HAVANA (AP) — The United States’ veto in the U.N. Security Council of a request for a humanitarian pause to allow aid access to the Gaza Strip shows the need for deep reform of this multilateral organization, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez said Thursday .
The position of the United States government, which compromises to stop this escalation of genocide, is not only “regrettable” but also “dangerous,” the Cuban official said during a press conference.
The motion, rejected the previous day in the Security Council, had been submitted by Brazil and called for the cancellation of Israel’s order to ask the population and United Nations personnel to leave the northern Gaza Strip and the Red Cross with their respective humanitarian corridors.
The United States representative justified its veto by saying that the project does not mention the right of the State of Israel to self-defense and that diplomacy must continue.
According to Foreign Minister Rodríguez, profound changes are necessary in the UN to “protect and preserve it from attempts” to transform it into a unit of “unipolar” hegemony of powers.
He stressed that “a profound reform of the Security Council is also crucial to correct the discriminatory imbalance for the countries of the South.”
As an example, the Chancellor pointed out that the veto right exercised by Washington the day before was taken into account by five countries – France, China, Russia, Great Britain and the USA – with permanent seats on the Security Council in recent years “systematically against the rights, protection and the peace of the Palestinian people”.
Brazil is one of the non-permanent members in this forum.
This year, Cuba is at the head of the Group of 77 plus China, a mechanism for negotiating positions within the United Nations that currently consists of 134 countries – the initial number has grown over the years.
The war, which began on October 7, has become the deadliest of the five wars waged by Israel and Hamas. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, 3,785 Palestinians were killed and 12,500 injured. While Tel Aviv reported that more than 1,400 Israelis died and at least 200 were taken hostage.
“The impunity with which Israel acts can only be explained by its confidence that there will be no consequences for its actions and that it has the support of the United States government and other of its NATO allies,” said Rodríguez, for whom The conflict is a consequence of “75 years of illegal occupation, the violation of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people on their own territory.”
Cuba proposed a series of measures, starting with stopping the bombings, providing humanitarian aid and, to permanently defuse the conflict, the creation of two states that would allow the Palestinian people their own state with predetermined borders 1967.
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Andrea Rodríguez is on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ARodriguezAP