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The vote came on the same day the Gaza Health Ministry said the number killed in Gaza during the war between Israel and Hamas has reached 20,000, or nearly one in every 100 people living in the enclave.
The near-unanimous council vote — in which Russia also abstained after accusing the United States of “twisting arms” to weaken the measure — “was tough, but we got there,” U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said. The 13 other council members all voted in favor.
The Biden administration has been under increasing global and domestic pressure to temper its strong support for Israel’s air and ground bombardments of Gaza as the number of civilian deaths climbs.
In recent weeks, senior administration officials have appealed both privately and publicly to the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to move away from its intense attacks in heavily populated areas and toward more-surgical strikes against Hamas leaders.
The bombardment of Gaza has been intense by any measure. The pace of death — both before and after a week-long pause that ended early this month and allowed increased humanitarian aid and the release of nearly half of about 240 Israeli and foreign hostages held by Hamas — does not appear to have slowed.
An average of 277 civilian deaths a day have been recorded in Gaza from Oct. 7 — when the conflict began with Hamas’s attack into southern Israel that left 1,200 dead — to the end of the pause, according to the Health Ministry. Since fighting resumed on Dec. 1, the average daily number has risen to more than 300.
A number of Security Council members expressed clear disappointment that the resolution did not go further in demanding a “cease-fire” — wording that had led to a U.S. veto of several previous resolutions. Negotiations over the new measure, sponsored by the United Arab Emirates, had continued nonstop since Monday in an effort to come up with a version the Americans would not block.
The United States has a long history of refusing to support resolutions deemed critical of Israel in the Security Council, with vetoes of more than 50 measures since the early 1970s. A 2017 abstention by the Obama administration on a measure declaring Israeli settlements in the West Bank illegal brought significant congressional criticism.
Senior administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy, said the White House and Secretary of State Antony Blinken were closely involved in the negotiations. Blinken, said one official, played “a key role in getting us to a place” where the United States wasn’t going to use its veto, including numerous conversations with his counterparts in Arab capitals and with European allies.
The resolution’s final form, UAE Ambassador Lana Zaki Nusseibeh told the council, “is not a perfect text. We know only a cease-fire will end this suffering.” But the measure, she said, “responds to the calls for a sustainable cessation of hostilities and a massive scale-up of humanitarian aid. Often in diplomacy, the challenge is meeting the moment in the world we live in, not in the world that we want.”
“We will never tire of pushing for a humanitarian cease-fire,” Nusseibeh said.
Thomas-Greenfield agreed that “the resolution is not perfect,” noting that the compromise document did not include Washington’s desire for a statement condemning Hamas for the attacks in Israel. “We were appalled that some council members still refuse” to denounce the attacks “which set so much heartbreak and suffering in motion.”
In a year-end news conference just after the vote, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres repeated his own call for an immediate cease-fire. “Over the last weeks and days, there has been no significant change in the way the war is unfolding,” he said, despite U.S. insistence that Israel has begun to change its tactics in response to Biden administration urging.
“Some 1.9 million people, 85 percent of the Gaza population, have been forced from their homes … and according to the World Food Program, widespread famine looms,” Guterres said. He added that the dead have included 136 U.N. aid workers.
While nothing can justify Hamas’s attack on Israel, the taking of hostages or the continued firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel, he said, “these violations of international humanitarian law can never justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”
The proper measurement of the effectiveness of aid, Guterres said, is not the number of trucks entering Gaza — now numbering just a fraction of what is normally required for survival inside the Israeli-blockaded enclave — but the “massive obstacles” imposed by Israel to distributing the aid, including “the intense bombardment and active combat in densely populated urban areas.”
Israel conducts its own inspection of all humanitarian cargo allowed into Gaza. Until last week, passage was restricted to the Rafah crossing from Egypt, the only entry into the enclave Israel does not control, which is designed largely for pedestrian and automobile traffic. Last week, Israel agreed to open its own crossing into southern Gaza, near Rafah at Kerem Shalom.
The new resolution attempts to resolve bottlenecks at the entry points and inside Gaza by demanding that access be allowed and facilitated on “all available routes to and throughout” the enclave, enabling distribution of fuel, food, medical supplies and assistance for emergency shelters “without diversion and through the most direct routes.” The measure also calls for provision of material and equipment to “repair and ensure the functioning of critical infrastructure.”
But logistical issues persist: Every truck entering Gaza must be unloaded once it is inside, with its cargo reloaded into other vehicles for distribution across the enclave. “We ourselves have a limited and insufficient amount of trucks” inside, Guterres said, with many left behind in the north when Israel issued evacuation orders and others destroyed by bombing. “But Israeli authorities have not allowed any additional trucks to operate in Gaza,” he said.
