After heated last-minute negotiations, the US ambassador to the United Nations said on Thursday evening that the United States was ready to support a Security Council resolution calling for urgently needed aid to enter the Gaza Strip.
A vote on the measure, which had been repeatedly postponed for days, was not expected until Friday at the earliest.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador, emerged from a closed session of Security Council members on Thursday evening to tell reporters that the United States had been working “hard and diligently over the course of the past week” with Egypt and the United Arab Emirates is intended to ensure that “we put in place a mechanism on the ground to support humanitarian assistance, and we are ready to vote for it.”
“I won’t reveal how I will vote,” she said, but added that the resolution, if presented as written, would be one “that we can support.”
The text of the resolution circulated after her speech abandoned the earlier call for a cessation of hostilities and instead called for “urgent steps” to allow unhindered humanitarian access. It calls on the UN Secretary-General to appoint a coordinator who will be tasked with “facilitating, coordinating, monitoring and verifying” whether the aid is of a humanitarian nature and who will also “consult all relevant parties”.
Ahead of Ms. Thomas-Greenfield's testimony, anger toward the United States had been growing among Security Council members and even among European allies, said the diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Some diplomats said they were kept in the dark about recent 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 control aid to the Gaza Strip. Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesman for the U.N. secretary-general, told reporters on Thursday that the council was in “deep discussions.”
Egypt is not a member of the council, but is involved because it controls the Rafah crossing into Gaza. Cairo wants the United Nations to take over Israel's inspections to streamline the delivery of aid to the enclave, where access to basics such as food, water and medical care has been very limited for weeks.
The United States, under Israeli pressure, has said Israel must remain involved in inspections, arguing that U.N. inspections would expedite aid.
The United Nations manages, monitors and provides humanitarian assistance in many conflict areas around the world.
“The U.N. has done this kind of work before,” said Lana Nusseibeh, the U.N. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates who is leading negotiations on the resolution. “It is now up to us to ensure there is strong support to respond to this disaster in Gaza. As we have done from the start of these negotiations, we will leave no stone unturned to pursue a successful rollout.”
Kate Phillips-Barrasso, vice president of global policy and advocacy at Mercy Corps, a global aid organization, called on the Security Council to act, saying: “Gaza is running out of time.”
“As in other conflicts, independent monitoring mechanisms are crucial to ensure that aid gets to people quickly and that parties to the conflict do not determine what gets there and how quickly,” she said.
Israel began the war to crush Hamas and other militant groups after Hamas led an attack on Israel on October 7 that killed about 1,200 people and took about 240 others hostage. Since then, humanitarian aid has only flowed through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, requiring a complicated surveillance system in which convoys of trucks first drove to Israel for inspection and then returned to Egypt to enter Gaza via Rafah.
Health authorities in Gaza say about 20,000 people have been killed in the enclave since the war began, most of them women and children, and the United Nations has warned of a humanitarian catastrophe as the vast majority of the enclave's 2.2 million people were forced to flee their homeland for forced relocation.
— Michael Levenson and Farnaz Fassihi