Palestinian Authority Foreign Affairs Minister Riyad al-Maliki faced off with Danny Dannon, the new Israeli ambassador to the United Nation,. Photo: Roosewelt Pinheiro/ABr.

JNS.org – Danny Danon, the new Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, faced off with Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki on Thursday at a U.N. Security Council session on the subject of the current wave of violence engulfing Israel.

Al-Maliki blamed Israeli “incitement and provocations” for the violence.

“Our Palestinian people, particularly our children, are being killed, targeted by the Israeli occupation forces. They are denied fundamental right to life because of their national and religious identities. Their legitimate rejection of illegal occupation is being faced with killing and destruction,” he said, Yedioth Ahronoth reported.

Danon said that the current attacks against innocent Israeli civilians have been unprovoked.

“This is not a ‘cycle of violence.’ These are simply unprovoked attacks against Israelis for no reason other than the fact that they are Jews living in their historic homeland,” he said.

“Mothers and fathers worry that their children will be knifed to death when they leave the house and children are worried their parents won’t make it home. This is the true meaning of terror. When you ignore this deliberate corruption of the minds of children, you are not part of the solution—you are a part of the problem,” added Danon.

Danon also refuted the Palestinian claim that Israel is “infringing the rights of Muslims in the sites that are holy to them,” explaining that this false view has been circulating since 1928, years before Israel was even established. He reiterated Israel’s commitment to the maintaining the status quo on the Temple Mount.

Israel gained eastern Jerusalem along with its holy sites from Jordan during the 1967 Six-Day War. But access to the Temple Mount is administered by the Islamic Waqf, a Muslim trust overseen by Jordan that limits non-Muslim visitation and bans Jewish prayer. A recent increase in Jewish visitors has been led by Jewish activist groups calling for greater Jewish access to the Temple Mount, which is a site holy to both Judaism and Islam.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was recently quoted as saying that “the Al-Aqsa [mosque] is ours…and they have no right to defile it with their filthy feet.”