Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, blasted his Iranian counterpart on Friday for forcing an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council to voice complaints about Israel’s military strikes on the Islamic Republic.
“You are not a diplomat. You are a wolf in disguise,” Danon told Amir Saeid Iravani, the regime’s envoy. “How dare you come here to ask for help while your regime calls for the destruction of our people.”
Iran requested Friday morning’s session and was backed by council members Algeria, China, Pakistan and Russia.
“How dare a representative of a regime that finances, arms and orchestrates terrorism all over the world, ask for compassion from this council?” Danon said, after Iravani accused the Jewish state of targeting civilians.
The session took place amid a week-long series of strikes between the two sides in what Israel dubbed “Operation Rising Lion,” an effort to target Iran’s nuclear facilities, military leadership and assets and nuclear scientists.
Danon decried Iran for its Thursday strike on Soroka Medical Center, located in the southern Israeli city of Beersheva. Iran claims, without evidence, that the hospital is located near military facilities and suffered only residual damage.
Experts told JNS that Iran doesn’t have sufficiently “smart” weapons to target the hospital from such a great distance but that it is responsible for striking the medical site. “The fact that Iran is knowingly firing inaccurate ballistic missiles at cities gives you a good idea of where their intentions lie,” Ryan Brobst, deputy director of the military and political power center at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told JNS.
Widely available video from the ground shows extensive damage to the hospital.
Of the 24 reported deaths thus far in Israel from Iranian missiles, all have been civilians.
“Iran is not only building nuclear capabilities. It is already waging war against Israeli citizens,” Danon said. “While the U.N. secretary-general is asking for ‘restraint,’ Iran is launching missiles at hospitals. We will not ask for permission to protect our children.”
Iravani described Israel’s operation as a “large-scale, unprovoked military attack,” accusing Jerusalem of “deliberate war crimes, acts of state terror and an example of barbaric warfare.”
Danon rejected any notion that the Jewish state targets Iranian civilians, challenging Iravani to reveal the names and locations of affected Iranian hospitals.
“This is the difference between a democracy acting in defence of its people and a regime targeting civilians,” Danon said.
The Iranian envoy continued to insist that the regime’s nuclear program is peaceful.
“There is no greater threat to international peace and security than a nuclear Iran,” Danon said.
Israel had acted militarily “as a last resort” and would not “wait for another threat, rocket, missile, terrorist or atomic bomb,” Danon said.
António Guterres, the U.N. secretary-general, briefed the council, pushing members to act with “unity and urgency” in cooling tensions.
Rafael Mariano Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear sites over the past week caused a “sharp degradation” in nuclear safety and security.
Grossi has drawn the ire of Iranian regime officials for a recent agency report stating that Iran was consistently out of compliance with its Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons obligations and refused to clarify why traces of nuclear activity were found at undeclared sites.
The report led to a censure of Tehran by the agency’s board of governors, which Iran claims paved the way for Israel’s actions. Russia concurred with that assessment.
Mohammad Eslami, the head of the Iranian regime’s Atomic Energy Organization, sent a letter to Grossi on Thursday claiming that Israeli attacks took place “despite repeated warnings to you regarding inaction, especially by the board of governors, which unfortunately operates under the guidance, influence and support of three European countries, the United States and the Zionist regime.”
The three European countries are France, Germany and the United Kingdom, which are signatories to the original Iranian nuclear accord of 2015. The trio has threatened recently to reinstate sanctions for Tehran’s noncompliance with the terms.
Eslami said he would take “legal action” against Grossi.
Dorothy Shea, Washington’s interim U.N. ambassador, told the council that “Iran’s leaders could have avoided this conflict had they agreed to a deal that would have prevented them from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon, but they refused to do so, choosing instead to delay and deny.”
“We can no longer ignore that Iran has all that it needs to achieve a nuclear weapon,” she added. “All it needs is a decision from their supreme leader.”
Jérôme Bonnafont, France’s U.N. envoy, blasted Iran for exceeding uranium enrichment quotas it had agreed to, and for its support of regional terror organizations.