An informal cease-fire took hold yesterday after close to 22 hours of mortar shell and rocket fire out of the Gaza Strip toward Israel’s southern communities and IDF retaliatory strikes on militant installations belonging to the Islamist Hamas and Islamic Jihad across the Palestinian enclave. The massive barrage of rockets and mortar shells that were fired by the Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad and its Gaza-ruling ally, the Islamist Hamas organization, led the United States to call for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council, during which Washington’s Ambassador Nikki Haley condemned Hamas’ heinous acts as proving an apparent truth: “Hamas’ stated purpose is the destruction of the state of Israel.”
While the United Kingdom and France joined the United States in condemning the internationally recognized terror group, Hamas; a statement demanding an official condemnation of the Islamist organization’s rocket fire toward Israel was blocked by the Council’s Arab representative, Kuwait, a temporary member of the powerful body, which praised Hamas for its ongoing battle against the Jewish state. Kuwait’s Ambassador to the U.N. Mansour Al-Otaibi emphasized to the other members of the Security Council that his country fully supports the Palestinians, who he asserted “have a legitimate right to fight (Israel) and to defend their aspirations and dreams to independence,” “for as long as the occupation (of what Al-Otaibi defined as Muslim lands) continues.” In response to Kuwait’s decision to block the condemning statement, Ambassador Haley described the UN body as “disconnected,” while calling its failure to adopt the statement “outrageous.”