After 40 days of war in Gaza, the United Nations Security Council finally passed a binding resolution calling for immediate humanitarian pauses and corridors to enable essential help to reach civilians, especially children, in the besieged Palestinian enclave. But some experts say the resolution, authorized on Nov. 15, will hardly affect the increasingly deadly situation in the territory.
As of Nov. 10, the latest day of casualties recorded by the Gaza Ministry of Health, approximately 11,000 people have died in the assault, of which 4,500 were children. The UN relies on the Hamas-controlled agency for such statistics.
Experts who spoke with PassBlue said the road to a ceasefire that could bring the return of peace in Gaza is still long. Omar Monieb, a former Egyptian diplomat who is now an analyst with the Eurasia Group consulting firm, said that although the resolution is a good measure of the global temperature on the war, negotiations outside the UN would ultimately influence the direction of the fighting.
“Israel will only agree to such a pause if it feels that it serves its own interests and if it has achieved at least part or all of what it wants from the operation,” Monieb said. “I don’t want to say that the Security Council resolutions are meaningless. They reflect the mood of the international community. The Security Council resolution, like the General Assembly resolution before it, did not necessarily have an impact on the ground.”
The Assembly resolution was the first formal response by UN member states to the Gaza war, which began on Oct. 7, when Hamas militants murdered an estimated 1,200 people in Israel in a surprise raid, even burning some victims. Yet the disproportionate reaction by Israel on Gaza has provoked not only outrage across the world but also may be breaching the rules of war, specialists say. As Michael Lynk, a former UN special rapporteur for human rights in Palestine, wrote recently: “belligerents have substantial obligations to conduct war in a highly restricted fashion, and civilians have very broad rights to be protected against death and suffering.”
The nonbinding resolution was approved by 121 countries on Oct. 26, calling for an “immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce” between Israeli forces and Hamas militants in Gaza. The United States and 13 other countries voted against it. A truce has not materialized.
Monieb might be reluctant to label resolutions from the world’s most important decision-making body as “meaningless,” but Israel’s permanent representative to the UN, Gilad Erdan, is not. He described the resolution in that word minutes after the resolution passed, tweeting that it failed to condemn Hamas or mention the Oct. 7 massacre. Israel rejected the Oct. 25 Assembly resolution on the same grounds.
“The UN Security Council’s resolution is disconnected from reality and is meaningless,” Erdan wrote on X/Twitter. “It will not happen. Israel will continue to act until Hamas is destroyed and the hostages are returned.”
Malta led the proposal for the Security Council resolution approved on Wednesday. Its ambassador, Vanessa Frazier, said Israel’s reaction to the resolution was “disappointing.” The country had significantly watered down the language of the text to accommodate the nearly intractable differences among certain Council members on the Gaza war, including the US and Russia, both veto powers.
Russia tried to amend the resolution by adding language calling for an “immediate, durable, and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities.” The rider failed to gather the nine positive votes it needed to succeed. (The US cast the single no vote. China, Brazil, Mozambique, the United Arab Emirates and Russia voted yes. The nine other countries abstained.)
Nonetheless, while experts believe that the resolution will fail in its primary aim of bringing some respite to civilians — especially children — in Gaza, it might douse growing domestic tensions for some Council members over the war as it drags into a second month. The US, Britain and Russia abstained from voting on the Council resolution, even though they could have used their vetoes as permanent members to quash the text more dramatically.
Monieb said the decision to abstain was not only “tactical” but also a response to domestic anger in their respective countries as rallies swell, insisting on a ceasefire.
The resolution played positively for US President Joe Biden in calming agitations within his own administration, said Andreas Krieg, a Mideast specialist and senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies, King’s College London. More than 400 people who work for the Biden administration across a range of federal agencies have demanded that Biden pursue a ceasefire with Israel. Britain has also seen ministers resign in protest because of a lack of ceasefire in Gaza.
“The Biden administration is interested in de-escalation as US presidential election campaigns are around the corner,” Krieg said.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US envoy to the UN, said that her country abstained from the Council vote on Wednesday because the resolution did not condemn Hamas or “reaffirm the right of all Member States to protect their citizens from terrorist attacks” even though the document called for releasing all hostages. She also said that the numerous draft resolutions focusing on humanitarian aid for Gaza that failed in October did not endorse Israel’s right to self-defense. Yet the Malta-led resolution did not do so, either.
The US used the same reason for casting the lone veto last month when it rejected a Brazil-drafted resolution calling for humanitarian pauses to allow essential goods into the enclave. The resolution garnered 12 yes votes. The US also voted against a resolution submitted by Russia last month — a text meant to compete with Brazil’s. A resolution presented by the US soon after, focusing on Israel’s right to self-defense, was vetoed by Russia and China.
