The United States vetoed three U.N. Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip over the past few months, but on Wednesday Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an interview with the Saudi Arabian news channel Al Hadath that the United States is working on the draft of a resolution calling for “an immediate ceasefire tied to the release of hostages.” Paul Beaumont at The Guardian reports:
Details of the new draft resolution were revealed as the UN released an analysis of satellite imagery showing that 35% of buildings in Gaza had been damaged or destroyed during Israel’s offensive, which has claimed almost 32,000 Palestinian lives.
The US has blocked previous attempts to pass a ceasefire resolution, and the new draft marks a significant step in its approach to the conflict. [...]
“Well, in fact, we actually have a resolution that we put forward right now that’s before the UN security council that does call for an immediate ceasefire tied to the release of hostages, and we hope very much that countries will support that,” Blinken said in Saudi Arabia as he toured the region for the sixth time in as many months.
Blinken also told Al Hadath that weeks-long indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas over another ceasefire and hostage release that the U.S., Egypt, and Qatar have trying to broker are making progress. “The gaps are narrowing, and I think an agreement is very much possible,” he said.
More than 100 of the 250 hostages Hamas militants abducted in its murderous Oct. 7 attack are still being held at unknown locations in the Strip. In November, Hamas released 105 hostages in an exchange in which Israel released 240 Palestinian prisoners, including 107 under 18 years old.
In Democratic primary elections in 12 states, more than half a million Americans have cast their votes for “uncommitted” as a protest against the Biden administration’s continuing arms deliveries to the Israel Defense Forces and its vetoes of ceasefire resolutions. Uncommitted votes make up about 12% of the total, according to The New York Times. A large portion of these uncommitted votes came from citizens aged 18 to 29, an age cohort that a poll shows to be most at odds with the administration’s Gaza policy.
Over the past few months, calls for a ceasefire in Gaza from several U.S. allies have intensified as fears of widespread famine in Gaza have gone onto red alert as Israel’s response to the Hamas-planned Oct. 7 slaughter of 1,200 people in Israel has obliterated large sections of the 25-mile Strip, killing more than 31,000 people, including thousands of children. U.N. authorities have recently said that half the 2.3 million Gazans, more than 1.7 million of them internally displaced by the war, are at imminent risk of starving to death. A growing number of deaths by starvation has already been reported. An analysis from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) partnership warned on Monday that the situation is catastrophic.
"The IPC announcement reflects the dire situation that the people of Gaza are facing," said WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. "Before this crisis, there was enough food in Gaza to feed the population. Malnutrition was a rare occurrence. Now, people are dying, and many more are sick. Over a million people are expected to face catastrophic hunger unless significantly more food is allowed to enter Gaza."
Before the recent months’ hostilities, 0.8% of children under 5 years of age were acutely malnourished. Today’s report shows that as of February in the northern governorates, that figure is between 12.4 and 16.5%.
The food situation has arisen not merely as a consequence of war, but because of Israel’s continued turning back of the bulk of aid trucks. The IDF denies that it’s blocking aid, but numerous NGO officials and some U.S. senators say they have directly witnessed this. U.S. and Jordanian air drops and charities providing food to Gaza by ships, like the one the World Central Kitchen recently organized, are widely considered inadequate to the need. Before Oct. 7, about 500 trucks entered Gaza each day. Now, it depends. On a good day, maybe 200 or so, according to U.N. calculations. But on some days, it’s as few as 10.
Aid workers in Gaza are indicating in ever worsening descriptions that starvation could add tens of thousands more Palestinians to those already dead as a consequence of the war. And that fear is compounded by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Nethanyahu’s vow to send the IDF into Rafah in southern Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled after Israel told them to evacuate the northern part of the Strip. By all accounts, intense discussions between Israeli emissaries and U.S. officials over the Rafah situation have not caused Netanyahu to detour from the plan to attack Rafah in the effort to destroy Hamas.
Under the Foreign Assistance Act, it is illegal for the U.S. to give or sell weapons to a nation that restricts humanitarian aid. Nineteen Senate Democrats co-sponsored an amendment to President Joe Biden's foreign security supplemental budget that the White House eventually turned into a memorandum. memorandum that "no arms transfer will be authorized where the United States assesses that it is more likely than not that the arms to be transferred will be used by the recipient to commit ... genocide, crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 ... or other serious violations of international humanitarian or human rights law."
Eight Democratic senators
have urged Biden to stop providing offensive weapons to Israel until it loosens restrictions on U.S.-supplied humanitarian aid into Gaza. Secretary Blinken has until March 25 to certify to Congress that Israel is sticking to Biden’s memo regarding blocking aid. On Wednesday, the Israeli daily
Haaretz reported that officials from three U.S. State Department bureaus—Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor; Population, Refugees, and Migration; and the Office of Global Criminal Justice—as well as the United States Agency for International Development don’t believe that Israel is complying with the aid requirement in the law.