U.S. Representative Ed Royce, (R-CA), Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Photo: U.S. Congress.

Chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs Ed Royce (R-CA) lambasted the United Nations Human Rights Council on Friday for adopting a resolution condemning Israel over alleged war crimes during last summer’s Operation Protective Edge.

“This resolution is a black mark on the Human Rights Council,” Royce declared, adding that “it undermines prospects for direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians to resolve their differences.”

Royce questioned the absence of any condemnation of Hamas’ alleged war crimes, which were indicated in the U.N. report but absent from the resolution. He wondered why the resolution failed to mention Israeli attempts to “minimize civilian casualties.”

“Today, the U.N. Human Rights Council kept up its record of bombarding Israel with biased and shameful resolutions. The goal of this international campaign against Israel is to question the democratic country’s right to self-defense to the point of rendering it virtually meaningless,” he said.

The resolution passed on Friday was written by the Palestinians and Arab states, and welcomes the U.N. report on the 2014 Gaza war. It ignores completely Hamas’ indiscriminate firing of rockets at Israeli cities, as well as alleged war crimes by Palestinian groups in Gaza, though several were indicated by the report.

The resolution passed the UNHRC with full European backing, and the U.S. was the only country to vote against it. Five countries — India, Kenya, Ethiopia, Macedonia and Paraguay — abstained.

Israeli lawmaker and chairman of the Yesh Atid Party, Yair Lapid, criticized the eight sitting European members for voting in favor, declaring “no limit to Europe’s hypocrisy.”

“While in Israel ‘Code Red’ sirens are sounding and the residents of the south are once again living under the intolerable cloud of terrorism, countries like Germany, France and the Britain voted in favor of a report which at best is a bad joke and at worst a symbol of the world’s hypocrisy,” he said, as a rocket fired by terrorists exploded in Israel on Friday.

According to Israeli daily Haaretz, officials in the Prime Minister’s Office expressed gratitude for the U.S.’s moral stand in voting against the resolution, which called for the end of impunity for Israeli officials who oversaw the Operation.