United Nations, United States — The United States on Wednesday vetoed a UN Security Council push to call for a ceasefire in Gaza that Washington said would have emboldened Hamas.
The resolution demanded “an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire” in the war between Israel and the Palestinian group, along with “the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages.”
But the wording angered Israel, with a senior US official warning ahead of the vote that the resolution had “the potential only to buoy Hamas, which will have no reason to come to the negotiating table.”
Israel’s UN ambassador Danny Danon said “the resolution being considered by the Security Council today is nothing short of a betrayal.”
“For us, it has to be a linkage between a ceasefire and the release of hostages,” said Robert Wood, the deputy US ambassador to the United Nations. “It has been our principle position from the beginning and it still remains.”
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza has said the death toll from Israeli war had reached 43,985 people, the majority civilians. The United Nations considers the figures reliable.
Of 251 hostages seized during the October 7 attack, 97 remain in Gaza, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.
Almost all of Gaza’s 2.4 million people have been displaced by the war, which has caused a humanitarian catastrophe.
Gaza ‘will haunt’ –
Since the beginning of the conflict, the Security Council has struggled to speak with one voice, as the United States used its veto power several times, although Russia and China have as well.
“China kept demanding ‘stronger language’,” said the US official who also claimed that Russia had been “pulling strings” with the countries responsible for pushing the latest resolution.
The few resolutions that the United States did allow to pass by abstaining stopped short of calling for an unconditional and permanent ceasefire.
In March, the council called for a temporary ceasefire during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, but this appeal was ignored by the warring parties.
And in June, the 15-member body pledged support for a US resolution that laid out a multi-stage ceasefire and hostage release plan that ultimately went nowhere.
“We regret that the Council could have incorporated compromise language the UK put forward to bridge the existing gaps… With that language, This resolution should have been adopted,” Wood, the US envoy, said following the vote.
Some diplomats have expressed optimism that following Donald Trump’s election win on November 5, President Joe Biden might be more flexible in his few remaining weeks in power.
They hoped for a repeat of December 2016 when then-president Barack Obama’s second term was finishing and the council passed a resolution calling for a halt to Israeli settlement building in the occupied territories, a first since 1979.
The United States refrained from using its veto then, a break from traditional US support for Israel on the sensitive issue of settlements.
The resolution vetoed on Wednesday calls for “safe and unhindered entry of humanitarian assistance at scale,” including in besieged northern Gaza, and denounces any attempt to starve the Palestinians.
The Palestinian delegation at the United Nations has suggested the text did not go far enough.
“Gaza’s fate will haunt the world for generations to come,” ambassador Riyad Mansour warned.
He said the only course of action for the Security Council is to call for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire under Chapter 7 of the UN charter.
That chapter allows the council to take steps to enforce its resolutions, such as sanctions, but the latest text made no reference to this option.
US envoy presses Israel-Hezbollah truce bid in Lebanon visit
US envoy Amos Hochstein was in Lebanon Wednesday, seeking to hammer out a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hezbollah, as the fighter group battled Israeli troops in the south of the country.
The United States and France have spearheaded efforts for a truce in the conflict, which escalated in late September after nearly a year of deadly exchanges of fire between Hezbollah and Israel.
Israel expanded the focus of its operations from Gaza to Lebanon, vowing to secure its northern border to allow tens of thousands of people displaced by the cross-border fire to return home.
On Tuesday, Hochstein said an end to the war was “now within our grasp”, while one of his main interlocutors, Hezbollah-allied parliament speaker Nabih Berri, said the situation was “good, in principle”.
Speaking to pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat, Berri said his team and US representatives still had “some technical details” to settle.
Hochstein also met Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati and army chief Joseph Aoun, as well as Christian leader Samir Geagea.
On Wednesday, he held another meeting with Berri.
A Lebanon-based diplomat, requesting anonymity, said “progress” had been made in the talks.
What remains to be seen, however, is the Israeli position on the plan.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that Israel would continue to conduct military operations against Hezbollah even if a ceasefire was reached.
“We will be forced to ensure our security in the north (of Israel) and to systematically carry out operations against Hezbollah’s attacks… even after a ceasefire”, to keep the group from rebuilding, he told parliament.
Hezbollah chief speech
Hezbollah began its cross-border attacks in support of its ally Hamas following the Palestinian group’s assault on Israel on October 7, 2023.
Since expanding its operations to Lebanon in September, Israel has conducted extensive bombing campaigns primarily targeting Hezbollah strongholds.
Israel has also sent ground troops into southern Lebanon, where it said Tuesday one soldier had been killed in combat and three wounded.
More than 3,544 people in Lebanon have been killed since the clashes began, authorities have said, most since late September.
Among them were more than 200 children, according to the United Nations.
US announces talks with Israel over civilian casualties in Gaza
Senior US and Israeli officials will meet in early December to address American concerns over harm to civilians caused by military operations in Gaza, the State Department said Tuesday.
The United States has regularly voiced concerns to key ally Israel over American-supplied weapons being used in strikes that have killed civilians in the Gaza Strip.
However, it has only once exercised the ultimate US leverage — holding some of the billions of dollars in military aid to Israel.
The State Department has also opened several investigations into Israeli strikes using US-supplied weapons that killed Gaza civilians. But no conclusions have been made public, and US military aid has continued to flow.
The December meeting will be the first of a new channel designed to “inform the ongoing work that the State Department has to do to make assessments about the use of US-provided weapons,” spokesman Matthew Miller said.
Israel’s use of the weapons would breach US law if it were determined the country had deliberately targeted and killed civilians, and US authorities are looking at specific instances to see whether that is the case.
“There are a number of incidents that we have had questions about and we’ve had concerns about,” Miller said.
He added that “we set up this new channel because we wanted to formalize a mechanism for getting answers to some of these questions.”
Miller declined to specify where the meeting would take place.
The Biden administration has long called for such a channel, which was included in a letter Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sent to Israel in mid-October.
The letter additionally gave Israel a month to allow more assistance into Gaza or face cutoffs of some US weapons.
However the United States ultimately decided not to take action, despite Israel not meeting metrics on the number of aid trucks and a new UN-backed assessment warning of imminent famine in Gaza.
Earlier Tuesday, a handful of left-leaning senators called on the Biden administration to halt arms sales to Israel, accusing the United States of playing a key role in the “atrocities” of the war in Gaza.