The United Nations Security Council on Monday failed to heed Israel’s call to condemn Hamas’s war crimes, after the terrorist group launched a war against Israel, killing more than 700 civilians and soldiers and taking some 100 others hostage.
“This is Israel’s 9/11,” Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan told reporters, adding that “from now, nothing will be as it was.”
“Hamas’s war crimes must be unequivocally condemned,” he said.
The UN that was established after the Holocaust to enforce the “Never Again principle” has persistently failed to call out Hamas for its terrorist activity, he added.
Erdan spoke before the UNSC held a special meeting behind closed doors for consultations on the situation in Israel and as the IDF prepared for a ground campaign in the Gaza Strip. No statement was released after the meeting.
Such a statement was not a priority for Washington at the moment, US Deputy Ambassador to the UN Robert Wood told reporters after the meeting.
'What's important now is solidarity'
“What’s important now is [that] the international community shows its solidarity with Israel. We have Israel’s back fully,” he said. “The condemnation of Hamas needs to continue until they end this violent terrorist activity against the Israeli people.”
Wood said all attempts to draw a “false” equivalency between the Hamas assault on Israel and IDF actions to ensure security was “unacceptable.”
United Arab Emirates Ambassador to the UN Lana Nusseibeh said the council also discussed the applicability of international humanitarian law and the protection of civilians.
“The point about proportionate response was also discussed,” she told reporters. “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.”
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.
'Blatant documented war crimes'
“These are war crimes – blatant documented war crimes,” Erdan said.
“As rockets rained down indiscriminately upon Israeli towns and cities, hundreds of Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel and began a barbaric pogrom of unparalleled magnitude,” he said about the invasion 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 and compared the killers to Nazis, adding 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.
PA envoy focuses on Palestinian suffering, urges UN not to back Israeli campaign in Gaza
Palestinian Authority envoy to the UN Riyad Mansour, in his conversation with reporters, focused on Palestinian suffering at Israel’s hands and 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,” he said. “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.”
There have already been 370 Palestinian fatalities in the last day due to IDF bombings, including entire families killed in their sleep, Mansour said. “Why is nothing done when those killed are Palestinians?” he asked.
The international community has to ask itself what an Israeli campaign in Gaza is about, Mansour said. “If this is about vengeance, then many Palestinians will feel that they have much to avenge,” he said. “If this is about peace, then the way to it is not through further entrenching oppression and occupation.”
“You cannot say that nothing justifies killing Israelis and then provide justification for killing Palestinians,” he added. “We are not subhuman. We will never accept a rhetoric that denigrates our humanity and... our rights.”
Palestinian statehood is the only path to peace, Mansour said.
“Israel cannot wage a full-scale war on a nation, its people, its land, its holy sites and expect peace in exchange,” he said. “One needs to address the root causes of the conflict, and by doing so, we will be addressing its consequences.”
Erdan compares Hamas to ISIS, al-Qaeda
Erdan, in his remarks to reporters, compared Hamas to the international terrorist groups ISIS and al-Qaeda. “Hamas is a genocidal Islamist Jihadist terror organization,” he said. “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 chastised the international community for failing to condemn Hamas in the past and accepting it as a representative for the Palestinian people.
Since Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, “the world has tried to reason with these terrorists,” he said, adding that billions of dollars in international assistance to rehabilitate Gaza was diverted for terrorist activity. “Money is fungible,” he added. “It enters Gaza and goes straight to building terror tunnels, rocket launchpads, missile manufacturing sites, and other terror infrastructure.”
“Mark my words, Israel may be under attack today,” Erdan said. “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,” he said.
“Israel will not accept any false, immoral comparisons between a savage terror group that targets innocents and the democratic State of Israel,” Erdan said.
Wood told reporters he expected all Security Council members to strongly condemn what has happened. “This was terrorism, plain and simple, and terrorism cannot be allowed to stand,” he said.
Reuters contributed to this report.