The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
US refuses to support UAE-backed call for Gaza ceasefire
The tactic of ‘damage not accuracy’ in Gaza risks radicalising a new generation of Palestinians
THE US last night blocked a UAEbacked demand for a ceasefire as fighting further intensified inside Gaza.
Washington vetoed a vote on a UN Security Council resolution, submitted by Abu Dhabi and backed by Arab leaders pushing to halt the invasion.
It comes as the US increased its pressure on Israel to avoid human casualties, and Lord Cameron said the county “must behave differently” in southern Gaza. Israel almost doubled its air strikes on the Gaza Strip yesterday, as Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defence minister, said there were signs that Hamas “is beginning to break”.
The UN ceasefire vote last night came after António Guterres, the UN secretary general, triggered a mechanism to bring the humanitarian situation in Gaza to the council’s attention.
It had been delayed by several hours to give Arab leaders more time to try to persuade the US, which holds a veto, to abstain. Ministers from Egypt, Qatar, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority, as well as Turkey, met with Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, to apply pressure in Washington yesterday afternoon. Ayman Safadi, the Jordanian foreign minister, warned that failing to pass the UN resolution would be tantamount to granting Israel licence “to continue with its massacre”.
The vote in the 15-member council was 13-1 after Britain abstained.
Calls for a ceasefire have split opinion in the West, with diplomat Josep Borrell instructing EU members to support UN calls, while the UK backs Israel. “If you stop now with Hamas in charge of even part of Gaza there can never be a twostate solution,” Lord Cameron, the Foreign Secretary, said during a visit to Washington on Thursday. Dame Barbara Woodward, Britain’s UN representative, backed “further and longer pauses” in fighting but argued “we cannot vote in favour of a resolution” that does not condemn Hamas’ atrocities.
Karim Ward marked his fifth birthday by telling everyone he met that today was his big day. “He was overjoyed,” his mother Walaa, 31, said. “He wanted us to celebrate, but I told him there were no cake shops open.”
They would celebrate properly when the war was over, Walaa promised. Then the bombs fell.
Walaa was found unconscious under a concrete column, with a shattered foot, several fractured bones and a thigh skewered by shrapnel.
“I survived because I was at my uncle’s house,” she said, as she wept and beat her chest.
Karim, left at home, was not so fortunate. While his mother was taken to hospital, somewhere under the vast cratered landscape of rubble the five-year-old’s body lay.
He was killed alongside 15 other members of the family, all victims of one of the deadliest single bombings of the densely packed Gaza Strip since the war began.
The Israeli military launched the bombardment of the Jabaliya refugee camp on Oct 31. It said it was targeting a senior Hamas commander living among Gazan civilians. The bombs left 195 dead and an enormous crater at the centre of the target site.
It is a scene that came to encapsulate Israel’s highly controversial tactic of “damage not accuracy” when seeking out leaders of the Oct 7 Hamas border raids. Air strikes and a lightning ground offensive in the north forced more than a million people into southern Gaza, a pocket of relative safety until last week when it too came under bombardment.
The future of the whole of Gaza, and indeed the Gazan people, is now more uncertain than ever as concerns grow that the war is fostering yet more animosity between Israel and the Palestinian people.
Residents described Jabaliya as a close-knit, vibrant community before the war began, despite its hardships. It was a maze of narrow alleyways grown organically from the 1948 war to become a semi-permanent home for Gaza’s many displaced people. At times, despite intermittent conflict with Israel, life was almost normal.
On the day of the bombing 10 to 12 missile strikes were heard, witnesses reported. When the dust settled Deeb Abu al-Qumsan joined hundreds of people in scrabbling through the dirt, where he found the body of his niece Layan, nine, clutching her pet cat.
Deeb’s wife, his eldest son Abdullah, 17, who had just celebrated his success in high school and enrolment at Al-Quds University, were also killed in the bombing. So was Mohammed, his brother, along with his daughters Rahaf, 15, and Layan. “I think of Abdul Rahman, just three years old, and Layan, found with her cat. What danger did they pose to anyone?” he asks. “I wish I had died with them.”
