UN urges more Gaza aid, UN chief says Israel creating distribution 'obstacles'
The U.N. Security Council called for boosting humanitarian assistance for Gaza, but the U.N. chief said the way Israel was conducting its military operation was creating "massive obstacles" to aid distribution inside the battered enclave.
After days of wrangling to avert a threatened U.S. veto, the Security Council on Friday passed a resolution urging steps to allow “safe, unhindered, and expanded humanitarian access” to Gaza and “conditions for a sustainable cessation” of fighting.
The resolution was toned down from earlier drafts that called for an immediate end to 11 weeks of war and diluting Israeli control over aid deliveries, clearing the way for the vote in which the United States, Israel’s main ally, abstained.
Washington repeatedly has backed Israel’s right to self-defense following the Oct. 7 rampage into Israel by Gaza’s ruling Hamas militants, who killed 1,200 people and took 240 hostages back into the enclave.
Gilad Erdan, Israel’s U.N. ambassador, said the Security Council should have focused more on freeing the hostages and that concentrating on “aid mechanisms” was unnecessary as Israel permits “aid deliveries at the required scale.”
Hamas and the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority split over the measure, with the former saying it was “insufficient” to meet the stricken enclave’s needs and defied international calls for an end to “Israel’s aggression.”
The authority’s foreign ministry welcomed the resolution as a step that would help “end the aggression, ensure the arrival of aid and protect the Palestinian people."
The United States and Israel, which has vowed to eradicate Hamas, oppose a ceasefire, contending it would allow the Islamist militant group to regroup and rearm.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration, however, has grown increasingly critical of the mounting casualty toll and humanitarian crisis that has worsened as Israel presses on with its ground and air offensive.
U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said the way Israel is conducting its operation is “creating massive obstacles to the distribution of humanitarian assistance” in Gaza, where the United Nations says the aid available is just 10 percent of what is needed.
Israel says 5,405 aid trucks - bearing food, water and medical supplies - have entered Gaza since the war started.
The latest casualty update from Gaza’s health ministry said 20,057 Palestinians have been killed and 53,320 wounded in the Israeli offensive that has destroyed huge swaths of the enclave and displaced most of the population of 2.3 million.
Israel says 140 of its soldiers have been killed since it launched its ground incursion on Oct. 20.
LATE NIGHT AIRSTRIKES, SHELLING
Air strikes, artillery bombardments and fighting were reported across Gaza late into Friday night, as hopes dimmed for an imminent breakthrough in talks in Egypt aimed at getting warring Israel and Hamas to agree to a new truce.
Israel's military ordered residents of Al-Bureij, in central Gaza, to move south immediately. The directive signaled a new focus of the ground assault that has devastated the enclave's north and made a series of incursions in the south.
Some residents packed up donkey carts and left. But there was no immediate sign of large numbers from Al-Bureij joining the hundreds of thousands fleeing other areas.
"Where should we go to? There is no place safe," Ziad, a medic and father of six, told Reuters by phone. "They ask people to head to (the central Gaza city of) Deir Al-Balah, where they bomb day and night."
An Israeli air strike on a house in Nusseirat refugee camp killed three people including a journalist of Hamas' Aqsa TV channel and two relatives, health officials and Hamas media said.
The reporter's death would bring to at least 69 the number of journalists killed in the conflict, according to a tally by the Committee to Protect Journalists.
In the south, at least four civilians died in an air strike on a car in Rafah, a Palestinian rescue worker said. A boy, his face covered in blood, and a girl, were carried away, video showed. There was no immediate Israeli comment.
"Israel's indiscriminate strikes on Gaza have turned the north of the Strip into a pile of rubble," medical charity MSF said in a post on X. "In Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, south Gaza, the dead and wounded continue to arrive almost every day... Nowhere is safe."
The official Palestinian news agency WAFA said at least 18 Palestinians were killed and dozens others wounded in an air strike on a house in Nuseirat, central Gaza, late Friday night.
The Israeli military has expressed regret for civilian deaths but has blamed Iran-backed Hamas for operating in densely populated areas or using civilians as human shields, an allegation the group denies.
