Closing summary
It is just after 7.30pm in Gaza and Tel Aviv.
Here’s a summary of what has happened today:
The UN general assembly overwhelmingly passed a resolution for the UN security council to reconsider and support the full membership of Palestine into the United Nations. 143 countries supported it, nine voted against, including the United States, and 25 abstained.
The resolution also gives Palestine a range of rights and privileges, in addition to what it is allowed in its current observer status.
Riyad Mansour, the permanent observer of Palestine, addressed the UN as the international body weighs a resolution for Palestine’s full membership into the UN. Mansour said: “I stand before you as lives continue falling apart in the Gaza Strip … as more than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed, 80,000 have been maimed, 2 million have been displaced, and everything has been destroyed.” He added: “No words can capture what such loss and trauma signifies for Palestinians.”
Gilad Erdan, Israel’s UN delegate, accused the intentional body of attempting to allow a “terror state” into its membership led by the “Hitlers of our time” during debate on the upcoming resolution. Erdan also shredded a copy of the UN charter, accusing members of doing so while debating the resolution.
Three Israeli whistleblowers working at the Sde Teiman desert camp, a holding site for Palestinians detained during Israel’s invasion of Gaza, have claimed to have witnessed a series of abuses by the military, including prisoners being restrained, blindfolded and forced to wear diapers, reports CNN. The Israeli whistleblowers said of the prisoners: “We were told they were not allowed to move. They should sit upright. They’re not allowed to talk. Not allowed to peek under their blindfold.” According to the sources, guards were instructed to enforce silence by shouting “uskot” (Arabic for “shut up”) and to identify and punish problematic individuals.
Dwindling food and fuel stocks could force aid operations to grind to a halt within days in Gaza as vital crossings remain shut, forcing hospitals to close down and leading to more malnutrition, United Nations aid agencies warned on Friday. Humanitarian workers have sounded the alarm this week over the closure of the Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings for aid and people as part of Israel’s military operation in Rafah, where around 1 million uprooted people have been sheltering, Reuters reported.
About 110,000 people have fled Rafah in southern Gaza and food and fuel supplies in the area are critically low, a United Nations official said. All crossings into southern Gaza remain closed, cutting off supplies and preventing medical evacuations and the movement of humanitarian staff, said Georgios Petropoulos, an official for the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs working in Rafah.
That’s it for today’s blog. Thank you for reading.
The United Nations general assembly voted overwhelmingly to enhance Palestinians status at the UN and take it closer to full membership.
The assembly voted 143 to 9 with 25 abstentions for a resolution calling on the security council to bestow full membership on the state of Palestine, while giving its mission a range of rights and privileges, in addition to what it is allowed in its current observer status.
The resolution was tailored over the past few days, diluting its language so as not to trigger a cutoff of US funding under a 1990 law. It does not make Palestine a full member, or give it voting rights in the assembly, or the right to stand for membership of the security council, but the vote was resounding expression of world opinion in favour of Palestinian statehood, galvanised by the continuing bloodshed and famine caused by Israel’s war in Gaza.
Even before the vote in the assembly on Friday morning, Israel and a group of leading Republicans urged funding be cut anyway because of the new privileges the resolution granted to the Palestinian mission.
The US mission, which voted no to the resolution, warned that it would also use its veto again if the general assembly’s call for Palestinian membership returned to the security council for another vote.
“Efforts to advance this resolution do not change the reality that the Palestinian Authority does not currently meet the criteria for UN membership under the UN charter,” the mission’s spokesperson, Nathan Evans, said. “Additionally, the draft resolution does not alter the status of the Palestinians as a ‘non-member state observer mission’.”
Updated
