Grata’.
In a statement to La Sexta television, Albares said: “UN Secretary-General Guterres is a good friend. He is a friend of Spain and, above all, a friend of peace.”
“We completely reject these slanders and this ban, and of course, we support the UN Secretary-General,” he added.
Israel officially declared on Wednesday the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres as ‘persona non grata’, banning him from entering Israel, Israeli media reported.
The announcement came with a post on X by Israel’s Foreign Minister Israel Katz. Katz said the ban is due to Guterres’s failure to “unequivocally condemn” Iran’s missile attack on Israel.
“Anyone who cannot unequivocally condemn Iran’s heinous attack on Israel, as almost every country in the world has done, does not deserve to step foot on Israeli soil,” Katz wrote.
This was not the first time an Israeli official has attacked the UN and its agencies, nor is Katz the only one to do so, since a number of Israeli officials have accused the organization of being biased against Israel.
In his address to the UN General Assembly on September 27, for example, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu labeled the world organization as an “antisemitic swamp” and “anti-Israel flat earth society”.
Israeli officials have repeatedly demanded that Guterres resign, especially after the UN Secretary-Genearl declared that the Al-Aqsa Flood operation “did not happen in a vacuum” and that “the Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.”
Outgoing Israeli ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, has also harshly criticized the UN, stating that its headquarters in New York should be “wiped off the face of the earth” Israeli media reported.
“The UN building should be closed and wiped off from the face of the earth,” Erdan told Israeli daily Maariv in an interview published on August 20, according to the Anadolu news agency.
“This building, which may look nice from the outside, is actually twisted and distorted,” said Erdan.
