Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, today (Wednesday, 31 January 2024), at the Prime Minister's Office in Jerusalem, met with a delegation of ambassadors to the UN, led by Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan, from Malta, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, Slovenia and Sierra Leone.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:
"Welcome. It's good to see all of you, and I'm glad you came to see with your own eyes and hear with your own ears direct evidence of the slaughter and the savagery.
The UN has not been a stellar organization when it comes to dealing with Israel. It's often unbelievably tilted. It has the UN Human Rights Commission, so-called Human Rights Commission, that devotes an enormous part of its resolutions against Israel, and nothing against Iran or Yemen or other arenas of savagery and aggression.
Not by saying it should be a plague on both your houses. No, because Israel is fighting the war of civilization against barbarism, because Israel is responding to unbelievably brutal and unprovoked attacks and because it's doing so with the greatest effort that I see of any army to minimize civilian casualties against an enemy that is committing a double war crime of both targeting our civilians, mutilating our civilians, raping our women and men, beheading them after the rape, burning babies alive, and sundry other atrocities that the only time that we've seen anything like that directed against the Jewish people was in the Holocaust.
South Africa had the temerity to bring this to the ICJ, charging us with genocide against, really in the service of a genocidal organization. Now, the worst thing that I can say is this, that many of the charges, false and unfounded, that were leveled against us in The Hague were brought by UNRWA officials. And we have discovered in the last few weeks that UNRWA officials were complicit in the massacre.
I think it's time that the international community and the UN itself understand that UNRWA's mission has to end. UNRWA is self-perpetuating. It is self-perpetuating also in its desire to keep alive the Palestinian refugee issue. And we need to get other UN agencies and other aid agencies replacing UNRWA if we're going to solve the problem of Gaza as we intend to do. There are other agencies in the UN. There are other agencies in the world. They have to replace UNRWA.
UNRWA is totally infiltrated with Hamas. It has been in the service of Hamas and its schools, and in many other things. I say this with great regret because we hoped that there would be an objective and constructive body to offer aid. We need such a body today in Gaza. But UNRWA is not that body. It has to be replaced by some organization or organizations that will do that job."
Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan said that every country that continues to fund UNRWA before a comprehensive investigation of the organization needs to know that its funds will serve terrorism and that the assistance that will be transferred to UNRWA is liable to reach Hamas terrorists instead of the population in Gaza. He called on all donor countries to freeze their support and demand an in-depth investigation that will cover all UNRWA employees.
Also attending the meeting were the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff, Tzachi Braverman, the Prime Minister's Foreign Policy Adviser, Dr. Ophir Falk and Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan.