A top aid official with the United Nations elicited outrage in Israel when he said during a TV interview that Hamas was “not a terrorist group for us.”
UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths said during a Sky News interview on Wednesday that “Hamas is not a terrorist group for us, of course, as you know. It’s a political movement.”
Griffiths made the comments in response to a question about whether Israel’s insistence that Hamas never be part of a future Palestinian government is realistic. He added that “it is very, very difficult to dislodge these groups without a negotiated solution which includes their aspirations.”
Griffiths on Thursday tweeted a clarification of his comments, writing: “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,” he added.
In comments attributed to Antonio Guterres in Ynet, the UN secretary general echoed Griffiths’s clarification, noting that designating terror groups can only be done by the UNSC, and that this did not detract from the horrors of October 7.
In response to Griffiths’ comments on Hamas, Foreign Minister Israel Katz tweeted in English: “Shame on him.”
In Hebrew, Katz tweeted a sharper message: “The United Nations reaches new lows every day,” he wrote, pointing to statements from Griffiths, as well as Guterres.
“We will eliminate Hamas with or without them,” he pledged. “Jewish blood is not cheap.”
Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan also blasted Griffiths, calling OCHA “a terror-excusing, Hamas-promoting, victim-blaming organization.”
“The UN’s pro-Hamas stance is finally exposed on live TV,” Erdan posted 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?”
Turning to Griffiths, Erdan wrote: “You are no ‘humanitarian.’ Sadly, you are a terror collaborator.”
The US on Thursday doubled down on its designation of Hamas as a terror organization in response to Griffiths.
“Hamas is a terrorist organization. We’ve said so. It is. It just is,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said, in response to a question on Griffiths’ comments during a press briefing. “You don’t have to look any further than what they did on the seventh of October to see it in stark terms.
“Take a look at their manifesto, even the one that was so-called watered down in 2017. There’s no doubt that they just want to wipe out Israel off the face of the map. This is a terrorist organization. Pure and simple. Period,” Kirby stated.
Despite the atrocities carried out by Hamas on October 7, Griffiths said during the interview, “If you want to have safety and security with people who are gonna inevitably continue to be your neighbor in some form or another, you are going to have to create a relationship based on some shared values.”
He also said during the interview that the idea of a mass displacement of civilians from Rafah ahead of an IDF incursion was “illusory,” adding that his agency was holding daily discussions with Israeli officials about safeguarding civilians.
Israel has repeatedly slammed UN officials since the start of the war for what it says is a failure to condemn Hamas and has accused some of its aid workers on the ground in Gaza of collaborating with the terror group — most notably 12 employees of the UNRWA it said took part in the October 7 massacre.
The accusation has led multiple countries to freeze their funding of UNRWA, demanding an in-depth investigation.
Israeli officials were furious when Griffiths met in November in Geneva with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian for a discussion on the future of Gaza. In response, the Israeli ambassador to Geneva wrote that “Iran has no place in the future of Gaza. It is part of the problem, not the solution.”
And Israel was not pleased when during the midst of Hamas’s October 7 onslaught itself, Griffiths appeared to blame both sides for the violence, releasing a statement appealing “to all sides to stop the fighting immediately and protect civilians everywhere and at all times.”