After furious last-minute negotiations, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said Thursday night that the United States was willing to support a Security Council resolution that would ask for more desperately needed aid to enter the Gaza Strip. Loop.
A vote on the measure, which had been repeatedly delayed for days, was not expected until Friday at the earliest.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador, emerged from a closed-door meeting of Security Council members Thursday night to tell reporters that the United States had “worked hard and diligently over the course of the past week.” ” with Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Emirates to ensure that “we put in place a mechanism that supports humanitarian assistance and we are ready to vote in favor.”
“I won’t share how I will vote,” he said, but added that if the resolution is presented as written, it would be one that “we can support.”
The text of the resolution, which circulated after she spoke, abandoned an earlier version’s call for a suspension of hostilities and instead called for “urgent measures” to allow unimpeded humanitarian access. It asks the UN Secretary General to appoint a coordinator in charge of “facilitating, coordinating, monitoring and verifying” that the aid shipment is of a humanitarian nature, who would also “consult all relevant parties.”
Before Thomas-Greenfield’s statement, anger against the United States had been growing among Security Council members, including among European allies, said the diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record. Some diplomats said they had not been briefed on the latest negotiations, which included closed-door talks between the United States and Egypt.
A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the talks, said high-level negotiations began early Thursday between Washington and Cairo to find common ground on who would inspect aid arriving in Gaza. Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for the UN secretary-general, told reporters on Thursday that the council was 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 inspections of Israel to speed up the delivery of aid to the enclave, which has had very limited access to basic elements such as food, water and medical care for weeks.
The United States, under Israeli pressure, has said Israel must remain involved in the inspections and disputes that UN inspections will speed up aid.
The UN manages, monitors and delivers humanitarian aid to many conflict zones 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 it has strong support to respond to this catastrophe in Gaza. “As we have done since the beginning of these negotiations, we will spare no effort to achieve a successful adoption.”
Kate Phillips-Barrasso, vice president of global policy and advocacy at Mercy Corps, a global aid organization, urged the Security Council to act, saying: “Gaza has run out of time.”
“As in other conflicts, independent monitoring mechanisms are essential to ensure that aid reaches people quickly and does not involve the parties to the conflict in determining what arrives and how quickly,” he said.
Israel launched the war to crush Hamas and other militant groups after Hamas led an attack on Israel on October 7 that killed approximately 1,200 people and took another 240 hostage. Since then, humanitarian aid has only arrived slowly through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, and involved a complicated tracking system in which convoys of trucks travel first to Israel for inspection and then return to Egypt to cross into Gaza at via Rafah.
Gaza health authorities say around 20,000 people have died in the enclave since the start of the war, most of them women and children, and the UN has warned of a humanitarian catastrophe as the vast majority of the 2.2 million inhabitants of the enclave have been forced to flee their homes.
