Will watered down Security Council Resolution be enough to stave off starvation in Gaza
The United Nations Security Council on Friday finally adopted a resolution which was intended to ramp up humanitarian aid to Gaza.
The watered down resolution culminated a week and a half of high-level diplomacy in order to ensure that it would not be vetoed by the United States. The vote, initially scheduled for last Monday, was pushed back each day until Friday.
The resolution which was adopted on Friday called for immediate speeding up of aid deliveries to hungry and desperate civilians in Gaza but excluded the plea for an “urgent suspension of hostilities” which was included in the original resolution moved by the United Arab Emirates.
Eventually the final text did not demand a ceasefire which would have helped to better facilitate the distribution of humanitarian aid.
Although the long-delayed vote in the 15-member Council was to accommodate the United States’ concerns, it was not sufficient to get the US to actually vote for the resolution. The U.S. abstained on the vote and avoided a third American veto of a Gaza resolution. Russia too abstained for a different reason. Russia wanted the stronger language of the original resolution restored which the U.S. did not want.
The Security Council resolution was received with mixed feelings by delegates and as well as others.
“It was the Christmas miracle we were all hoping for,” said United Arab Emirates Ambassador Lana Nusseibeh whose tireless efforts to get the resolution adopted was acknowledged by delegates. She said it would send a signal to the people in Gaza that the Security Council was working to alleviate their suffering.
Israel’s U.N. Deputy Ambassador Brett Jonathan Miller however criticised the Security Council for not condemning Hamas for its Oct. 7 attacks with the more general wording of “deplores all attacks against civilians and civilian objects as well as all violence and hostilities against civilians, and all acts of terrorism ” not to its satisfaction.
Not surprisingly a relieved U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the Council, “This was tough, but we got there.” The United States was increasingly getting isolated from the International Community for not being able to rein in Israel despite America’s unconditional support of the Jewish state.
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.”
“It is hard to overstate how urgent this is,” Thomas Greenfield said. “This resolution speaks to the severity of this crisis, and it calls on us all to do more.”
Israel was literally showing the middle finger to the US’s repeated call to ensure minimum civilian casualties in the military operation in Gaza. The United States was in a sense reduced to speaking to Israel through the Security Council resolution when its direct diplomacy with Israel had had no effect.
Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia called the resolution “entirely toothless” and said the wording of the resolution that was finally adopted “would essentially be giving the Israeli armed forces complete freedom of movement for the clearing of the Gaza Strip.” Russia would have vetoed it, he said, if it hadn’t been supported by a number of Arab countries.
Ambassador Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian U.N. envoy, said it took the Security Council 75 days “to finally utter the words ‘cessation of hostilities,’”.
“This resolution is a step in the right direction” because of its important humanitarian provisions, Mansour said. “It must be implemented and must be accompanied by massive pressure for an immediate ceasefire” he said.
Hamas for its part called the resolution “an insufficient step” that “doesn’t meet the requirements of the catastrophic state caused by the terrorist military machine in Gaza.”
Whether the resolution adopted by the Security Council on Friday will help in mitigating the unfolding tragedy in Gaza during the last two months remains to be seen. The magnitude of the crisis is evident from the statistics set out in a report released on Thursday by 23 U.N. and humanitarian agencies.
According to these reports 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.
More than 20,000 Palestinians have been killed since the war started, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Thousands more Palestinians lie buried under the rubble of Gaza, the U.N. estimates.
Israeli Deputy Ambassador Brett Jonathan Miller however claimed that “humanitarian aid is pouring into Gaza every single day” and Israel was willing to increase the number of aid trucks entering the territory and the only roadblock is “the U.N.’s ability to accept them.” He stressed that “any enhancement of U.N. aid monitoring cannot be done at the expense of Israel’s security inspections.”
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres responded to the Israeli claims stating that it was a mistake to measure the effectiveness of the humanitarian operation in Gaza by the number of trucks.
“The real problem is that the way Israel is conducting this offensive is creating massive obstacles to the distribution of humanitarian aid inside Gaza,” the U.N. chief said. He said the four elements of an effective aid operation don’t exist at present in Gaza — security, staff that can work in safety, logistical capacity especially trucks, and the resumption of commercial activity in the territory.
The Secretary-General reiterated his longstanding call for a humanitarian ceasefire. He expressed hope that Friday’s resolution may help this happen but said “much more is needed immediately” to end the ongoing “nightmare” for the people in Gaza. Guterres said on Friday that “four out of five of the hungriest people anywhere in the world are in Gaza.”
Guterres 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.
The redeeming grace in the resolution however is the reiteration of the Security Council’s “unwavering commitment to the vision of the twostate solution where two democratic states, Israel and Palestine, live side by side in peace within secure and recognized borders.”