Riyad Mansour
Riyad MansourReuters

The Palestinian Authority (PA)’s envoy to the United Nations insisted on Tuesday that Resolution 2334 passed last month by the UN Security Council was “pro-peace”.

The envoy, Riyad Mansour, made the comments in the first meeting of the Security Council since the passing of the resolution which condemned Israel’s presence in Judea, Samaria, and eastern Jerusalem.

The resolution is a move towards peace, one that is both “pro-Palestinian” and “pro-Israel”, Mansour claimed, according to i24news.

He added that it was a “turning point” and a "moment of truth" for Israel.

“Resolution 2334 is not anti-Israel. It is anti-settlements. It is pro-peace, pro-Palestine, and pro-Israel,” said Mansour.

The passing of Resolution 2334 was one in a series of unilateral moves by the PA, which seeks to impose an agreement on Israel while bypassing direct talks.

The PA has in recent years several times initiated similar resolutions at the UN Security Council, though they have failed to pass due to the U.S. using its veto power.

This time, however, President Barack Obama chose to break with the longstanding policy and abstain in the vote, allowing the resolution to pass.

This week, Obama toldCBS’s “60 Minutes” that his choosing to abstain in last month’s vote did not trigger a significant crisis in relations with Israel.

“I don’t think [the abstention] caused a major rupture in relations between the United States and Israel. If you’re saying that Prime Minister [Binyamin] Netanyahu got fired up, he’s been fired up repeatedly during the course of my presidency, around the Iran deal and around our consistent objection to settlements. So that part of it wasn’t new,” he said.

Obama added that he believed “that both for our national interests and Israel’s national interests that allowing an ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians that could get worse and worse over time is a problem. And that settlements contribute. They’re not the sole reason for it, but they’re a contributing factor to the inability to solve that problem.”

At Tuesday’s Security Council meeting, Israeli UN ambassador Danny Danon said that Resolution 2334 encouraged terrorists to carry out more attacks against Jews.

”The resolution you adopted against Israel provided inspiration for terror,” Danon said as he took out a photo of four soldiers who were murdered in the terrorist attack in Jerusalem’s Armon Hanatziv neighborhood last week.

“Shir Hajaj, Yael Yakutiel, Erez Orbach, and Shira Tzur were murdered by a Palestinian who was led to believe that he could use terror and violence to remove the Jewish people from Jerusalem. He will not succeed," stressed Danon.