Portuguese president urges Israel to reconsider declaring UN’s Guterres ‘persona non grata’

Israel should reconsider its decision to declare the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, "persona non grata" in agreement with the position taken on Wednesday by the Portuguese government, Portugal's President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa said on Thursday.

"I think it would be very wise for the Israeli authorities to reconsider that attitude because it was disproportionate. Where the secretary-general spoke of regret, they would have preferred to condemn, that regret was insufficient," he said.

Recebo de Sousa was speaking at the entrance to the Alves Martins School in Viseu, where he was awarded the title of honorary member of the Order of Public Instruction.

"It's a practically unprecedented situation about a secretary-general of the United Nations or senior international figures. Even with countries that normally veto each other in the Security Council and, as you know, are paralysing the Security Council," he said.

The president, who said he had spoken to Guterres by telephone on Wednesday, also agreed with the European Union that efforts should continue to "overcome what is truly, day by day, a worsening situation."

"In relations between states and international institutions, if the idea is to build peace, in the more or less short term, reconsidering these decisions is a matter of common sense," he concluded.

The UN chief responded to Israel's criticism by saying he had implicitly condemned the Iranian regime in a statement released on Tuesday night.

"As I did concerning the Iranian attack in April, and as it should have been obvious that I did yesterday [Tuesday] in the context of the condemnation I expressed, I strongly condemn Iran's massive missile attack on Israel," Guterres stressed during a Security Council meeting Thursday.

The Iranian government fired some 200 rockets at Israel on Tuesday night in retaliation for the assassinations of the leader of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the pro-Iranian Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah, Hasan Nasrallah, and an Iranian general.

(Cristina Marques – edited by Pedro Sousa Carvalho, Daniel Eck | Lusa.pt)