The United Nations Security Council pushed off to Thursday a highly anticipated vote on a resolution calling for a halt in fighting in the war in Gaza and a major increase aid deliveries. The delay was at the request of the United States to allow more time for more negotiations, according to diplomats.
The postponement came after intense closed-door consultations failed to bring the United States and other members of the Council closer to a consensus. A major sticking point has been the question of whether the United Nations should take over from Israel the inspection of shipments of food, water, fuel and other aid going into Gaza, diplomats say.
The Council moved into closed consultations around noon on Wednesday, when the vote was originally scheduled. Hours later, the vote was delayed until 10 a.m. Eastern on Thursday. It was the third time this week that a vote on the resolution had been pushed off to allow for more talks aimed at finding a formula the United States and Israel will accept.
Some diplomats on the Council said they were growing frustrated with the United States’s repeated requests for delays and that it appeared unlikely that Washington would ultimately allow the resolution to pass.
“The point of the resolution is to ensure that aid goes in to Gaza, safely, and at scale,” said the United Arab Emirates ambassador, Lana Nusseibeh, who has been leading the negotiations. “Humanitarians have called this a code red moment for the Palestinians in Gaza.”
Proponents of the resolution say that it would give U.N. agencies the mandate to bypass Israeli inspections that have often slowed down aid convoys. It would also keep Israel, one of the warring parties, from having final say over the aid. In that regard it is similar to a Security Council resolution in 2014 that authorized aid convoys in Turkey to enter Syria during the war there without Syrian government involvement.
“We want to see a humanitarian cease-fire, we want to see the guns fall silent so we can reach the people of Gaza who need the most help right now,” said Stéphane Dujarric, the chief spokesman for the U.N. secretary general’s office on Wednesday.
Israel’s air and land offensives in Gaza, which Israeli officials say is aimed at destroying Hamas, has killed about 20,000 Palestinians, according to Gazan health authorities, who say the majority of the dead are children and women. The war has also displaced 1.9 million people — more than 85 percent of the densely packed enclave — pushing most them into squalid, overcrowded conditions in the south, living outside or crowding into shelters.
Hunger and disease are spreading rapidly, U.N. officials say Groups of desperate people have been stopping and looting aid trucks.
The resolution, put forward by the United Arab Emirates, calls for aid to be delivered by not just by trucks traveling overland, but on ships and aircraft. The Emirates and Egypt, which is not on the Council but whose border is used for most of aid convoys, have argued that it is impossible to scale up the aid deliveries to the levels needed with the current system.
At present, aid trucks aiming to enter Gaza from Egypt must first travel to Kerem Shalom, in Israel, to be inspected, then return to Egypt and cross the border at Rafah in southern Gaza. On Sunday, Israel began allowing some trucks to enter Gaza directly through the Kerem Shalom crossing.
One U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic talks, said that without Israel’s cooperation, any Security Council resolution would be difficult to implement, and that Washington would not approve removing Israel from the inspection process.
Security Council resolutions are legally binding on members of the United Nations, but as a practical matter, Israel could choose to ignore the measure. The Council could then impose sanctions on Israel, though that, too, would require United States support.
The American secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, said at a news conference in Washington that the White House’s goal was to negotiate a resolution that “actually advances” efforts to deliver aid “and doesn’t do anything that could actually hurt the delivery of humanitarian assistance, or make it more complicated.”
“I hope we can get to a good place,” he said.
