Palestinians line up for a free meal in Rafah, Gaza Strip on Thursday. International aid agencies say Gaza is suffering from shortages of food, medicine and other basic supplies as a result of the two-and-a-half-month war between Israel and Hamas. Fatima Shbair/Associated Press
UNITED NATIONS — The United States, key allies and Arab nations engaged in high-level diplomacy Thursday in hopes of avoiding another U.S. veto of a new United Nations resolution on desperately needed aid to Gaza. Its sponsor expressed hope that the long-delayed vote would take place in the evening.
Shahad Matar, spokesperson for the United Arab Emirates, which sponsored the Security Council resolution, told reporters “we’re very close to agreement.” The 15 council members started closed consultations just before 6:30 p.m. EST to discuss the changes to the draft resolution, with a vote expected to follow.
As she arrived for consultations, U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said that after a week and a half of negotiations, “we are hopeful.”
Whether the changes are enough to meet U.S. concerns about the text’s references to a cessation of hostilities in the Israel-Hamas war and the key sticking point – the inspection of aid trucks entering into Gaza to ensure they are only carrying humanitarian goods – remains to be seen. The current draft calls for the U.N. to take over the job from Israel, which the United States and Israel, its close ally, oppose.
The new watered-down text eliminates the call for an urgent suspension of hostilities and for urgent steps toward 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.”
On the sticking point on aid deliveries, the new draft requests that U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres 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.
In another major change, the new draft eliminates the condemnation of “all violations of international humanitarian law, including all indiscriminate attacks against civilians and civilian objects, all violence and hostilities against civilians, and all acts of terrorism.”
Whether these major changes are acceptable to other council members remains in question.
President Biden answers a reporter’s question as he walks from Marine One upon arrival on the South Lawn of the White House on Wednesday, in Washington. Alex Brandon/Associated Press
Earlier, U.S. deputy ambassador Robert Wood told reporters as he headed into a Security Council meeting on Syria that “We’re still working it. We’re working it very hard.” He said there needed to be some changes in the text “that would make it worthy of our support.”
Nathan Evans, the spokesman for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, stressed that the resolution’s goal is to expand aid getting into Gaza.
“There are still serious and widespread concerns that this resolution as drafted could actually slow down delivery of humanitarian aid by directing the U.N. to create an unworkable monitoring mechanism,” Evans told The Associated Press. “We must ensure any resolution helps and doesn’t hurt the situation on the ground.”
Both the U.N. and aid groups worry that if the U.N. is placed in charge of inspections, it would delay deliveries into Gaza and may not even be possible. Israel insists it must maintain the lead on inspecting deliveries.
In a sign of intense U.S. efforts, President Biden told reporters on his way back from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, late Wednesday that “we’re negotiating right now at the U.N. the contours of a resolution that we may be able to agree to.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke to the foreign ministers of Egypt and UAE late Wednesday, according to a US official, but the results of the call were unclear.
As part of the U.S. push at the U.N., Blinken spoke Wednesday with the foreign ministers of France, Germany and the United Kingdom and stressed the need for urgent humanitarian aid to Gaza, “the imperative of minimizing civilian casualties,” and preventing further escalation of the conflict and ”underscored the U.S. commitment to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has said Gaza faces “a humanitarian catastrophe” and 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 U.N 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 U.N. World Food Program has said 90% of the population is regularly going without food for a full day.
Mercy Corps Vice-President Kate Phillips-Barrasso said a resolution calling for a suspension of hostilities is critical to delivering aid to starving people.
“We urge that an exclusive, independent mechanism be part of that agreement both in principle and in practice,” she said. “As in other conflicts, independent monitoring mechanisms are critical to ensuring aid gets to people quickly and does not involve parties to the conflict determining what gets in and how fast.”
U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby also raised two other issues Wednesday morning that are not in the Arab-sponsored resolution – condemnation of Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 incursion into southern Israel that sparked the latest war and Israel’s right to self-defense.
The U.S. on Dec. 8 vetoed a Security Council resolution, backed by almost all other council members and dozens of other nations, demanding an immediate humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza. The 193-member General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a similar resolution on Dec. 12 by a vote of 153-10, with 23 abstentions.
In its first unified action on Nov. 15, with the U.S. abstaining, the Security Council adopted a resolution calling for “urgent and extended humanitarian pauses” in the fighting, unhindered aid deliveries to civilians and the unconditional release of all hostages.
Security Council resolutions are important because they 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.
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 U.N. estimates.
Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani, Matthew Lee and Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington contributed to this report.
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