Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday condemned the UN Security Council, which he said had become “Israel’s defense council”, a day after the US vetoed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, AFP reports, Agerpres reports .

“Since October 7, the Security Council has become a council for the protection and defense of Israel,” the Turkish head of state condemned on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights.

As Reuters reports, he also called for reform of the UN Security Council.

A UN Security Council call for a cease-fire in Gaza is rejected only by a US veto. Is this correct? The UN Security Council must be reformed,” Erdogan told a human rights conference in Istanbul. The Turkish leader again insisted that “the world is bigger than five”, referring to the fact that the UN Security Council has five permanent members from veto power, China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

“Another world is possible, but without America. The United States is with Israel with its money and military equipment. Hey, America! How much will you pay for this? (…) Every day the Declaration of Human Rights is violated in Gaza,” he continued.

For his part, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said on Saturday that he considered the US “responsible for the bloodshed” in Gaza following the veto imposed by Washington. Calling the position of the US “immoral”, Abbas added that he considers the US “responsible for the bloodshed of Palestinian children, women and the elderly in the Gaza Strip, who became victims of the Israeli occupation forces.”

According to a statement released by his press service, the US is Israel’s “partner” in the “crimes of genocide, ethnic cleansing and war” that the Israeli state is committing in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem. “This policy is becoming a danger to the world and a threat to international security and peace,” Abbas added.

Instead, Yair Lapid, the leader of the centrist opposition in Israel, said that anti-Semitism is the only “rational explanation” for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ decision to insist on a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza.

Guterres this week invoked an exceptional mechanism in the United Nations Charter, Article 99, which allows him to request the Council’s intervention in cases of serious threats to world peace and security, and a subsequent resolution was blocked by a US veto.

“Just when Israel is defending itself after our children have been killed by brutal terrorists and our people are taken hostage, the UN Secretary General suddenly decides to invoke Article 99 to help Hamas. How do we know it’s anti-Semitism? Because there is no other rational explanation for this,” Lapid wrote on Saturday in a series of posts on social networks.

Lapid referred to other deadly conflicts, such as those in Sudan and Syria, saying that in those cases neither Guterres nor his predecessors had invoked Article 99 to force the Security Council to hold a debate.