Washington’s draft UN security council resolution on Gaza marks a shift in the US position, but it is a nuanced shift, retaining the linkage between a ceasefire and hostage release while loosening that linkage and emphasising that an immediate end to hostilities is the priority.
The primary focus for now is the hostage negotiations underway in Qatar, which are moving into high gear again, with the CIA and Mossad chiefs, William Burns and David Barnea, expected to fly into Doha on Friday.
The US draft resolution is designed to provide a sense of urgency to those talks. It also represents an attempt by the Biden administration to keep pressure on Hamas while seeking to regain some international credibility and mend ties with allies after three vetoes of UN ceasefire resolutions.
The latest veto was cast on 20 February, on an Algerian ceasefire resolution. At the time the US envoy to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, insisted that an unconditional ceasefire could derail the talks on a hostage deal, which Washington portrayed as the best way to a sustainable truce. The US mission at the UN circulated an alternative text in which the security council “underscores its support for a temporary ceasefire in Gaza as soon as practicable, based on the formula of all hostages being released”.
A month has passed since then, however. There has been no hostage deal and Gaza has slipped much further towards absolute catastrophe, with a UN panel of experts warning that a famine is imminent. The US is struggling to avoid the accusation of complicity in that disaster, and February’s version of the text now looks all the more complacent.
The new version of the draft resolution circulated on Thursday morning “determines the imperative of an immediate and sustained ceasefire to protect civilians on all sides, allow for the delivery of essential humanitarian assistance, and alleviate humanitarian suffering, and towards that end unequivocally supports ongoing international diplomatic efforts to secure such a ceasefire in connection with the release of all remaining hostages”.
It represents stronger language. It uses the word “immediate”, and the linkage to the hostage deal is not as tight. “Towards that end” has some ambiguity over whether an agreement is essential, rather than just helpful, in securing a ceasefire.
The nuances reflect the tightrope the US is still trying to walk, seeking to claw back leadership on the issue at the UN, while keeping pressure on Hamas to agree a limited deal that would exchange 40 of the most vulnerable hostages for a six-week pause.
So the resolution does not demand a ceasefire but simply “determines the imperative of one”. Antony Blinken, who is visiting Arab capitals, has gone out of his way to emphasise the linkage between a ceasefire and a hostage agreement.
But the draft resolution leaves the US wiggle room if the hostage talks fail, and that keeps up pressure on Israel to accept the six-week ceasefire on the table and to get serious finally about the flow of aid into Gaza. In their recent rhetoric, US officials such as the aid chief, Samantha Power, have made clear that Israel will bear primary responsibility for a famine if it does not change the level of humanitarian access.
Power, Thomas-Greenfield and Blinken have been seeking to push Biden towards a ceasefire call for weeks, but the president has put his faith in the hostage deal, with a look over his shoulder at the damage the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, could do to him in an election year.
The House speaker, the Republican Mike Johnson, said on Thursday he intends to invite Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress.
The last time that happened, in 2015, at the invitation of a previous Republican speaker, Netanyahu’s appearance on Capitol Hill was seen as a partisan swipe at US nuclear talks with Iran and the Obama White House, which was not initially consulted over the invitation.
The threat to Biden now is that Netanyahu paints him as abetting terrorism by pushing Israel into a ceasefire, allowing the Israeli leader to blame the US president for a failure to eliminate Hamas.
A new survey by the Pew Research Center suggests that Americans are still generally supportive of Israel, with 58% saying the state has valid reasons for fighting Hamas, and 38% saying Israeli conduct of the war has been acceptable, compared to just 34% saying it has been unacceptable.
That could change as conditions worsen further in Gaza, but if he waits for US public opinion to shift before using the full extent of US leverage, Biden will risk sharing complicity for the famine that is now barrelling towards 2.3 million people who are starving and under siege.
