Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday night praised the United States’s veto of a United Nations Security Council resolution on Friday called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
“I greatly appreciate the correct stance that the U.S. has taken in the U.N. Security Council,” said Netanyahu.
“The other countries need to understand that, on the one hand, it is impossible to support the elimination of Hamas while on the other hand calling for a halt to the war, which will prevent the elimination of Hamas,” he added.
“Therefore, Israel will continue our just war to eliminate Hamas and achieve the other goals of the war that we have set,” said the premier.
U.S. Deputy Ambassador Robert Wood criticized the council after the vote as the resolution did not condemn Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 people in Israel or the kidnapping of some 240 hostages by the terror group. It also did not acknowledge Israel’s right to self-defense.
Wood said the resolution was “divorced from reality” and would have “only plant[ed] the seeds for the next war.”
Thirteen members of 15-strong UNSC voted in favor of the resolution while Britain abstained.
Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Gilad Erdan expressed his appreciation to the Biden administration for “standing firmly by our side and showing its leadership and values.
“It is shocking that while Hamas is firing rockets at Israel from population centers in southern Gaza, the U.N. is busy debating a distorted resolution that will enable Hamas terrorists to stay in power and does not condemn them.... A ceasefire will be possible only with the return of all the hostages and the destruction of Hamas,” added Erdan.
The Security Council convened the emergency meeting to hear from Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who last week invoked Article 99 of the U.N. Charter, which allows the head of the international body to bring to the council’s attention issues that he perceives as a threat to international security.
Guterres warned on Friday of a “humanitarian catastrophe” and “a complete breakdown of public order " in Gaza, and urged the council to demand a truce.
Gaza is at “a breaking point,” he said, adding that Hamas’s Oct. 7 slaughter “can never justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”
In late October, Guterres told the Security Council that “it is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” adding that “the Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.”
He went on to say that “they have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced; and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.”
In response, Israeli Foreign Minister Cohen slammed Guterres in his own address to the Security Council: “Mr. Secretary-General, in what world do you live? Definitely, this is not our world.”