Hamas-affiliated Shehab news agency reported heavy shelling and air strikes on Jabalia al-Balad and Jabalia refugee camp, in northern Gaza, and said that Israeli vehicles were trying to advance from the western side of Jabalia amid the sound of gunfire.
WAFA reported that Israeli shelling destroyed a water desalination plant in Jabalia by the Al Amal Hospital.'
Biden said on Friday he and his wife, Jill, were "heartbroken" by the news that Gad Haggai, a 73-year-old American-Israeli, is believed to have been killed by Hamas in its Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Haggai's wife, Judith Weinstein, is still being held hostage in Gaza, according to Israeli media outlet Haaretz.
UN Security Council votes to increase Gaza aid, US and Russia abstain
The United Nations Security Council on Friday voted to approve a United Arab Emirates-sponsored resolution demanding a humanitarian pause in the Israel-Hamas war.
A vote on the resolution was previously scheduled for 5 p.m. Monday, but was delayed to try to avoid another veto by the U.S.
The resolution passed Friday, in which 13 nations voted in favor with the U.S. and Russia abstaining, "calls for urgent steps to immediately allow safe, unhindered, and expanded humanitarian access and to create the conditions for a sustainable cessation of hostilities."
It "demands that all parties comply with their obligations under international law, notably with regard to the protection of civilians, calls for urgent and extended humanitarian pauses and corridors throughout the Gaza Strip for a sufficient number of days to enable full, rapid, safe, and unhindered humanitarian access and to enable urgent rescue and recovery efforts, and calls for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages, as well as ensuring immediate humanitarian access," the resolution adds.
The resolution also expresses "grave concerns as to the impact the resumption of hostilities has had on civilians."
"Today, this council made clear that all hostages must be released immediately and unconditionally and that humanitarian groups must be able to access hostages, including for medical visits," U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said following the vote.
"Today, this council made clear that civilian and humanitarian facilities, including hospitals, medical facilities, schools, places of worship and U.N. facilities, as well as humanitarian personnel and medical personnel, must be protected," she added. "This applies to all parties to this conflict, to Israel, but also to Hamas, a terror group that instigated this conflict and that wages war from inside homes and hospitals and U.N. sites and uses innocent civilians as human shields, an act of cowardice and cruelty."
Anne Bayefsky, the director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, told Fox News Digital following the vote, "The Biden administration refused to veto — meaning it allowed — the adoption of a UN Security Council resolution that failed to condemn Hamas for October 7th, failed to condemn Hamas for terror tunnels, failed to condemn Hamas for continuing rocket attacks, failed to name Hamas as the hostage-takers, failed to acknowledge Israel's legal right of self-defense, failed to condemn Palestinian terrorists for using rape and horrific sexual violence as a weapon of war, and repeatedly draws obscene moral comparisons between Israel and Hamas."
"The days of intense U.N. negotiations need to be contrasted with a different reality: the people of Israel are currently being attacked on at least three fronts — Gaza, Lebanon, and Palestinian Authority-controlled territories," she added, "And yet, according to the U.N. Security Council, the only 'humanitarian situation' is in the Gaza Strip."
The U.S. previously vetoed a Security Council cease-fire resolution that was widely supported by all council members and dozens of other member nations. Robert Wood, the U.S. deputy ambassador to the U.N., maintained the U.S. wanted to see peace between Israelis and Palestinians but was critical of how the resolution would go about it.
"It would simply leave Hamas in place, able to regroup and repeat what it did on Oct. 7. Colleagues, a senior Hamas official recently stated the group intends to repeat the vile acts of Oct. 7, quote, again and again and again, unquote. And yet this resolution essentially says Israel should just tolerate this, that it should allow this terror to go unchecked," Wood said earlier this month.
"Although the United States strongly supports a durable peace in which both Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace and security, we do not support this resolution's call for an unsustainable cease-fire that will only plant the seeds for the next war," he added.
UN Security Council approves resolution for aid to Gaza but stops short of call for ceasefire.
