UNITED NATIONS, 25 April 2008 — A Libyan envoy who compared the situation in Gaza to the Holocaust went further yesterday, saying it was worse than in Nazi concentration camps because of regular Israeli bomb attacks.
“It is more than what happened in the concentration camps,” Libya’s deputy permanent UN representative, Ibrahim Dabbashi, told reporters. “There is the bombing, daily bombing (by Israel) ... in Gaza. It was not in the concentration camps.” “It is worse than that,” said Dabbashi.
US envoy Alejandro Wolff rejected the Libyan statement. He was one of several Western envoys who walked out of a UN Security Council discussion on Gaza on Wednesday after Dabbashi compared the situation in the Gaza Strip to the Holocaust.
Wolff told reporters the remarks “reflect a degree of historical ignorance and moral insensitivity that is one of the large reasons this council has been unable to act on Middle East issues and why peace in the Middle East is so difficult.” The French, British, Belgian and Costa Rican envoys also left the council on Wednesday after Dabbashi made his remarks.
Such protests against fellow Security Council members are rare, diplomats said. Israel, which withdrew troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005 but still controls its airspace, coastal waters and main goods crossings, regularly launches incursions and air strikes that it says target militants responsible for cross-border rocket fire and other attacks.
Israel has repeatedly suggested that Libya should never have been elected to a seat on the Security Council. After decades of isolation as a pariah of the West, Libya was elected to the council last year after the United States dropped its opposition. It is the only Arab state on the council and will have its seat until the end of 2009.
In January, Israel sealed border crossings with the Gaza Strip in response to Palestinian rocket attacks against southern Israel.
The United Nations has warned that closing Gaza’s borders has resulted in a humanitarian crisis for the territory’s 1.5 million people, most of whom depend on foreign aid.
Libya and other council members have been pushing for the Security Council to condemn the Israeli blockade of Gaza, which the United Nations says has made it very difficult to deliver food and medicine and has severely damaged the economy.
Immediately after Dabbashi mentioned the concentration camps, diplomats said, French Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert, Wolff, Britain’s deputy ambassador Karen Pierce, Belgian Ambassador Johan Verbeke and Costa Rica’s deputy ambassador walked out of the council’s consultation room. South Africa’s UN Ambassador Dumisani Kumalo, the current council president, then ended the meeting.
“We support the South African presidency’s decision to close the meeting,” Britain’s Pierce said in a statement. “A number of council members were dismayed by the approach taken by Libya and do not believe that such language helps advance the peace process.” Kumalo would not confirm the walkout, saying “ambassadors always walk in and out” of council meetings.
Syria’s UN Ambassador Bashar Ja’afari, who is not a Security Council member, told reporters afterward that he agreed with Libya’s characterization of the situation in Gaza. “We have many times compared this situation — I mean the one prevailing in the occupied Palestinian territories — to the situation in Europe during World War II,” he said. “Unfortunately, those who complain of being victims of some kind of genocide are repeating the same kind of genocide against the Palestinians.”
Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, in a letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the situation in Gaza, accused the Israeli military of perpetrating “atrocious crimes against humanity ... resulting in the death and injury of hundreds of Palestinians.”
In the letter, obtained Wednesday by the Associated Press, he urged Ban “to take all necessary measures in order to stop the inhumane actions of the Zionist regime, and to help alleviate the sufferings of the Palestinian people.”
