The United Nations has several special rapporteurs who are "totally out of control" in regard to their perspective on Israel, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres admitted in an interview with the Financial Times on Tuesday.
"Now that UN Secretary-General Guterres is leaving office, admitting that many of the UN's human rights rapporteurs have gone 'totally out of control,' it's time to ask who let them go out of control in the first place," Israel's UN Ambassador, Danny Danon, told The Jerusalem Post in response to the interview. "It happened on his watch!"
However, Guterres also strongly denied the UN as a whole having an institutional bias against Israel.
"I totally refuse the idea of bias," he said. "On the contrary, I think we have been on the right side of history."
He added that, from his perspective, the UN had been "defending what is necessary for peace to come to the Middle East.
"There are two peoples, with a few million each one," he explained, "And there is no way one can destroy the other. So it's probably better to do everything possible to reconcile."
Board of Peace is not threat to UN, Guterres says
Guterres also discussed US President Donald Trump's Board of Peace, and its attempts to achieve stability in Gaza.
The UN Secretary-General explained that he was not concerned that the Board of Peace would supplant or replace the UN.
"The truth is, if you look at what happens in Gaza, with the measures that were taken and you look at the progress that was made, let’s be honest, it is not for the UN to be worried," he said. "It is for others to be worried about what they are doing.”
He also criticized the tendency by the US to veto UN bills concerning Israel, as well as Russia for vetoing bills related to the Russia-Ukraine war, saying that it was time for "superpowers to understand the limits of their power."
Guterres expressed his worry that "a sense of impunity is now prevailing" among superpowers in the UN, and that the Security Council's leverage was diminished by its lack of ability to tell countries that "they must behave [or] they’ll be punished.”