The UN Security Council held an emergency meeting here
to discuss the deadly Israeli attack on Gaza, with India expressing the
hope that Israel and Palestine will pay heed to the Council’s message
that the two should exercise restraint and violence must stop.
“It is our expectation that the Council’s meeting will help de-escalate
the situation and impress upon the parties the need to exercise maximum
restraint so that the situation does not deteriorate any further.
“The message which must resonate from this meeting is that violence has
to stop,” India’s Permanent Representative to the UN Hardeep Singh Puri
told presspersons after the late night 90-minute closed door emergency
meeting.
Puri, who is also President of the Security Council, was speaking in his national capacity and not on behalf of the Council.
He said all the statements that he heard during the meeting “resonated
with the message that the violence has to stop, there has to be
de-escalation (of violence)”.
The Council did not
come up with any statement on the Israeli attack and Puri said council
members had only agreed to issue a communique, which would state that an
emergency meeting on the situation had taken place.
He said the Council will continue to monitor the crisis.
The Council also heard a briefing on the situation from Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman.
Tensions flared between Israel and Palestine after Israel launched
deadly strikes against Palestinian Hamas militants in Gaza yesterday.
Ahmed Said Khalil al-Jabari, the head of the military wing of the
Palestinian group Hamas that controls Gaza, was killed when his car was
targeted during Israeli air strikes on the territory that followed a
wave of rocket attacks against Israel from Gaza.
UN
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spoke by telephone yesterday with Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi
about the escalating violence in Gaza and southern Israel.
Ban’s spokesperson said the UN Chief expressed his concern to Netanyahu
about the deteriorating situation in southern Israel and Gaza, which
includes an alarming escalation of indiscriminate rocket fire from Gaza
into Israel and the targeted killing by Israel of the Hamas military
operative in Gaza.
The Secretary-General reiterated
his strong condemnation of rocket fire out of Gaza and noted his
expectation that Israeli reactions are measured so as not to provoke a
new cycle of bloodshed that could cause additional civilian casualties
and have dangerous spillover effects in the region.
He also called for the parties to exercise the utmost restraint and to respect international humanitarian law.
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