Israel’s envoy to the United Nations panned Russia at a Security Council meeting Tuesday over Moscow’s criticism of Israel’s actions as it wages war on the Hamas terror group and pointed out infractions committed by Russia amid its ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
Ambassador Gild Erdan drew a line connecting Iran, which backs Hamas, with the war in Ukraine where it is supplying Russia with military equipment after Moscow invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
“As we all know, Iranian drones are being used by Russia to kill civilians in Ukraine,” Erdan told the council. “Iran’s terror will reach all of you. We all know this, even Russia, who collaborates with Iran.”
Erdan later posted to X that he “responded to the hypocrisy of Russia which brazenly criticizes Israel while everyone knows it cooperates with Iran, the number one state sponsor of terrorism, and uses Iranian drones to kill Ukrainian citizens.”
The war between Israel and Hamas erupted when the terror group carried out an unprecedented attack on October 7 that killed some 1,200 people in Israel’s south, mostly civilians. Terrorists who burst through the boundary with the Gaza Strip also abducted 253 people who were taken into the Palestinian coastal enclave; more than 130 are still being held.
Israel responded with a military campaign to destroy Hamas, remove it from power in Gaza and release the hostages.
Israel has until now largely avoided directly criticizing Russia, with the government seen as attempting to keep ties from deteriorating in order to protect its freedom of action in the skies over Syria.
At the meeting, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the council had not provided an adequate response to ending the war because the US is vetoing council resolutions on a ceasefire while enabling Israel to carry out “collective punishment” of Palestinians in Gaza.
Earlier in the day, Lavrov gave an interview with the CBS network during which he urged the creation of a Palestinian state to end the violence.
“If in response to terrorist attacks, international humanitarian standards are ignored and means of collective punishment are applied, then I fear that this is an invitation to more barbaric methods of combat on either side.”
“Unless this injustice is corrected, and a Palestinian state is created, more and more violence will pop up in Palestine, and in other parts of the Arab and Muslim world,” he said.
Lavrov also criticized Israel for alleged strikes in Lebanon and Syria that have targeted Hamas, Hezbollah and Iranian military sites, including a weekend strike that killed five officers from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Addressing the Security Council meeting, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Israel’s rejection of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “unacceptable.”
Riyad al-Maliki, the Palestinian Authority foreign minister, said Israel was carrying out “the most savage bombing campaign” since World War II, which is leading to famine and the massive displacement of civilians.
“This is an assault of atrocities,” which has destroyed countless innocent lives, he told the Security Council.
Calling for a ceasefire, al-Maliki said the “disregard for Palestinian life” should no longer be tolerated.
Erdan rejected a ceasefire, noting that Hamas leaders have “publicly sworn to commit such massacres [as October 7] again, and again and again until Israel is destroyed.”
Hamas has an “agenda of Jewish genocide,” he said, and that on October 7, “my people were deliberately butchered” in an act of “sheer evil.”
He urged the Security Council to “eliminate the root” of the conflict, which he said was Iran, and warned the council that if “it continues to focus only on providing aid to Gaza, which is truly important… but ignores the root of the dire threat to the Middle East and the world, the Iranian threat, then our collective future will be a very dark, radical, Shiite future.”
He held up a photo provided by the US military of Iranian weapons it seized from a ship heading to supply the Houthi repels. Houthis say they are carrying out the attacks in support of the Palestinians and aim to target Israel-affiliated ships, though many vessels with no ties to Israel have also been targeted, including US warships. Their missile and drone strikes, as well as boarding of cargo ships, have drawn a US-led military response, including airstrikes on the Houthis in Yemen.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian warned Israel that it would not destroy Hamas, its stated goal.
“The killing of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank cannot continue on to the so-called total destruction of Hamas, because that time will never come,” he said. “Stopping the genocide in Gaza is the main key to security in the region.”
US Under Secretary of State Uzra Zeya used her remarks to reiterate that there can be no forced relocation of Palestinians and that Gaza civilians displaced by the fighting must be allowed to “voluntarily and safely return home, with dignity, as soon as conditions allow.”
She urged Israel to do more to prevent civilian casualties of which, she said, there have already been “far too many.
But Zeya blamed Hamas for the war, reminding the council that “Hamas’s brutal terrorist attacks on Israel unleashed this conflict.”
“It is time for this council to unequivocally condemn Hamas’s atrocities and terror,” she said “to reiterate its demand that Hamas immediately release all the hostages and allow medical access” and described the forum’s failure to do so as “bewildering.”
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry has said that since the start of the war, at least 25,490 people in Gaza have been killed, mostly women and children, though these figures cannot be independently verified, and are believed to include both civilians and Hamas members killed in Gaza, including as a consequence of terror groups’ own rocket misfires.
The IDF says it has killed over 9,000 terror group members in Gaza, in addition to some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7, and says that it has continued to take steps to ensure that civilian casualties are minimized despite Hamas being deeply entrenched within the enclave’s population.