“The US was too clever by a half in abstaining from rather than supporting the Malta resolution on the Hamas-Israel conflict,” Stephen Schlesinger, a Century Foundation fellow and author of “Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations.”
“The American envoy to the UN declared the resolution a good first step by endorsing humanitarian aid to Gaza but declined to back it for failing to also acknowledge Israel’s right to defend itself,” Schlesinger added. “But surely, by the ambassador’s logic, praising the first step would have been the best way to encourage the taking of the second step, namely, affirming the self-defense rights of Israel. Otherwise the US, in abstaining, looks unserious, merely playing political games in the Security Council.”
The Council resolution asks that essential goods reach civilians, especially children, who have been profoundly affected by the war. They make up more than 50 percent of the 2.2 million people living in Gaza. Save the Children charity said that the number of children killed in Gaza since the war began has surpassed the annual number of children killed in global conflicts every year since 2019. Unicef said that more than 700,000 youngsters have been displaced since the war. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the enclave was becoming a “graveyard for children.”
The UN is struggling mightily to get basic humanitarian aid to Gazans amid the Israel Defense Forces ground invasion. Israel cut off water, electricity and fuel to the strip soon into its siege after the Oct. 7 massacre. Many of the hospitals in the enclave’s north have been shut due to lack of power; others continue to operate under horrendous conditions. The fourth communications blackout by Israel was underway on Nov. 16, the UN said.
Al Shifra hospital in Gaza City, the largest medical center in the enclave’s north, was stormed by Israeli forces this week as they contend its basement is a command center for Hamas operations. So far, the US backs Israel’s claims, while top officials at the hospital (and Hamas) deny the allegations. The media have been virtually restricted from the zone, and information about the claims cannot be independently verified, some mainstream media are reporting. Al Jazeera, however, has been providing live coverage there.
Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees, or Unrwa, said 103 of its staffers, all Palestinians, have been killed so far, though he hasn’t said whether Israel is to blame for the deaths. (The UN held a memorial service at its New York City headquarters and offices worldwide on Nov. 13 for the slain staffers.) At least 42 journalists have been killed since the war began. Israel’s restrictions of fuel into Gaza have left UN operations teetering on the abyss.
“UNRWA received today just over 23,000 litres of fuel to the besieged Gaza Strip,” Lazzarini said on Nov. 15. “The Israeli Authorities have restricted the use of this fuel only to transport the little aid coming via Egypt. This fuel cannot be used for the overall humanitarian response, including for medical and water facilities or the work of UNRWA.”
As Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said: “If there is a hell on earth today, its name is northern Gaza.”
Formal reactions from global civil society groups and professional humanitarians to the war continue to be voiced. An interagency statement on Nov. 16 from UN and other “humanitarian chiefs,” referring to corridors proposed by Israel to enable Palestinian civilians to flee northern Gaza for the south, said, in part: “No ‘safe zone’ is truly safe when it is declared unilaterally or enforced by the presence of armed forces.”
Additionally, a new letter from leading international experts to Guterres is calling on him to add Israeli forces, the Qassam Brigades (Hamas) and Islamic Jihad to his “list of shame” for grave violations against children in armed conflict immediately, rather than wait until his 2024 report is produced.
Volker Turk, the UN human rights commissioner, said this week, after a trip to Egypt and Jordan: “Extremely serious allegations of multiple and profound breaches of international humanitarian law, whoever commits them, demand rigorous investigation and full accountability. Where national authorities prove unwilling or unable to carry out such investigations, and where there are contested narratives on particularly significant incidents, international investigation is called for.”
This article was updated to include information on the rules of war and to correct the description of the massacre by Hamas on Oct. 7.
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Damilola Banjo is an award-winning staff reporter for PassBlue who has covered a wide range of topics, from Africa-centered stories to gender equality to UN peacekeeping and US-UN relations. She also oversees all video production for PassBlue. She was a Dag Hammarskjold fellow in 2023 and a Pulitzer Center postgraduate fellow in 2021. She was part of the BBC Africa team that produced the Emmy-nominated documentary, “Sex for Grades.” In addition, she worked for WFAE, an NPR affiliate in Charlotte, N.C. Banjo has a master’s of science degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and an undergraduate degree from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria.
How many years Israel has ignored the UNSC resolutions? And as its Ambassador was saying, this last resolution for humanitarian pauses is also ‘meaningless’. The fundamental question is simply for how long the United States will continue to blindly support Israel in its wars of occupation, colonisation, ethnic cleansing and genocide against Palestinians?