Since the war began, as many as 100,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed, according to analysis of satellite imagery. Much of the destruction is in Gaza City. The United Nations says at least four of its shelters have been damaged by bombing, while schools, government buildings and mosques have also been destroyed.
Gazans who fled south faced a filtration process set up by the Israeli military guarding “humanitarian corridors”. Laden with all they could carry they were required to pass through a shipping container block while holding up their ID cards.
It is unclear what exactly was inside the container. Israeli media reports suggest it contains AI technology used to scan the faces of each Palestinian passing through, possibly to check their identities against lists of confirmed Hamas fighters.
Soldiers would occasionally shout out phrases in Hebrew such as “Don’t be afraid, come to me”, Israeli media have reported, just in case any Israeli children kidnapped by Hamas were among the crowds.
Israel has indicated some willingness for the Palestinian Authority (PA), which is currently in charge of the occupied West Bank, to govern Gaza after the war. There has also been speculation about wealthy Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia or the United
Arab Emirates, stepping in to help rebuild and run a post-war Gaza.
Israel defended the air strike as a legitimate attack on Ibrahim Biari, a Hamas commander of the Central Jabaliya Battalion, who helped plan the Oct 7 attacks inside Israel. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) regularly accuses Hamas of hiding among civilians, under a “human shield”. But questions remain as to whether the air strike and Israel’s military operation on the whole is a proportionate use of force.
In Jabaliya, Israel is thought to have dropped laser-guided bombs to kill Biari – either a GBU 31 or possibly a GBU 56, according to former UN weapons inspector Chris Cobb-Smith, who has studied images of a large crater. Both warheads carry payloads of around 900kg. The UN high commissioner for human rights has stated that the Jabaliya attack was “disproportionate” and could amount to a war crime. But some academics and experts dispute this. Security analyst Charles Herbert said it was unclear whether the bombs were an “appropriate and proportional weapon system to employ”.
Meanwhile, John Spencer, an expert in urban warfare at the United States Military Academy, and others have argued that the attack on Jabaliya would be lawful if its military objective was of “high value”.
The has approached the IDF for any further comment on criticism of its operations in Gaza.
A recent poll by the Arab World Research and Development group – with a sample size of 668 Palestinians, including 277 Gazans – suggested that 60 per cent continue to support
Hamas. “We need to be clear that what anger there is being articulated against Hamas is by far overshadowed by the deeper anger directed at Israel because of its actions against Palestinians,” said Hugh Lovatt, a senior Middle East analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Some international leaders, however, have warned that the levels of devastation being wreaked by Israel will only create a new generation of traumatised and conflict-stricken Gazans. This in turn could create a more radical successor to Hamas.
“War and violence radicalises people and our concern, which I have said to [Israeli] president [Isaac] Herzog… that is the real danger that will come out of this war in Gaza,” said Irish foreign minister Micheál Martin after a recent visit to Israel. “What you are doing is creating fertile ground for more extreme views to grow.”
The mental toll on Gazans, especially children, is incalculable.
“Even before this escalation, more than half of parents we spoke to reported that their children were self-harming or experiencing suicidal thoughts,” James Denselow, the head of Save the Children’s conflict team, said.
Israel is facing mounting pressure – including from the US government – to scale back some of its firepower in the continuing offensive in southern Gaza.
“The pulverising of Gaza now ranks among the worst assaults on any civilian population in our time and age,” said the Norwegian Refugee Council this week. “Each day we see more dead children and new depths of suffering for innocent people enduring this hell.”
Facilities provided by the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) are currently housing approximately 1.1 million displaced people across 156 locations in the Gaza Strip.
But there is no room for Walaa, the mother of five-year-old Karim, who now lives in a school in Khan Younis, in the south. This is not her home, and neither was Jabaliya. She was forced into that refugee camp when the first bombs of the war fell where she lived in northern Gaza, she explained, her shattered leg propped up.
“I wish I had died with my son,” she added, her voice trembling. “It’s more merciful for me.”