During remarks to a UN Security Council briefing on the situation in the West Bank, Russian Permanent Representative to the UN Vassily Nebenzia pointed to the situation in the Gaza Strip, where, “less than a year since the formal entry into force of the ceasefire agreement,” he said, “nearly 1,300 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces. According to UNICEF, almost 300 of them were children. This means that over the past 300 days, on average, one child has been killed every day in Gaza at the hands of Israeli military personnel.”
The diplomat declared that “the practical implementation of the US ‘peace plan’ for Gaza has effectively stalled,” and pointed frankly to the culprit: “A number of Western delegations in this Chamber have laid the blame for the lack of progress on the Gaza peace plan squarely on Hamas. We all remember the repeated calls during Security Council meetings on the leadership of the Palestinian movement to immediately lay down its arms, not to obstruct the work of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), and to accept the roadmap proposed by the High Representative of the Peace Council, Mr. Nikolay Mladenov. We sincerely hope that our Western colleagues will demonstrate the same unity and determination vis-à-vis the other party to the conflict, specifically given the fact that West Jerusalem publicly rejected that roadmap while Hamas agreed to the proposed deal.”
