The UN secretary general has told world leaders that Lebanon is on the brink of becoming a second Gaza, adding the crisis has “become a non-stop nightmare that threatens to take the whole region down”.
António Guterres made his warning as diplomats meeting in New York for the UN general assembly battled to impose a ceasefire in Lebanon and to hold Israel back from a ground invasion.
The Lebanese prime minister, Najib Mikati, flew to New York to make representations to the US to order Israel to end the bombardment while France, with support from Egypt and Jordan, called for an emergency meeting of the UN security council.
US officials insisted they had concrete proposals to lower the tension but there is no sign that Israel or Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese militia, are willing to dial down the fighting yet.
The new Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, due to address the general assembly later on Tuesday, said his country could not allow Hezbollah to stay alone under attack from a fully armed Israel.
Among a whirlwind of meetings in New York as the scale of the death toll of almost 560 people in Lebanon became clear, foreign ministers from the G7 group of leading industrialised nations issued a statement warning the destructive cycle of “actions and counter-reactions risk magnifying this dangerous spiral of violence and dragging the entire Middle East into a broader regional conflict with unimaginable consequences”.
The EU foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, said the escalation between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah was already almost a full-fledged war. “If this is not a war situation, I don’t know what you would call it,” he said.
The Jordanian foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, accused Israel of openly defying UN security council resolutions, and said the UN now needed to live up to its responsibilities.
Pezeshkian, who had come to the UN hoping to issue an appeal for coexistence with the west, found himself propelled into warning he could not allow Hezbollah to “stand alone against a country that is being defended and supported and supplied by western countries, European countries, and the United States of America. The danger does exist that the fire of events that are taking place [in Lebanon] will expand to the entire region”.
When asked whether Iran would counsel Hezbollah to restrain itself in its response to Israeli strikes, Pezeshkian said Hezbollah was facing a country “armed to the teeth and has access to weapons systems that are far superior to anything else”.
He added: “We must not allow Lebanon to become another Gaza at the hands of Israel.”
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said Iran would not fall into what he described as a “trap” set by Israel. “[The Israelis] think that they can get out of their deadlock by expanding the battlefield. We are fully alert and will not fall into their trap,” he said.
Pezeshkian also met the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has come closest among Muslim leaders to advocating practical countermeasures against Israel. Speaking in New York, Erdoğan said the global system was losing “effectiveness and credibility”, with institutions that are supposed to maintain world peace and security in a “state of moral collapse”.
The difficulty for the Biden administration is that it has failed since a pause in the fighting last year to persuade Israel to agree a ceasefire in Gaza, and Hezbollah has pledged not to stop firing missiles into Israel unless Israel agrees to such a step.
US officials have been acknowledging for weeks that although most of the ceasefire terms are agreed between Israel and Hamas, the remaining gaps are large and unbridgeable.
Until a few days ago the US said it was confident that an Israeli land invasion of Lebanon was not imminent, but its confidence in that assessment is changing. It has claimed it has repeatedly not been given prior notice of Israel’s actions, including the sabotage of Hezbollah pagers and communications equipment, as well as the assassination of the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. Iran has rejected these claims as lies.
Guterres, as he opened the general assembly’s main debate, set the Middle East crisis in the context of a whirlwind set of crises engulfing the whole world that together represent “an era of epic transformation”.
On Israel, he said nothing could justify the abhorrent acts of terror committed by Hamas against Israelis on 7 October but added that “nothing can justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people”.
Addressing those who go on undermining the goal of a two-state solution, he said: “What is the alternative? How could the world accept a one-state future that includes such a large number of Palestinians without any freedom, rights or dignity?”
Guterres addressed multiple crises in his speech, saying the “level of impunity in the world is politically indefensible and morally intolerable”.
He added: “A growing number of governments and others feel entitled to a ‘get out of jail free’ card. They can trample international law. They can violate the United Nations charter. They can turn a blind eye to international human rights conventions or the decisions of international courts. They can thumb their nose at international humanitarian law.”