Benjamin Netanyahu poses with ministers prior to a cabinet meeting in the Israeli occupied Golan Heights, April 17.

The United Nations Security Council on Tuesday unanimously voiced alarm over Israeli statements about the Golan Heights on Syria’s border with Israel, a declaration that elicited a sharp response from Israel.

Earlier this month Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would never relinquish the Golan Heights, in a signal to Russia and the United States that the strategic plateau should be excluded from any deal on Syria’s future.

“Council members expressed their deep concern over recent Israeli statements about the Golan, and stressed that the status of the Golan remains unchanged,” China’s U.N. Ambassador Liu Jieyi, president of the 15-nation Security Council this month, told reporters after a closed-door meeting.

He added that council resolution 497 of 1981 made clear that Israel’s decision at the time to impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration in the Golan was “null and void and without international legal effect.”

Council statements are adopted by consensus, which means all its members, including Israel’s ally the United States, backed it.

Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Danny Danon issued a statement rejecting the council complaint.

“Holding a meeting on this topic completely ignores the reality in the Middle East,” he said. “While thousands of people are being massacred in Syria, and millions of citizens have become refugees, the Security Council has chosen to focus on Israel, the only true democracy in the Middle East.”