(JNS) A multi-paneled monitor was set up in the round of the United Nations Security Council chamber in Manhattan, affording Ilay David the chance to address the body at eye level.
David, the brother of hostage Evyatar David, said that the 15-member body is responsible partly for the suffering of the hostages in Gaza.
“Every moment of delay is a step closer to a final, tragic outcome. We all have a responsibility,” David said via live video feed. “To the leaders of the world, to every member of this council and to the global community, your silence in the face of this monstrous cruelty is complicity.”
Israel requested the Security Council’s emergency session on Wednesday afternoon. The United States, France and the United Kingdom advanced it to address the plight of the hostages, as recent Hamas propaganda videos showed nearly-skeletal Evyatar David and Rom Braslavski suffering from starvation.
In the video, David was shown being forced to dig his own grave.
“My father cannot sleep and my mother has not stopped crying” since the video was released, Ilay David told the council. He urged it to “recognize that this is a matter of life and death requiring urgent medical intervention.”
“The very soul of humanity is being scarred by Hamas’s barbaric actions,” he said.
Gideon Sa’ar, the Israeli foreign minister, flew to New York for the session. He lost no time decrying Dmitry Polyanskiy, the deputy Russian envoy, who said that Moscow mourns all the victims of the conflict and every minute hostages remain in captivity is a tragedy, but Russia holds Israel responsible for the lack of ceasefire. (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, spoke on July 28 and Aug. 4.)
“It was really funny to hear the Russian Federation representative, after three and a half years of a brutal invasion, brutal war in Ukraine and bombardments on civilian population in Kiev and other places, speaking here the way he spoke,” Sa’ar said.
Gideon Sa’ar, the Israeli foreign minister, at a meeting at United Nations headquarters in New York City on the medical condition of hostages held in the Gaza Strip, Aug. 5, 2025. Credit: Liri Agami/Flash90.
Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian “permanent observer” to the council, addressed the global body earlier in the meeting.
“I must say, the Palestinians learned propaganda from you—from the Soviet era, and you were good teachers,” Sa’ar told Polyanskiy. “The Palestinians invented terrorism as a way to promote their means, and it includes all Palestinian factions.”
The Israeli minister said that Hamas is “pure evil” for the host of sexual and other crimes it committed on Oct. 7 and since. He described the terror group’s hostages as in a state of “starvation” and “torture.” He said that was part of Hamas’s “deliberate and well-planned, sadistic propaganda campaign.”
David and Braslavski look like “living skeletons,” in contrast with a “well-fed terrorist,” whose “thick, meaty arm” could be seen in the video of David, Sa’ar said.
The Israeli minister told the council that the Jewish state isn’t responsible for hunger in Gaza.
Israel has been “facilitating huge amounts of aid into Gaza since the beginning of the war,” Sa’ar said. “The truth must be told: Hamas sadistically starves our hostages, while the terrorists enjoy meat, fish and vegetables.” He added that despite a condition in the first ceasefire deal in November 2023 that the Red Cross be allowed to assess the hostages and deliver medication, Hamas has prevented any such care.
“Terror states and organizations kidnapping civilians is not just our problem,” the Israeli minister said. “Today it’s Israel. Tomorrow, it’s you.”
Sa’ar also rebuked António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, and the global media.
Ilay David, brother of hostage Evyatar David, speaks on a screen during a meeting at United Nations headquarters in New York City on the medical condition of hostages held in the Gaza Strip, Aug. 5, 2025. Credit: Liri Agami/Flash90.
“I read the New York Times the day after Hamas released the distorted video of Evyatar David. I looked, but could not find Evyatar on the front-page,” the minister said. (The Times has run prominent images of young Gazans, whom it said were starving but who turned out to have preexisting conditions.)
“We are witnessing the twisted anti-Israel agenda of so much of the global media” and Guterres’s “deafening silence” about the hostages amid his “endless and obsessive tweets against Israel,” Sa’ar said.
Earlier, Sa’ar told reporters that he came to New York to “put the issue of the hostages front and center on the world stage.”
“They cannot be forgotten,” he said.
The minister told reporters that the two-state solution conference at the United Nations the prior week, which France and Saudi Arabia sponsored, “gave Hamas free gifts and an incentive to continue this war.”
“They directly assassinated the hostage deal and ceasefire,” he said.
Dorothy Shea, the interim US ambassador to the United Nations, told the council that “unfortunately, at a time when pressure on Hamas is more necessary than ever to free the hostages and end the war, some have instead taken steps that embolden Hamas and undermine the negotiators’ efforts.”
Last week’s event was an “unproductive publicity stunt,” the likes of which “undercut the efforts of mediators and prolong the war,” Shea said. “These gifts to Hamas not only imperil the hostages. They also hurt the civilians of Gaza who continue to suffer what President Trump has recognized as real starvation.”
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