US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley. Photo: Reuters / Lucas Jackson.

A senior Palestinian official on Wednesday criticized US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and her pledge to “take names” of countries that do not back Washington, saying she had not been appointed “the schoolmarm of the world.”

Haley first warned she would “take names” when she arrived at the United Nations in January last year. She reiterated it ahead of a UN General Assembly vote in December when more than 120 countries voted for a resolution calling for the United States to drop its recognition of Jerusalem as Israel‘s capital.

“She threatened and she pressured and she used coercion and so on at the UN, particularly by taking down names,” Hanan Ashrawi, a senior Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) official, told reporters at the United Nations. “I don’t think people appointed her the schoolmarm of the world.”

The US mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Ashrawi’s remarks.

As the United States opened its new embassy in Jerusalem on Monday, dozens of Palestinian rioters were killed in clashes with IDF troops on the Israel-Gaza Strip border. The UN Security Council met on Tuesday over the violence.

“Those who suggest that the Gaza violence has anything to do with the location of the American embassy are sorely mistaken,” Haley told the council. “Rather, the violence comes from those who reject the existence of the state of Israel in any location.”

Israel and the United States said Hamas — which rules Gaza — instigated the violence.

Ashrawi rejected Haley’s assessment that the opening of the US embassy was not linked to the Gaza border riots. Palestinian leaders have called Monday’s events a “massacre.”

“It’s extremely difficult to find any relationship between reality and the words we hear coming out from the American representative here,” Ashrawi said.