The U.N. Security Council adopted a watered-down resolution Friday calling for immediate speeded-up aid deliveries to hungry and desperate civilians in Gaza — but without the original call for an “urgent suspension of hostilities” between Israel and Hamas.
The long-delayed vote in the 15-member council was 13-0 with the United States and Russia abstaining. The vote came immediately after the United States vetoed a Russian amendment that would have restored the call to immediately suspend hostilities. That vote was 10 countries in favor, the U.,S. against and four abstentions.
The final-vote U.S. abstention avoided a second American veto of a Gaza resolution following Hamas’ surprise Oct. 7 attacks inside Israel. A relieved U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the council after the resolution’s adoption: “This was tough, but we got there.”
She said the vote bolsters efforts “to alleviate this humanitarian crisis to get life saving assistance into Gaza and to get hostages out of Gaza, to push for the protection of innocent civilians and humanitarian workers and to work towards a lasting peace.”
But Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia called the resolution “entirely toothless” and accused the United States of “shameful, cynical and irresponsible conduct” and resorting to tactics “of gross pressure, blackmail and twisting arms” to avoid a U.S. veto.
The final resolution, with some late changes Friday morning, culminated a week and a half of high-level diplomacy by the United States, the United Arab Emirates on behalf of Arab nations and others. Between Tuesday and Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke to the foreign ministers of Egypt and the United Arab Emirates three times each as well as to the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Britain, France and Germany.
The vote, initially scheduled for Monday, was delayed every day until Friday.
Rather than watered down, Thomas-Greenfield described the resolution as “strong” and said it “is fully supported by the Arab group that provides them what they feel is needed to get humanitarian assistance on the ground.”
But it was stripped of its key provision with teeth: the call for “the urgent suspension of hostilities to allow safe and unhindered humanitarian access, and for urgent steps towards a sustainable cessation of hostilities” which Russia sought to restore.
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Instead, the resolution calls “for urgent steps to immediately allow safe, unhindered and expanded humanitarian access, and also for creating the conditions for a sustainable cessation of hostilities.” The steps are not defined, but diplomats said its adoption marks the council’s first reference to stopping fighting.
On a key sticking point concerning aid deliveries, the resolution eliminated a previous request for the U.N. “to exclusively monitor all humanitarian relief consignments to Gaza provided through land, sea and air routes” by outside parties to confirm their humanitarian nature.
It substituted a request to U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to expeditiously appoint “a senior humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator with responsibility for facilitating, coordinating, monitoring and verifying” whether relief deliveries to Gaza that are not from the parties to the conflict are humanitarian goods. It asks the coordinator to expeditiously establish a “mechanism” to speed aid deliveries and demands that the parties to the conflict — Israel and Hamas — cooperate with the coordinator.
Guterres has said Gaza faces “a humanitarian catastrophe” and warned that a total collapse of the humanitarian support system would lead to “a complete breakdown of public order and increased pressure for mass displacement into Egypt.”
According to a report released Thursday by 23 U.N. and humanitarian agencies, Gaza’s entire 2.2 million population is in a food crisis or worse and 576,600 are at the “catastrophic” starvation level. With supplies to Gaza cut off except for a small trickle, the U.N. World Food Program has said 90% of the population is regularly going without food for a full day.
Nearly 20,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, since the conflict started. During the Oct. 7 attack, Hamas militants killed about 1,200 people in Israel and took about 240 hostages back to Gaza.
Hamas controls the Gaza Strip, and its Health Ministry does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths. Thousands more Palestinians lie buried under the rubble of Gaza, the U.N. estimates.
Security Council resolutions are legally binding, but in practice many parties choose to ignore the council’s requests for action. General Assembly resolutions are not legally binding, though they are a significant barometer of world opinion.
© 2023 The Canadian Press
