UN Secretary-General António Guterres told world leaders gathered at the UN in New York on Tuesday that the thousands of people killed, injured or displaced by the floods in Derna, Libya, were “victims many times over” of conflict and climate change.
Guterres added at the UN General Assembly that "Derna is a sad snapshot of the state of our world”, as humanitarians in Libya continued to assess needs in the wake of the disaster.
“Even as we speak now, bodies are washing ashore from the same Mediterranean Sea where billionaires sunbathe on their super yachts.” Guterres said.
The UN Secretary General added that Derna was a sad snapshot of the state of the world, adding that it was “the flood of inequity, of injustice, of inability to confront the challenges in our midst.”
"The people of Derna lived and died in a state of indifference, while heavy rain poured for 24 hours, hundreds of times greater than the monthly average rainfall, and the dams cracked after years of war and neglect, as everything they knew was erased from the map.” He added, according to the UN News website.
