War between Israel and Hamas: US says it can support UN Security Council resolution on Gaza

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador, emerged from a closed-door meeting of Security Council members on Thursday evening to tell reporters that the United States had “worked hard and diligently over the past week” with Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Emirates must ensure that “we put a mechanism in place that will support humanitarian assistance, and we are willing to vote for it.”

“I won’t say how I’m going to vote,” she said, but added that if the resolution were introduced as written, it would be one that “we can support.”

The text of the resolution, circulated after her speech, dropped an earlier version’s call for a suspension of hostilities but called for “urgent steps” to allow unhindered humanitarian access. It calls on the UN Secretary General to appoint a coordinator charged with “facilitating, coordinating, monitoring and verifying” that relief supplies are humanitarian in nature, who would also “consult all relevant parties.”

Before Ms. Thomas-Greenfield’s statement, anger at the United States had been growing among Security Council members, even among European allies, the diplomats said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record. Some diplomats said they had been kept in the dark about the latest negotiations, which included closed-door talks between the United States and Egypt.

A US official, speaking on condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the talks, said high-level negotiations between Washington and Cairo began early Thursday to agree on who would inspect aid going to Gaza. Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesman for the UN secretary general, told reporters on Thursday that the council was engaged in “deep discussion”.

Egypt is not a member of the Council, but is involved because it controls the Rafah border crossing into Gaza. Cairo wants the United Nations to take over Israel’s inspections to streamline aid to the enclave, which has had severely limited access to basic services such as food, water and medical care for weeks.

The United States, under Israeli pressure, has said Israel should remain involved in the inspections and disputed that U.N. inspections would speed up aid.

The UN provides, monitors and delivers humanitarian aid to many conflict areas around the world.

“The UN has done this kind of work before,” said Lana Nusseibeh, the UN ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, who is leading negotiations on the resolution. “It is now up to us to ensure that the country receives strong support to respond to this catastrophe in Gaza. As we have done from the outset of these negotiations, we will leave no stone unturned in pursuing a successful adoption.”

Kate Phillips-Barrasso, vice president of global policy and advocacy for Mercy Corps, a global aid organization, urged the Security Council to take action, saying: “Gaza is running out of time.”

“As in other conflicts, independent monitoring mechanisms are critical to ensure that aid gets to people quickly and that the parties to the conflict are not involved in determining what gets in and how quickly,” she said.

Israel launched the war to crush Hamas and other militant groups after Hamas led an attack on Israel on October 7, killing about 1,200 people and taking about 240 hostage. Since then, humanitarian aid has only flowed through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, and there has been a complex monitoring system in which truck convoys first travel to Israel for inspection and then return to Egypt to enter the Gaza Strip via Rafah.

Health authorities in Gaza say around 20,000 people have been killed in the enclave since the start of the war, the majority of them women and children. The UN has warned of a humanitarian catastrophe as the vast majority of the enclave’s 2.2 million residents have been forced to flee their homes.