The United States has once again unilaterally vetoed a draft resolution by the United Nations Security Council that called for an immediate, permanent cease-fire in Gaza — a move that comes as the Biden administration spends its last months in office continuing to sell the weapons Israel is using to destroy the Palestinian territory.
The Security Council in New York voted 14-1 on Wednesday in favor of the resolution, but the veto blocked the council from adopting it due to the U.S.’s status as a permanent member.
In addition to demanding a cease-fire, the resolution would’ve demanded the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas, and would have urged Israeli forces to withdraw from the enclave and immediately restore access to humanitarian assistance for Palestinian civilians.
“I think it’s clear that the political rationale here is not actually to find a path to peace. That it’s not about saving innocent lives, and it’s not about ending the continued violence that is being perpetrated against Palestinian civilians,” Tariq Habash, a Biden appointee who resigned in protest of the administration’s Gaza policy, told HuffPost. “If it was, the veto would not have been used.”
That was echoed by Majed Bamya, the deputy permanent observer of the State of Palestine. But U.S. deputy ambassador Robert Wood argued that by not explicitly linking a cease-fire to the hostages’ release, the resolution would disincentivize Hamas from engaging in peace negotiations.
“We made clear throughout negotiations we could not support an unconditional cease-fire that failed to release the hostages,” Wood said. “This resolution abandoned that necessity. For that reason, the United States could not support it.”
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Hamas militants launched an attack on Israel in October 2023 that killed about 1,200 people. They also took roughly 250 hostages, about 100 of whom are believed to remain in captivity. Israeli ambassador Danny Danon said on Wednesday that states who voted for the U.N. resolution had betrayed the remaining hostages, but Bamya argued that the ongoing “full-fledged” military offensive against Palestinians is “about everything except the hostages.”
For more than a year, the Israeli military, using arms supplied by the U.S., has rained bombs on Gaza. The assault is thought to have killed at least 43,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children — a number that experts and medical workers say is a gross undercount — and has displaced the entire population of Gaza and destroyed infrastructure necessary to sustaining life. Israel’s siege has blocked most humanitarian aid, sparking a mass starvation crisis, and Israeli forces have allegedly detained men in torture camps.
All of that has been cause for humanitarian concern as the Israeli military turns to growing hostilities in Lebanon.