Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan and New York City Mayor Eric Adams at an event at the United Nations on March 29, 2022. Photo: Shahar Azran.

Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations (UN) Gilad Erdan on Wednesday accused Palestinian leadership of obstructing the peace process by waging a “jihad war of multilateral terrorism” meant to “destroy the Jewish state.”

Speaking before the UN’s Security Council, Erdan’s remarks also addressed the Palestinians’ role in the passage of a UN General Assembly plenary resolution asking the International Court of Justice to issue an advisory opinion on the “occupied” Palestinian territories.

“One of the weapons that they use in this jihad war is the manipulation and abuse of international bodies,” Erdan said.

“They weaponize these bodies in order to force Israel into surrendering to their demands,” he added, charging that the Palestinians are leveraging anti-Israel bias in the United Nations to impose on Israel multilateral actions that reflect exclusively their narratives and policy preferences.

Erdan also criticized the Palestinians for classifying deaths of terrorists as civilian deaths, creating the perception that Israel indiscriminately kills Palestinians, and denounced the UN for passing “more resolutions targeting Israel than the rest of the world combined.”

Palestinian envoy the UN Riyad Mansour also addressed the Security Council, accusing Israel of “living in a parallel dimension in which the entire world is wrong and they are right.”

“Israel should renounce colonial occupation to abide by the law, not expect the world to renounce its rules and principles to accommodate its colonial occupation,” he continued.

US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield emphasized the US’s commitment to the two-state solution and called for deescalating hostilities by, for example, keeping the Temple Mount, referred to by Palestinians as the al-Asqa Mosque, a neutral space.

She also urged donor countries to increase their funding of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), a Palestinian aid organization that has been criticized for teaching antisemitic tropes and themes in schools it administers in the Palestinian territories.