Foreign Minister Israel Katz announces that he has designated UN Secretary General António Guterres “persona non grata,” meaning the Portuguese diplomat cannot enter Israel. The Foreign Ministry says the decision is a reaction to Guterres’s response after Iran’s missile attack last night, “in which he failed to mention Iran by name and did not unequivocally condemn its grave aggression.” Israel Guterres’s policies throughout the war have “provided backing to terrorists, rapists and murderers from Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, and now to the mothership of global terror, Iran.” In a statement, Katz says that “anyone who cannot unequivocally condemn Iran’s heinous attack on Israel, as nearly all the countries of the world have done, does not deserve to set foot on Israeli soil.”
FM Katz accused Erdogan of turning "Turkey into a state that supports terrorism [that] subjects Turkey to the Iranian axis of evil in the name of extreme ideology and blatant anti-Semitism.”
Katz ordered the measure two days after Spain, Ireland and Norway announced they would unilaterally recognize Palestine as a state, a measure that officially goes into effect on May 28.