During a private meeting on Sunday, United Nations' Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon disregarded U.N. neutrality when he seemingly took sides in the long-standing conflict between Israel and Palestine by saying that Israel's "occupation" of Gaza provided Hamas justification for launching over 3,600 rockets on Israel citizens.
The claims prompted Netanyahu to correct Ban's premise, saying that the concept of an "occupation" was made moot after Israel's 2005 disengagement from Gaza, reported the Jerusalem Post.
"The root cause of the violence that burst from Gaza is not Israel's occupation in Gaza, for a simple reason: Israel doesn't occupy Gaza," Netanyahu said. "Israel left Gaza to the very last centimeter, to the very last inch. We uprooted all the settlements and vacated all the settlers. So there is no Israeli occupation of Gaza. The root cause of this summer's outburst of violence was Hamas' rocketing of Israeli cities, and these rocket attacks often exploited UN neutrality, using UN facilities and UN schools as part of the Hamas machine of terror. And when rockets were discovered inside UN schools, some UN officials handed them back to Hamas - that very same Hamas that was rocketing Israeli cities and Israeli civilians."
Hamas' opposition to "Israel's very existence" is the main cause of the rocket fire on Israel, Netanyahu declared.
"Hamas doesn't give a hoot for the 1967 lines. For them, Israel has no right to live, in any borders. Hamas rejects our very existence. They're committed to killing every Israeli and every Jew. You just have to read their charter - they say that very plainly."
Peace can "only be achieved" through peace talks, Netanyahu said as he criticized the Hamas-Palestinian Authority's pledge to prosecute Israel in the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes, something the authority has been threatening to do for years.
Ban made the trip to Jersusalem this week, where he met with top politicans and called for peace talks to resume, also asking Israel to lift restrictions on the Gaza Strip and to halt settlement activity in east Jersusalem.
Ban visited the Gaza strip on Tuesday, two days after donor states pledged $5.4 billion in aid to help rebuild after last summer's 50-day war, in which more than 2,100 Palestinians and 73 Israelis were killed.
