The United States on Wednesday vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s war against the Palestinian terror group Hamas in Gaza, after a A senior American official accused Council members of cynically rejecting attempts to reach a compromise.
The fifteen members of the Council voted on a draft resolution calling for an “immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire” and separately called for the release of the hostages.
The U.S. official, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity, said before the vote that the United States would only support a resolution explicitly calling for the immediate release of the hostages as part of a cease-fire. fire.
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“As we have said many times before, we simply cannot support an unconditional ceasefire that does not call for the immediate release of the hostages,” the official stressed.
In March, the United States abstained from voting on a resolution that also called for an immediate ceasefire during the month of Ramadan as well as the immediate and unconditional release of hostages in Gaza. At the request of the United States, which then argued that this was sufficient to prevent its veto, the requests were merged into the same paragraph. The United States then argued that the resolution effectively conditioned a ceasefire on an agreement on the hostages, even if this link was not explicit in the text.
Like the March resolution, the text presented Wednesday also places the demands for an immediate ceasefire and the immediate and unconditional release of the hostages in the same paragraph, but without explicitly linking them to each other. .
Spokespeople for the US mission to the United Nations did not respond to requests for clarification on the reasons that led Washington to change its position on the issue.
The latest version of the draft text was prepared by the ten elected members of the Council, and seen by AFP.
“We cannot let the UN tie the hands of the State of Israel in protecting its citizens and we will not stop the fight until we bring home all the kidnapped men and women », declared before the vote the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, denouncing a “shameful” text.
“There must be a link between a ceasefire and the release of hostages, this has been our principled position from the beginning and that has not changed,” the American ambassador insisted on Tuesday. Deputy Robert Wood.
On October 7, 2023, terrorists infiltrating southern Israel from the neighboring Gaza Strip carried out a pogrom that resulted in the deaths of more than 1,206 people, mostly civilians.
Illustration: Destruction caused by Hamas terrorists on October 7 in Kibbutz Beeri, near the Israel-Gaza border in southern Israel, seen on October 19, 2023. (Erik Marmor/Flash90)
That day, 251 people were kidnapped. In total, 97 are still hostages in Gaza, including 34 declared dead by the army.
Gaza’s health ministry, controlled by Hamas, says more than 43,000 people have been killed or presumed dead in the fighting so far. This toll, which cannot be verified and which does not distinguish between terrorists and civilians, includes the approximately 17,000 terrorists that Israel claims to have killed in combat and the civilians killed by the hundreds of rockets fired by the terrorist groups which fell inside the Gaza Strip.
Israel says it is working to minimize civilian casualties and points out that Hamas uses Gazans as human shields, waging its battles from civilian areas, including homes, hospitals, schools and mosques.
Almost all of the approximately 2.4 million inhabitants have been displaced in this territory plagued by a humanitarian disaster.
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Since the start of the war, the UN Security Council has struggled to speak with one voice, blocked several times by American, but also Russian and Chinese, vetoes.
The few resolutions that the Americans allowed to pass by abstaining did not call for an unconditional and permanent ceasefire.
Destruction caused by Hamas terrorists at Kibbutz Beeri, near the Israel-Gaza border, January 4, 2024. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
Some diplomats hoped that after Donald Trump’s victory, Joe Biden’s United States would be more flexible in negotiations, imagining a repeat of December 2016.
A few weeks before the end of Barack Obama’s mandate, the Council then adopted, for the first time since 1979, a resolution asking Israel to stop establishing itself in the Palestinian Territories. The vote was made possible thanks to the decision of the United States not to use its right of veto, even though it had always supported Israel until then on this issue.
The draft resolution put to the vote on Wednesday also demanded “safe and unhindered” access to large-scale humanitarian aid, including in the “besieged” north of Gaza and denounced any attempt to “starve the Palestinians”.
The Palestinians, for their part, seemed to believe that this text did not go far enough.
“The fate of Gaza will haunt the world for generations to come,” warned their UN ambassador Riyad Mansour.
For him, the Council’s “only possible course of action” is certainly to demand an immediate and unconditional ceasefire, but within the framework of Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter.
This key chapter allows the Council to take measures to enforce its decisions, for example with sanctions, but the draft text did not refer to it.
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