by Mike Wagenheim
“It is not the urgency to stand against the murder, torture and abduction of innocent Israelis and foreign nationals,” an Israeli U.N. envoy said.
The U.N. Security Council rushed back to its chamber on Sunday for another “emergency” meeting on the Israel-Hamas war—this time to deal with Israel’s plans to take over Gaza City.
The meeting was requested on Friday and initially scheduled for Saturday, but was pushed off to accommodate the Israeli delegation due to Shabbat.
Jonathan Miller, deputy Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, noted the unusual speed with which the Security Council scheduled the meeting.
“This chamber has suddenly discovered a sense of immediacy, but tragically, it is not the urgency to demand the release of the 50 innocent souls held for almost 700 days in Hamas terror tunnels in Gaza,” he said. “It is not the urgency to stand against the murder, torture and abduction of innocent Israelis and foreign nationals.”
Miller told council members that the global body’s greatest sense of urgency “is reserved for pressuring Israel, the victim of the most horrific attack against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.”
The plan to take Gaza City, which the Israeli political echelon approved on Aug. 7, will ensure “humanitarian assistance flows to civilians outside combat zones and away from the reach of Hamas,” Miller told the Security Council. “This is not conquest.”
Israel has no plans, nor a desire, to occupy Gaza permanently, according to Miller. “This is liberation from a terror regime,” he said.
Washington appeared to be the lone council member to have Israel’s back, as is often the case.
Dorothy Shea, interim U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said the U.S. government “believes that today’s meeting is emblematic of the counterproductive role that far too many governments on this council, and throughout the U.N. system, have played on this issue.”
The Trump administration continues to press forward with ceasefire talks, which Hamas has repeatedly stymied, according to Shea.
Sunday’s meeting, which the United Kingdom requested and which France, Denmark, Greece and Slovenia supported, is among the actions that undermine efforts to hold the Hamas terror organization accountable, Shea said.
“Remarkably, instead of pressuring Hamas, members of this body have encouraged and rewarded its intransigence, actively prolonging the war by spreading lies about Israel, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and the United States, and by handing propaganda victories to terrorists,” she said.
Shea added that France, the United Kingdom and others, who have announced recently that they intend to recognize a Palestinian state, have hardened Hamas’s negotiating position.
The U.S. envoy said the United Nations ought to “take advantage” of steps that Israel has taken, including designated corridors and pauses in fighting to facilitate aid delivery, and of the U.S.-funded Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, “which has demonstrated it can securely deliver aid to civilians in Gaza,” she said.
Hamas and other terrorists have looted nearly 90% of U.N. aid deliveries in the past 11 weeks.
“The United States supports Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas’s terrorism,” Shea said. “Ultimately, Israel has a right to decide what is necessary for its security and what measures are appropriate to end the threat posed by Hamas and other similar groups.”
Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump said Washington is “trying to get people fed” and “as far as the rest of it, I really can’t say.”
“That’s going to be pretty much up to Israel,” Trump said.
‘We urge the Israeli government to reconsider’
The five organizers of Sunday’s session addressed reporters before the meeting. Samuel Zbogar, the Slovenian envoy to the global body, said that “expanding military operations will only endanger the lives of all civilians in Gaza, including the remaining hostages, and result in further unnecessary suffering.”
James Kariuki, the London envoy, told the council that Israel’s Gaza City plan “is wrong, and we urge the government of Israel to reconsider immediately.”
“This is not a path to resolution,” he said. “It is a path to more bloodshed.”
Jay Dharmadhikari, the deputy French envoy, said Paris “condemns, in the strongest possible terms, the plan of the Israeli government to expand its military operations to take control of Gaza City, with a view to establishing military control over the entirety of the Gaza Strip.”
Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia’s deputy U.N. ambassador, responded to Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who addressed the council the prior week in a session about the plight of Israeli hostages in Gaza.
“It was really funny to hear the Russian Federation representative, after three and a half years of a brutal invasion, brutal war in Ukraine and bombardments on civilian population in Kiev and other places, speaking here the way he spoke,” Sa’ar said on Aug. 5. He added that the Palestinians learned propaganda “from you.”
Polyanskiy told the council that Sa’ar “hypocritically shed crocodile tears in this chamber over the fate of the Israeli hostages, and he already knew that the Israeli cabinet would soon take this decision, essentially ruling out the possibility of them returning home alive.”
Sa’ar made an “attempt to manipulate the Security Council for domestic Israeli interests,” the Russian diplomat said.
Polyanskiy, whose government has faced criticism of Holocaust revisionism, said “the Jewish people that faced the Holocaust in the Second World War can today put Palestinians in a ghetto and pursue their total destruction.”
“How quickly the lessons of history are forgotten,” he said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also shared a history lesson on Sunday.
“The purpose of this news conference is to puncture the lies and spread the truth, but that distortion has been propelled around the Earth, almost the way that the Jewish people” were “maligned in the Middle Ages,” the Israeli premier told foreign press.
“Every massacre of the Jewish people was preceded by massive vilification. We were said to be ‘spreading vermin’ to Christian society. We were said to be ‘poisoning the wells.’ We were said to ‘slaughter Christian children for their blood,’” Netanyahu said. “As these lies spread around the globe, they were followed by horrific, horrific massacres, pogroms, displacements, finally culminating in the worst massacre of them all—the Holocaust.”
“Today the Jewish state is being maligned in a similar way,” he told the press. “The international press has bought—hook, line and sinker—Hamas statistics, Hamas claims, Hamas forgeries and Hamas photographs.”
Mike Wagenheim
Source: https://www.jns.org/un-found-sense-of-immediacy-but-not-for-hostages-israel-says/
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