United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon met with President Shimon Peres Wednesday and promised that the U.N. would not conduct any more inquiries without coordinating them with Israel.
The two met in New York.
“I took action to balance the latest report in which Israel was attacked for ‘Cast Lead,’” Ban told Peres. “I admit that the committee made several recommendations that were beyond the scope of the mandate given it,” he added.
Peres made it clear that Israel would not apologize for its actions in Gaza. “We do not accept even one word from the report. This is an unfair and unilateral report, which ignored the cruelty and incessant fire by Hamas,” he said.
'Did we kill our own soldiers on purpose?'
“I admit that we made several mistakes, but I do not know any wars without mistakes. We did not want to kill a single civilian, but war is terrible and our own soldiers, too, died of our forces’ fire,” Peres noted. “Did we kill our own soldiers on purpose? Of course not."
"You need to give us one answer,” Peres told the Secretary General. “Why did 4,000 missiles land on Israel’s children in three years? What did you expect, that we would sit there and do nothing, that we would not defend Israel’s citizens?”
Peres also told Ban that Israel “views with great severity” the invitation of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the recent U.N. conference on racism in Geneva. “You chose to give a podium to such a vile man, who wishes to implement a second Holocaust,” Peres accused. Ban said that he had no idea Ahmadinejad would speak as he did.