A top UN official visiting Dhaka has said UN peacekeepers do not have a role to play in Gaza where more than 730 people have been killed and over 4,500 injured in seventeen days of land, aerial and naval operations by Israeli forces, including yesterday’s shelling of a UN-run school in Beit Hanoun that reports say left 15 dead and 200 wounded.
“Clearly it is not a situation for United Nations Peacekeeping Operations” to intervene in Gaza, Harve Ladsous, Under-Secretary General for the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations, said at meeting with journalists at the Sonargaon Hotel on Thursday.
Ladsous was replying to a question from the Dhaka Tribune about the potential role of UN peacekeepers in the Gaza conflict.
He said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had been active for several days in efforts to stop the conflict and to limit civilian casualties.
The situation in Gaza “is deplorable,” Ladsous said.
From an humanitarian point of view, the killing “must be stopped,” he added.
CNN reported on Thursday that 732 Palestinians had been killed in the fighting, including at least 166 children. More than 4,500 had been wounded.
About 35 Israelis including 29 soldiers had been killed in the latest Israeli offensive.
The under-secretary general said peacekeeping was a tool to support the political process to improve the human rights situation through a multi-faceted engagement for national reconciliation through political mediation.
Non-state actors, transnational actors including drug traffickers, extremists, and Jihadi groups, constituted serious threats to international instability, he said. The inability to instantly deploy troops were a major challenge in defusing conflict situations, he said.
Ladsous lauded Bangladeshi peacekeepers, including all-female police units in the Congo and Haiti, for the high standard of their work.
“They know the job,” he said, and they performed their duties “with heart and courage.”
Without naming any specific cases, the under-secretary said the UN reviewed potential peacekeepers’ human rights records before deploying them on UN missions.
One hundred eighteen Bangladeshi peacekeepers have died while on duty in the 53 missions in 39 countries that the country’s forces have taken part in during the last three decades.
Nine thousand Bangladeshi peacekeepers are currently serving in 9 missions around the world.