UN to vote on watered-down resolution on aid to Gaza without call for suspension of hostilities

United Nations, December 22

After many delays, the UN Security Council scheduled a vote on Friday on a watered-down resolution to deliver desperately needed aid to Gaza.

The revised text is backed by the United States, while Russia and other countries still support stronger wording that would include a call for “the urgent suspension of hostilities” between Israel and Hamas.

Council members met behind closed doors on Thursday to discuss a revised draft resolution, then delayed the vote so they could consult their capitals on the significant changes, aimed at avoiding a US veto. A new text with a few minor revisions was circulated Friday morning.

It was unclear whether the resolution would be adopted. One council diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity because discussions were private, said Russia holds the key.

US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told reporters the United States backs the new text. She didn’t say how the US would vote, but an abstention would still allow adoption of the resolution if Russia or another permanent member didn’t use its veto.

The circulation of the new draft culminated a week and a half of high-level negotiations involving US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Between Tuesday and Thursday, Blinken spoke to the foreign ministers of Egypt and the United Arab Emirates three times each as well as to the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Britain, France and Germany.

The vote, initially scheduled for Monday, has been delayed every day since then.

Rather than watered down, Thomas-Greenfield described the resolution as “strong” and said it “is fully supported by the Arab group that provides them what they feel is needed to get humanitarian assistance on the ground.”

But it was stripped of its key provision with teeth — a 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.” The steps are not defined, but diplomats said if adopted this would mark the council’s first reference to stopping fighting.

On a key sticking point concerning aid deliveries, the new draft eliminates a previous request for the UN “to exclusively monitor all humanitarian relief consignments to Gaza provided through land, sea and air routes” by outside parties to confirm their humanitarian nature.

It substitutes a request to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to expeditiously appoint “a senior humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator with responsibility for facilitating, coordinating, monitoring and verifying” whether relief deliveries to Gaza that are not from the parties to the conflict are humanitarian goods. It asks the coordinator to expeditiously establish a “mechanism” to speed aid deliveries and demands that the parties to the conflict — Israel and Hamas — cooperate with the coordinator.

Thomas-Greenfield said the US negotiated the new draft with the United Arab Emirates, the Arab representative on the council which sponsored the resolution, and with Egypt, which borders Gaza, and others.

This mainly bypassed the 13 other council members, several of whom objected to being left out, according to diplomats speaking on condition of anonymity because the consultations were private.

Guterres has 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 and increased pressure for mass displacement into Egypt.”

According to a report released Thursday by 23 UN and humanitarian agencies, 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 UN World Food Program has said 90 per cent of the population is regularly going without food for a full day.

Nearly 20,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, since the war started. During the Oct. 7 attack, Hamas militants killed about 1,200 people in Israel and took about 240 hostages back to Gaza.

Hamas controls the Gaza Strip, and its Health Ministry does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths. Thousands more Palestinians lie buried under the rubble of Gaza, the UN estimates.

Security Council resolutions are legally binding, but in practice many parties choose to ignore the council’s requests for action. General Assembly resolutions are not legally binding, though they are a significant barometer of world opinion.