Nikki Haley, the United States Ambassador to the UN, on Tuesday urged the global body to take action against the Hamas terrorist organization as well as countries that support it.
“A few weeks ago, UN officials discovered a tunnel underneath two schools run by the UN in Gaza. It was the exact type of tunnel that Hamas has used for years. These tunnels are what Hamas uses to smuggle in the materials they need to make rockets. Or to sneak into Israel to attack civilians or kidnap them in the dead of night,” Haley told a UN Security Council briefing on the situation in the Middle East.
“Imagine children playing in their schoolyard while Hamas moved explosives underneath their feet. Imagine children trying to learn, while a few feet below, terrorists might have been crawling toward Israel. All of this happening under a building flying the flag of the United Nations. It’s an outrage,” she added.
Haley noted that Gaza “is prime real estate on the Mediterranean Sea” and has “enormous potential”, but that potential “is being squandered by the terrorists who govern it.”
The humanitarian crisis in Gaza “rests squarely with the one group that actually controls Gaza: Hamas,” she continued.
“Hamas has exercised control over Gaza since 2007. After 10 years of Hamas rule, life for the people of Gaza is worse than ever before. Rather than govern, Hamas chooses to devote its resources to building a terrorist arsenal. Rather than pursuing peace, Hamas chooses to provoke destructive wars. Rather than allowing help to reach the Palestinian people, Hamas chooses to divert untold amounts of aid to feed its military enterprise.”
“Hamas remains a terrorist organization bent on Israel’s destruction. Its goal is to defeat Israel by force. It will use all the resources it can to continue the fight,” said Haley.
She urged the Security Council to stand up to condemn Hamas’s terror, noting that some member states of the UN maintain ties to Hamas and other Gaza terrorist groups.
“The Security Council must unite to say that enough is enough. We need to pressure Hamas to end its tyranny over the people of Gaza. We should condemn Hamas in this Council’s resolutions and statements. We should name Hamas as the group responsible when rockets are fired from Gaza, or when fresh tunnels are discovered. And we should designate Hamas as a terrorist organization in a resolution, with consequences for anyone who continues to support it,” said Haley.
“We must do much more to show Hamas that we will never tolerate terrorism. We must show that when Hamas uses homes and schools to hide its terrorist infrastructure, there will be consequences. Those who give Hamas the arms, money, and political support to operate must cease. And if they do not, Member States of this United Nations need to come together to put real pressure on supporters of Hamas to stop,” she continued.
“Every ounce of what we do should be against Hamas. They are a dangerous actor who has no care for the Palestinians, no care for the Israelis, and they are determined to destroy everything in their path. So once again, we are having this session, and once again, we will hear speeches on whether you’re for Israel, against Israel, for Palestinians, against Palestinians. But I would ask you to please address the real threat that is causing so many people harm, and that’s the threat of Hamas.”