NEW YORK CITY: The only good news to emerge from the Middle East in recent days was US President Donald Trump’s announcement of an agreement under which Hamas would relinquish its weapons and Israel withdraw its forces from Gaza, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, said on Friday as he warned that the region and the wider world “cannot afford more war.”
He told reporters in New York that the fighting “must stop on all fronts in the region,” international navigational rights and freedoms in and around the Strait of Hormuz and Bab Al-Mandab “must be fully restored,” and “diplomacy must prevail.”
Regarding recent attacks against Saudi Arabia by Iran-backed militias inside Iraq, and fears that Iraq might be harnessed as another proxy in the war with the US, Guterres told Arab News that the UN fully supported the Iraqi government’s desire for its country “not to be instrumentalized by anybody, and for the state to have the monopoly of the use of force inside Iraq.”
The world is six months into a military escalation in the Gulf, he said, a conflict that began as a regional crisis but was “increasingly becoming a driver of global instability.” Trade through the Strait of Hormuz has collapsed, energy markets have been upended, and the prices of food and key fertilizers have surged as supply chains buckle worldwide, he added.
Families around the world are struggling to put food on their tables, farmers are unable to afford basic inputs, and vulnerable countries are being pushed closer to the edge, Guterres said. He cited World Food Programme projections that as many as 45 million people could face acute food insecurity as a result of the disruptions, and warned that rising prices and slowing growth threatened to push millions more into poverty.
He also delivered an extended warning on the accelerating climate crisis, highlighting new World Meteorological Organization forecasts that show a strengthening El Nino was likely to push global temperatures to record levels between August and October, with sea surface temperatures in key monitoring regions expected to average nearly 3 degrees Celsius above normal levels.
He said the poorest and most vulnerable people, including children, the elderly, outdoor workers and those living in informal settlements, were paying the highest price for a crisis they did the least to cause, even as heat-related deaths remained vastly undercounted worldwide.
Describing extreme heat as “not a future threat” but a present one, Guterres urged governments to take action to address it on four fronts: by expanding early-warning and cooling systems; setting heat-safety standards for workers; retrofitting cities and infrastructure to cope with higher temperatures; and phasing out fossil fuel subsidies and projects.
“The warm-up act is over,” he said. “We cannot afford to wait for the main event.”
