[AntiWar.com reports in “300,000 Palestinians Forced To Flee as Israeli Strikes Pound Gaza City” that: “The displaced people will be forced to al-Mawasi. A so-called safe zone that Israel has repeatedly bombed.” See information on protests for Thursday, Sept. 18.]
While other top UN officials have been criticized for tacitly enabling Israeli attacks, the new UN General Assembly president, Annalena Baerbock, has openly backed Israeli war crimes.
EUobserver writes: “Baerbock is not just any diplomat. As Germany’s foreign minister from 2021 to 2025, she tried to justify over and over again Israel’s war crimes as ‘self-defence,’ rejected ceasefires, and her country continued to provide Israel with hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons, making it its second biggest arms supplier. She de facto became one of Israel’s strongest defenders alongside United States officials, while bombs were falling on hospitals, refugee camps, and schools.” In March 2024, Nicaragua invoked the Genocide Convneiton agaisnt Germany, see their charges.
Also see piece from The New Arab: “German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock: From Green feminism to ‘Zionist cheerleader.” Middle East Eye in “How Germany’s former foreign minister failed Gaza — then got a top UN job” reports that German diplomat Helga Schmid was originally slated for the position, but Baerbock was nominated after she lost her cabinet position in the February election.
TORSTEN MENGE, [email protected]
Menge is currently assistant professor in residence at Northwestern University in Qatar, where he teaches philosophy.
When asked by journalist Abdelhamid Siyam at the UN if she wanted to distance herself from having condoned Israel’s bombing of civilian targets, Baerbock said “This quote is not a quote I ever gave.” In fact, Menge notes “During a speech in Germany’s parliament on October 10, 2024 she stated that ‘civilian places can also lose their protected status because terrorists abuse it.’ She suggested that ‘Hamas terrorists hide behind people, behind schools,’ without providing any evidence or explaining which of the 97 percent of educational facilities in Gaza that have been damaged by Israeli attacks she meant. By arguing that Germany’s support for ‘right to self-defense’ is ‘inextricably linked’ to Germany’s respect for international humanitarian law, Baerbock has contributed to Israel’s abuse and rewriting of IHL.
“Baerbock has repeatedly claimed without evidence that Hamas is using civilians in Gaza as human shields. In an interview with Deutsche Welle on November 21, 2023, she said ‘We are in a terrible situation in which a terror organization Hamas is abusing children, families, hospitals, and schools, which are actually protected civilian sites, to run a war, a war to wipe out Jews.’ She also claimed that ‘we have seen that at the moment people in the north of Gaza wanted to flee, Hamas started shooting at Palestinian civilians.’” [See IPA news release on fabrications regarding human shields.]
Menge, who speaks German, added: “Baerbock has also contributed to Israel’s atrocity propaganda in other ways. She has publicly claimed that she had seen a Hamas-recorded video showing the rape of a woman on October 7, but she has never provided evidence for the existence of this video.
“For months, Baerbock refused to call for a full ceasefire, giving diplomatic cover to Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. In the UN General Assembly, Germany abstained twice, in October and December 2023, on votes for a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. In an interview in November 2023, Baerbock cynically suggested that this refusal was necessary to ‘relieve that suffering’ in Gaza and ensure the provision of essential humanitarian assistance. She said, ‘it doesn’t help to act impulsively and say “the guns must fall silent.” That is not the responsibility of politicians.’
“Last week was not the first time that Baerbock has misrepresented her record as foreign minister. While campaigning for re-election, she claimed she was ‘one of the very, very few who said we will not stop humanitarian aid for Gaza; we will continue to support the UN in this.’ Yet, in addition to refusing calls for a ceasefire, Germany suspended its financial contributions to UNRWA in November 2023 and only resumed them in April 2024. In May 2024, Baerbock claimed that Germany ‘did not deliver any weapons that are being used to kill children in Gaza.’ Yet, Germany’s government announced in June 2025 that it had exported weapons and military equipment worth more than 485 million Euros to Israel since October 2023 (see also reports on the use of German weapons in Gaza).”