Middle East on Brink of Full-Scale War, Russian Envoy to UN Warns

"The region is on the brink of a full scale war and an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe," he told reporters following a closed-door UN Security Council meeting on the current escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, TASS reported.

"Let me be clear: the responsibility for the looming war in the Middle East, to a large extent, lies on the United States," he told reporters following the closed-door meeting. 

According to Nebenzya, "it is Washington that recklessly and selfishly blocked the work of the Middle East Quartet of international mediators in an effort to monopolize the peace process and limit it to imposing an economic peace with Israel on the Palestinians and other Arab countries without solving the Palestinian question." "We consistently warned against this, saying it will backfire one day, and so it did," the Russian envoy stressed.

Nebenzya added that "for years, the US blocked any reaction, any signal from the UN Security Council, claiming that its quiet regional diplomacy is more effective."

"We shouldn't ignore that the current flare-up of violence happens against the background with real systematic violations of the decisions of the UN Security Council and the General Assembly, including the illegal expansion of settlements, which is regularly condemned by the vast majority of UN member states," he said.

Nebenzya added that Russia unequivocally condemned "extreme brutality, killings and the horrifying scale of violence."