A Nest of Ninnies: António Guterres

It was quite a spectacle at the UN on its first day of the new session. With the denunciations of Israel very much on display, it seemed like old times, specifically like 1975, when the General Assembly adopted the “Zionism is racism” resolution. A veritable nest of ninnies came to the podium to denounce the tiny Jewish state as the nec plus ultra of evil. First up was Secretary General António Guterres. Remember that just after the mass atrocity that Hamas carried out on October 7, 2023, Guterres condemned the attack, but in the same breath said that the attack “did not happen in a vacuum” — meaning we should all understand that Hamas was only responding to previous Israeli mistreatment. How exactly Israel mistreated the Gazans was not explained, because not a single Israel had remained in Gaza after 2005. For the ten years of his reign on the East River, Guterres has kept up a steady drumbeat of criticism of Israel, as it insisted on fighting back against the attacks on its people by Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. In October 2024, Israel’s Foreign Ministry declared Guterres persona non grata, banning him from entering the country. Israel argued that he failed to unequivocally condemn Iran’s missile attacks and accused him of supporting terror groups. So it was no surprise when he attacked Israel yet again in his squalid swansong. “Guterres: ‘Cracks have become canyons’ as world faces four tests of power,” UN News, September 22, 2026:

He renewed calls for compliance with International Court of Justice (ICJ) orders regarding Gaza and warned that settlement expansion in the Israeli-occupied West Bank threatens to extinguish the two-State solution.

The ICJ, he said, has issued “orders” that Israel must “do all in its power” to prevent “genocide in Gaza.” Guterres chose to ignore the fact that Israel has been, and is now doing, “all in its power” to prevent “genocide” in Gaza. The IDF has made a tremendous effort to minimize civilian deaths. According to West Point Professor John Spencer, “Israel has done more and implemented more measures to prevent civilian harm than any military in the history of urban warfare.”

It is Hamas that, by embedding itself and its weapons in civilian areas, including inside schools, hospitals, mosques, and apartment buildings, has used civilians as human shields, and far from protecting them, the terror group knows that it can exploit any harm that comes to them as propaganda in its war against the Jewish state.

By endorsing the ICJ’s charge to Israel to avoid committing a nonexistent “genocide” — Guterres is making clear that he thinks such a “genocide” in fact is being committed. We’ve taken apart that charge before, and here again are the facts:

In 1967, when Israel took over Gaza, it had a population of 360,000. Today its population is two million. Is that “genocide”?

During the current war against Hamas, the IDF has waged a tremendous campaign to keep civilian casualties to a minimum. It has dropped millions of leaflets, sent millions of text messages, and made millions of robocalls, all in order to warn civilians away from sites soon to be targeted. It has also employed the “knock-on-the-roof” technique to alert people living in apartment buildings to leave for their own safety. Is that “genocide”?

During the war in Gaza, the IDF has facilitated the entry into the Strip of 182,000 tons of humanitarian aid — food and medicine. It has also prevented Hamas, whenever it could, from stealing that aid, so that it could reach its intended recipients. Is that “genocide”?

Israel has transported children from Gaza who needed specialized medical care and delivered them to Jordan. Is that “genocide”?

And now for some arithmetic:

According to Hamas, 73,500 people have died in Gaza during the war.

According to Israel, about 25,000 Hamas combatants have been killed.

That means there were 48,500 non-Hamas deaths. Now we need to calculate how many of these 48,500 deaths were non-combat related.

Before the war, in Gaza an estimated 7,700 to 8,400 total baseline deaths per year resulted from all non-conflict natural causes (such as age-related illnesses, non-communicable diseases, and normal baseline rates of disease or accidents). So, it is reasonable to assume there have continued to be about 8,000 deaths per year, or 667 per month. During the 35 months of the war, from October 2023 to September 2026, 23,345 (667 times 35) people in Gaza died of non-combat related causes.

So of the 48,500 deaths of non-Hamas people in Gaza, 25,515 (48,500 minus 23,345) died as a result of the war.

How do those numbers stack up against other wars?

The UN has calculated that in all the wars fought since World War II, the civilian-to-combatant ratio was on average 9:1. In Afghanistan, the Americans brought that down to 4:1, and in Iraq, to 3:1.

In Gaza, 25,515 civilians died as a result of the war, and 25,000 Hamas combatants also died.

The civilian-to-combatant ratio in the Gaza war, then, is 25,515:25,000, or about 1:1, a figure that no other military In the world has come close to achieving.

Which leads me to ask of António Guterres what I have asked so many times before about Gaza: Genocide? What genocide?

Guterres also said that after the attack by Hamas on October 7, “what followed was an onslaught on Palestinians in Gaza, with a scale of killing and destruction unlike anything I have witnessed in all my years as Secretary-General…. Meanwhile violence, displacement and settlement expansion by Israel in the Occupied West Bank are bulldozing the path to peace and raising the spectre of ethnic cleansing. We cannot allow the two-State solution to disappear before our eyes.”

A “scale of killing and destruction unlike anything” Guterres had “witnessed in all [his] years of Secretary-General? Really? What about the deaths of 400,00 people in the Sudanese civil war just since April 15, 2023 — a conflict that still rages? What about the 250,000 deaths, just since 2016 (when Guterres assumed his post ), most of them civilians, in the Syrian civil war? What about the deaths of nearly one million Russians and Ukrainians, both soldiers and civilians, since the war broke out in February 2022? What about the nearly 400,000 people in Yemen who have died since 2016 from hunger, disease, and lack of infrastructure? What about the 40,000 Iranians killed by their own government in just two days — January 8 and 9 — this past year? There are many more examples of “death and destruction” that Guterres appears to have overlooked in his insistence that what has gone on in Gaza is on a “scale of killing and destruction unlike anything” he has “witnessed in all [his] years” as Secretary-General.

Thank god Guterres’ term is about to end, and he won’t be around to conduct from what has been his bully, and bullying, pulpit on the East River, his war against the Jewish state.