The United Nations has said that aid flows are also hampered by Israel’s insistence on screening all truckloads itself, and refusal to open other entries to Gaza. An initial draft of the resolution demanded that all pre-screening inspections be given to the “exclusive” control of the U.N. secretary general, a provision objected to both by the United States and Israel. The passed resolution instead calls on Guterres to appoint a senior coordinator to oversee and facilitate the entry of aid, wording that left Israel’s role vague.
Even what Russia and some other members called a watered-down resolution was unlikely to please Israel. A government spokesman said early Thursday that there is a “built-in bias at the United Nations against our country, to the extent it’s simply ridiculous.”
In comments to the council after the vote, Jonathan Miller, Israel’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, said that “there is no doubt that humanitarian aid is crucially important,” and noted that Israel already facilitates the entry of hundreds of truckloads. “The only roadblock to aid entry,” he said, is “the U.N.’s ability to accept it.”
“Any enhancement of U.N. aid monitoring cannot be done at the expense of Israel’s security inspections … and security inspections of aid will not change,” Miller said.
Security Council resolutions are binding on U.N. members under international law, but there is little precedent or route for the council to enforce its mandates.
The resolution also reiterates the council’s “unwavering commitment” to a two-state solution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and “stresses the importance of unifying the Gaza Strip with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority.” Both goals, supported by the Biden administration, have been rejected by Netanyahu.
In its own statement, according to Israeli media reports, Hamas said it considered the resolution “an insufficient measure that does not respond to the catastrophic situation created by the Zionist war machine.”
Much council attention Friday was focused on the rising number of deaths in Gaza, and the arrival at the grim 20,000 benchmark.
The number of people killed there since Israel launched its operations, with the goal of destroying Hamas’s military infrastructure and killing its leaders, has been a subject of dispute.
The Washington Post and other media outlets rely on numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry, as many international institutions, organizations and global bodies did before the war. The ministry has proved reliable historically, with direct access to hospitals and morgues. It writes death certificates for Palestinians residing in the enclave.
Israeli and U.S. officials have questioned the figures publicly, however, arguing that they cannot be trusted because the ministry is controlled by Hamas, the governing body in Gaza since 2007. Both countries designate Hamas as a terrorist group. They also have noted that ministry figures do not differentiate between combatants and civilians, although at the end of November, the Biden administration provided an estimate to Congress that the death toll in Gaza was more than 15,000, close to the number provided by the Gaza Health Ministry at the time.
“The only figures that Israel and the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] can estimate with a degree of confidence are the numbers of Hamas terrorists killed since the Oct. 7 attack,” an Israeli official said this month, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence. The official said that “several thousand” Hamas fighters had been killed at that point, a small proportion of a force that has been estimated at 30,000.
Neta C. Crawford, co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, which tracks the toll of conflicts, said the rate of death among the Gazan population was similar to that in 20th-century wars. “This is, in the 21st century, a significant and out-of-the-norm level of destruction,” Crawford said.
War makes counting the dead difficult. The Gaza Health Ministry paused its death toll updates last month, citing communication outages and a lack of access to besieged hospitals, but later resumed counting.
While the United Nations often releases its own counts after a conflict, U.N. officials have said they see no reason to doubt the ministry figures. They acknowledge, though, that the numbers could prove inaccurate for practical reasons.
At a meeting of the World Health Organization’s executive board, Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus suggested that the figures could actually be an undercount.
“We don’t know how many are buried under the rubble of their homes,” said Tedros, whose agency works directly with the Gaza Health Ministry.
Analysts have suggested that the heavy destruction of infrastructure, particularly in the north of Gaza, indicates the use of large bombs such as the 2,000-pound Mark 84.
While these huge bombs can be retrofitted with the U.S.-supplied Joint Direct Attack Munition system to become precision weapons, a U.S. intelligence assessment found that almost half of the munitions Israel has used in Gaza since the war began have been unguided bombs, an unusually high proportion for a high-tech military like the IDF.
President Biden told supporters at a recent campaign event that “indiscriminate bombing” was beginning to cost Israel support around the world.
In an appearance on social media in early December, IDF spokesman Jonathan Conricus suggested that the Israeli military would soon present an “analysis of claims made by the Hamas-controlled and so-called Gaza Health Ministry.”
Brian Finucane, a State Department attorney during the Obama administration who serves as a senior adviser for the International Crisis Group, said that under the rules of war, the IDF would be expected to assess any potential civilian death toll before an attack.
The aim would be to ensure that any civilian harm was proportionate to the military advantage that was expected. “Whether they’d ever release them is another matter,” Finucane said of those estimates.
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