The United Nations Security Council failed to heed Israel’s call to condemn Hamas's war crimes after the fundamentalist Islamic terror group launched a war against Israel killing over 700 civilians and soldiers and taking some 100 others hostage.
“This is Israel’s 9/11!,” Israel’s ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan told reporters, adding that from now “from now, nothing will be as it was.”
“Hamas’ war crimes must be unequivocally condemned,” he insisted.
The same UN that was established after the Holocaust to enforce the “Never Again principle,” he said, despite the organization’s persistent failure to call out Hamas for its terror activity.
He spoke before the UNSC held a special meeting behind closed doors for consultations on the situation in Israel as the IDF prepared for a ground campaign in Gaza. No statement was released after the meeting.
'Not a priority'
Deputy US Ambassador to the UN Robert Wood told reporters that such a statement was not a priority for Washington at the moment.
"What's important now is the international community show its solidarity with Israel. We have Israel's back fully," Wood told reporters after the meeting. "The condemnation of Hamas needs to continue until they end this violent terrorist activity against the Israeli people.”
Wood strongly rejected all attempts to draw a “false" equivalency between the Hamas assault on Israel and IDF actions to ensure security is “unacceptable.”
United Arab Emirates UN Ambassador Lana Nusseibeh said the council also discussed the applicability of international humanitarian law and the protection of the civilians.
"The point about proportionate response was also discussed, but clearly, right now, the focus for Israel is its own security needs and the fact that it has hostages being held in the Gaza Strip that should be released," she told reporters.
The UNSC gathered as mounting video and evidence was posted on social media documenting the civilian cost of the attacks, including photographs of grandmothers and small children kidnapped by Hamas.
“These are war crimes! Blatant documented war crimes!,” Erdan stated.
“As rockets rained down indiscriminately upon Israeli towns and cities, hundreds of Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel and began a barbaric pogrom of unparalleled magnitude,” Erdan said as he described the events that began around 6 a.m. on Saturday.
“Ruthless terrorists gunned down innocent Israeli civilians in the streets – murdering anything that moved,” Erdan said. They “broke into homes, gathered entire families into rooms and shot them point blank. As if they were stomping on insects.”
He held up photos of the dead to underscore his point, as he compared the killers to Nazis, noting that in some cases the elderly victims were Holocaust survivors.
“Grandparents and the elderly, among them Holocaust survivors who endured the Nazis, were violently dragged from their homes, this time by Hamas, and taken into Gaza,” Erdan told reporters.
Palestinian Authority envoy Riyad Mansour in his conversation with reporters focused on Palestinian suffering at Israel’s hands as he urged the International community not to back an Israeli military campaign in Gaza.
“When Israel now tries to justify yet another assault .. no one should say or do anything to encourage it down this path. We know only too well that the messages about Israel’s right to defend itself will be interpreted by Israel as a license to kill, to pursue the very path that led us here,” Mansour said.
There have already been 370 Palestinian fatalities in the last day, he said. Referencing the civilian cost of IDF bombings in said that this included entire families killed in their sleep.
“Why is nothing done when those killed are Palestinians,” he said.
The international community has to ask itself what an Israeli campaign in Gaza is about, he said. "If this is about vengeance then many Palestinians will feel that they have much to avenge. If this is about peace, then the way to it is not through further entrenching oppression and occupation," he said.
“You can not say that nothing justifies killing Israelis and then provide justification for killing Palestinians. We are not sub-human. We will never accept a rhetoric that denigrates our humanity and ranges our rights,” he said.
Palestinian statehood, he said, is the only path to peace. “Israel can not wage a full-scale war on a nation, its people, its land, its holy sites and expect peace in exchange. One needs to address the root causes of the conflict and by doing so we will be addressing its consequences,” Mansour said.
Erdan in his remarks to reporters compared Hamas to the international terror groups ISIS and Al Qaeda.
“Hamas is a genocidal Islamist Jihadist terror organization. It is no different than ISIS. It is no different than Al Qaeda. There is no reasoning with genocidal Jihadists” whose charter calls for the annihilation of the Jewish states, Erdan said.
He chastised the international community for failing to condemn Hamas in the past and holding that the group, which controls Gaza, can become an accepted representative for the Palestinian people.
Since Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, “the world has tried to reason with these terrorists,“ Erdan said. Billions in international assistance to rehabilitate Gaza was diverted for terror activity, he said.
“Money is fungible. It enters Gaza and goes straight to building terror tunnels, rocket launchpads, missile manufacturing sites, and other terror infrastructure,” Erdan added.
“Mark my words, Israel may be under attack today. But this is not only a war on Israel. This is a war on the free world. It is a war on civilization.
“Israel is at the forefront of the war on terror and if we do not succeed, the whole world will pay the price,” Erdan stressed.
“Israel will not accept any false immoral comparisons between a savage terror group that targets innocents and the democratic State of Israel,” Erdan stated.
US Deputy Ambassador to the UN Robert Wood told reporters he expected all council members to strongly condemn what has happened.
“This was terrorism, plain and simple and terrorism can not be allowed to stand,” he said.
Reuters contributed to this report.