UNITED NATIONS, October 14. /TASS/. Israel has the right to protect its citizens but its collective punishment of Palestinians is unacceptable, Russian Permanent Representative to the United Nations Vasily Nebenzya said.

"Israel by all means has the right to protect its own citizens. We also reiterate the right of Israel to ensure its security. However, there are two inseparable dimensions of the unfolding tragedy, and we can't highlight one and ignore the other: indiscriminate shellings of residential areas in Gaza, cutting this territory from water and electricity," he told reporters following a closed-door UN Security Council meeting on the current escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"There are human lives that matter most. Israel's actions of collective punishment of Gaza citizens, as well as its demands to evacuate more than one million civilians in 24 hours and concentrate them in a de facto ghetto in the south of the sector, are also unacceptable and can lead to irreversible catastrophic consequences regionally and globally," Russia’s UN envoy stressed.