As the one-year Israel-Hamas war approaches, New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters on Friday issued a statement saying Tel Aviv was going “too far” in the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip.

In a speech on Radio New Zealand on Wednesday, he also defended his country’s support for a resolution on Palestine at the UN General Assembly and called “to do the best we can to try and see that this misery is over.”

Peters stated Israel has the right to self-defence, but “there comes a time when you cannot maintain that argument, when so many innocent people become the victims of your defence.” According to him, a two-state solution is a “durable and just solution for Israelis and Palestinians” that may resolve the current conflict and prevent future conflicts.

On Wednesday, the UN General Assembly passed a landmark resolution calling for an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories within a year. 124 countries supported the resolution and demanded Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem, as outlined in the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 advisory opinion.

Israel, in turn, ignored a UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. In nearly a year, Israeli attacks have claimed the lives of some 41,300 people, mostly women and children, and injured more than 95,500.

Israeli strike on Beirut kills 31

Apart from that, tensions between Israel and Lebanon continue to rise. At least 31 people were killed in the Israeli airstrike on a Beirut suburb on Friday, including three children and seven women, Lebanon’s health ministry said on Saturday. The Israeli strike is one of the deadliest in the history of the standoff between the two countries.

The strike sharply worsened the conflict between Israel and the Iranian-backed group and delivered another attack to Hezbollah after two days of attacks this week in which pagers and walkie-talkies used by its members exploded. The total death toll in those attacks rose to 39 and more than 3,000 injured.

Hezbollah claimed overnight that senior leader Ibrahim Aqil was among the dead. Another 15 members of the group were killed overnight, including senior commander Ahmed  Wahbi, who led the military operations of the Radwan special forces during the Gaza war until early 2024.

At least 70 people lost their lives in Lebanon this week, bringing the total number of deaths in the country since October to more than 740.