The United Nations Security Council has approved a resolution pressing for the urgently needed passage of humanitarian aid into Gaza after 11 weeks of Israel’s devastating siege of the beleaguered strip.
But after several days of negotiations led by the United States, the council stopped short of a resolution calling for an immediate cessation of violence, instead approving a watered-down measure in an effort to avoid a veto from the US.
The long-delayed vote in the 15-member council was 13-0 – the US and Russia ultimately abstained from voting.
The resolution was stripped of its call for “the urgent suspension of hostilities to allow safe and unhindered humanitarian access, and for urgent steps towards a sustainable cessation of hostilities”. Instead, it calls “for urgent steps to immediately allow safe and unhindered humanitarian access, and also for creating the conditions for a sustainable cessation of hostilities”.
A final version did not include demands for a ceasefire or any immediate pause in the fighting, making it unlikely that the measure to support the flow of aid into Gaza – which is largely in Israel’s control – will initiate any end to violence that has left thousands dead.
Within 10 weeks, Israel’s air-and-ground assault in Gaza has now killed more than 20,000 people, a figure that amounts to nearly 1 per cent of the population before Israel’s war against Hamas.
Israel launched its devastating retaliatory campaign following Hamas attacks in Israel on 7 October that left 1,200 people dead and took roughly 240 hostages. Israel’s response has killed roughly one in every 100 people in Gaza. More than two-thirds are women and children.
The “purpose” of the draft resolution introduced by the United Arab Emirates “is very simple”, said ambassador Lana Nusseibeh told the council in New York on Friday.
It “responds with action to the dire conditions in Gaza while protecting those who are trying to deliver aid”, she said.
“We know this is not a perfect text, we know only a ceasefire will stop the suffering,” she added.
Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian UN envoy, said it took the Security Council 75 days “to finally utter the words ‘cessation of hostilities,’” stressing that the Palestinians and Arab nations supported the Russian amendment. “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.”
The US had twice vetoed resolutions supporting a ceasefire, magnifying the gulf between the US and global powers and Arab nations, while President Joe Biden’s administration refused or moderated any pressure on Israel and prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to limit the destruction.
Passage of the latest resolution on Friday followed another week of delays, marked by intense negotiations involving UN secretary general Antonio Guterres in an effort to finally broker passage of a measure with US support.
The resolution does not call on Israel to relinquish its control over the inspections of aid into Gaza, though it calls for the appointment of a “coordinator” to oversee its entry.
That person will be responsible for “facilitating, coordinating, monitoring and verifying” humanitarian aid in Gaza by “consulting all relevant parties”.
American and Israeli officials have insisted that any pause in the fighting will simply aid Hamas militants in their efforts to regroup.
A measure blocked on Tuesday would have called for a legally binding “urgent suspension of hostilities to allow safe and unhindered humanitarian access and for urgent steps [to be taken] towards a sustainable cessation of hostilities”.
Vasily Nebenzya, Russia’s UN ambassador, called US negotiations “shameful, cynical and irresponsible conduct” as a means to “sabotage” efforts towards a lasting peace with an ultimately “toothless” and “extremely neutered” resolution.
He criticised the “ambiguous phrase” that calls for a “for a sustainable cessation of hostilities” and said that any obstruction of immediate attempts to end the conflict make council members “complicit” in Gaza’s destruction, suggesting that the measure is “giving Israel a green light for war crimes”.
“Why are we together in this room? To rubber stamp a decision that is convenient for Washington?” he added.
Following the vote, US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said the resolution’s passage – which she abstained from supporting – “provided a glimmer of hope amongst a sea of unimaginable suffering”.
She said that the US will “continue to work with the UN, with humanitarian groups and countries in the region to get more humanitarian aid into Gaza to secure the release of hostages and to work towards a lasting peace”.
“We must find a path forward to in the misery we’re seeing,” she added. “We must work together to alleviate this tremendous suffering once and for all.”
The US vetoed a Security Council resolution on 18 October to condemn all violence against civilians in the Israel-Hamas war and to urge humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza. On 8 December the US vetoed a second council resolution backed by almost all other council members and dozens of other nations, demanding an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. The 193-member General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a similar resolution on 12 December by a vote of 153-10, with 23 abstentions.
