EDITORIAL: Incompetent U.N. dares to lecture Israel on war ‘rules’

Israel faces increasing pressure from the usual suspects to stand down in its war with Hamas. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently noted, “Even wars have rules,” a thinly veiled shot at the Jewish state. Two weeks ago, the U.N. General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to call for a cease-fire in the conflict.

The goal is to pressure Israel while giving aid and comfort to its enemies, who engage in a reign of terror openly devoted to its elimination. There’s really no other way to interpret the dangerous foolishness that has come out of the United Nations since the barbaric Hamas attack of Oct. 7.

Has Mr. Guterres admonished Hamas the way he has Israel? Less than three weeks after the initial Hamas rampage, he issued a luke-warm condemnation of the terror group but then went on to explain that the attacks “did not happen in a vacuum.” He blamed “56 years of suffocating occupation.” In other words, the Hamas campaign was regrettable but understandable.

You will die a very old age before you will ever unearth a quote from Mr. Guterres lecturing Hamas — which intentionally hides military targets in civilian areas and seized innocent hostages to use as war pawns — about the “rules” of war.

Likewise for the U.N. General Assembly. In late October, the body rejected a resolution condemning the Oct. 7 attacks and condemning Hamas for taking hostages. So the member states in opposition demand that Israel stop trying to defend itself, yet they can’t even muster the courage or moral authority to rebuke Hamas terrorists for their documented atrocities.

This is the product of an incompetent world bureaucracy that defines the words impotent and compromised.

As the United Nations turns a blind eye, Israel’s deputy counsel general for the Pacific Southwest was in Las Vegas last week to host a public screening at a local church of a 47-minute video of the Oct. 7 attack. Viewers were shocked at what they saw.

“I really don’t know what to say because it was really so awful,” Denise Fanning, 59, of Las Vegas, told the Review-Journal. “It was horrific. I just had to come outside. It’s unendurable what people went through.” Charles Trim, a 38-year-old Las Vegan, minced few words. “That was a clear vision of the fact that pure evil does exist,” he said.

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has presented his nation’s requirements for a cease-fire. “Hamas must be destroyed. Gaza must be demilitarized and Palestinian society must be deradicalized,” he wrote in a Tuesday op-ed for The Wall Street Journal.

Perhaps Mr. Guterres should be the one to deliver the message to his friends in Hamas.