Why the UN’s Gaza resolution is unlikely to impact wider war.
After numerous postponed votes, the United Nations Security Council on Friday approved a resolution calling for urgent humanitarian aid to Gaza, abandoning a proposal that would have urged for a broader ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, which has killed over 20,000 people and devastated large parts of the Gaza Strip.
That’s despite worldwide protests and a UN General Assembly majority vote last week calling for such a pause in fighting.
So what does the resolution do? Here’s what you need to know:
Expanded aid, and vague hopes of peace
The resolution calls for “urgent steps to immediately allow safe, unhindered, and expanded humanitarian access and to create the conditions for a sustainable cessation of hostilities.”
The final language is a step back from the original text in the United Arab Emirates-proposed resolution, which demanded an “urgent suspension of hostilities.”
A vote on the resolution was scheduled for Monday, but was delayed every day this week as the US pushed for revisions behind the scenes.
After more than a week of negotiations between the UAE, the US, which has crucial veto power over the UNSC, and other nations, US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said Thursday that negotiators reached compromise language that the US and Israel could support.
Earlier this month, the US, a staunch ally of Israel in the conflict, vetoed a resolution calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.
The final resolution also scaled down a proposal to have the UN “exclusively monitor all humanitarian relief consignments to Gaza provided through land, sea and air routes,” instead calling for the body to appoint an official responsible for helping coordinate aid.
A dire reality in the conflict zone
The resolution is notable in that it contains the Security Council’s first agreed-upon reference to some future pause in fighting, though it’s unlikely to provide much hope to those in the war zone.
The day before the vote, a UN-backed food monitoring body found that Gaza’s entire population of over 2.2m people are approaching famine conditions.
“These are not just numbers — there are individual children, women and men behind these alarming statistics,” World Food Program chief economist Arif Husain said in a statement. “The complexity, magnitude and speed that this crisis has unfolded is unprecedented.”
The Israeli campign has killed roughly 1 per cent of the population of Gaza, and more than two-thirds of those killed in the response to the brutal 7 October Hamas attack have been women and children.
An estimated 85 per cent of Gaza’s population has been internally displaced, according to the UnitedNations Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights.
Thus far, only a weeklong temporary ceasefire at the end of November has paused the fighting, allowing aid to trickle into Gaza as both Israel and Hamas exchanged detainees held in their custody.
US officials have said they support temporary “humanitarian pauses” in the conflict, rather than urging for a full-in ceasefire, a stance that human rights groups and nations critical of the US have argued amounts to being complicit in war crimes.
Mixed reaction from world leaders
The resolution, which passed 13-0 with abstentions from Russia and the US, was greeted with a mix of world opinion.
Russia abstained in protest, arguing the resolution would allow Israel to continue a ground invasion of Gaza that has carried a vast civilian death toll.
“By signing off on this the Council would essentially be giving the Israeli armed forces complete freedom of movement for furthering clearing of the Gaza Strip, and anyone voting for the text as it is currently worded would bear responsibility for that,” Russian Ambassador Vassily A Nebenzia told the UN chamber on Friday.
The UAE’s Lanna Nusseibeh, meanwhile, defended the proposal, while voicing larger criticisms of Israel’s policy towards Palestine.
“The text compels the international community to finally share in the burden that Egypt has been shouldering and it commits all of us to breaking the cruel blockades strangling Gaza for the last 16 years,” she said after the vote.
“The injustice of the occupation persists with the international community’s complicity. If you have a moral, national or political interest in saving the two-state solution, you must act now. This resolution gives us an opportunity to demonstrate that at the very least, the world will not tolerate the continued deprivation of the people of Gaza from basic necessities,” she added.
Israel, meanwhile, called the resolution “unnecessary.”
“In our view, the resolution is unnecessary and proves the inability for the UN to play a positive role in the conflict. After nearly three months, the UN has yet to condemn the massacre of October 7,” an Israeli official told CNN.
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