The U.N. Security Council passed a resolution calling on Hamas to agree to Joe Biden’s three-phase hostage ceasefire proposal, the first time the body has approved a comprehensive peace deal to end the war in Gaza.
Hamas issued a statement saying it welcomed the resolution, but it was unclear whether it meant Gaza’s leaders accepted the ceasefire plan.
The Israeli government’s position is also ambiguous. It has formally accepted the peace plan, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has tried to distance himself from the plan and his coalition has shifted to the right since the proposal was tabled.
Fourteen Security Council members voted in favor of Monday’s resolution and none opposed, with only Russia abstaining from the vote on the U.S.-drafted resolution calling for first exchanging elderly, sick or women hostages held by Israel during the initial six-week ceasefire. of Palestinian detainees.
The ceasefire will evolve into a permanent end to hostilities and the release of all hostages in a second phase that will be negotiated by both sides as well as U.S., Qatari and Egyptian mediators. Phase three will involve launching major reconstruction efforts.
The resolution calls on Hamas to accept the agreement and urges both parties to “fully implement its terms without delay and unconditional”.
The United States has been seeking UN endorsement of the proposal since Biden unveiled it on May 31. It won the support of the Palestinian delegation with a clause that said the initial six-week ceasefire would be extended as long as the second phase of negotiations continued.
The United States, Qatar and Egypt will “work to ensure that negotiations continue until all agreements are reached and the second phase begins,” the resolution said.
Palestinian presidential spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeneh said the Palestinian Authority leadership would accept any resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza to preserve the integrity of the Palestinian territories.
Palestinian support for the U.S. resolution makes it diplomatically more difficult for Russia or China to veto it. Since the outbreak of the Gaza war in October, the Security Council has been working hard to find consensus in a highly polarized context. It has agreed on a humanitarian solution involving a temporary ceasefire, but this is the first time it has embraced a comprehensive peace.
“Over the past eight months, the council has often faced divisions, and the world has been understandably frustrated,” Linda Thomas Greenfield, the U.S. envoy to the United Nations, said after the vote. “But this story There is another side, because today we passed a fourth resolution on this conflict.
“Colleagues, today we vote for peace,” she declared.
The text said Israel had accepted the terms of the ceasefire, although that claim was increasingly called into question after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a series of skeptical comments claiming the United States had revealed only parts of the plan. And insists that any proposal to achieve a lasting ceasefire without completely destroying Hamas’s military and governance capabilities is “impossible.”
Centrist Minister Benny Gantz resigned over the weekend, leaving Netanyahu even more reliant on far-right members of his coalition who are staunchly opposed to the deal.
Hamas made positive comments when Biden first announced the deal and said it welcomed the Security Council vote, but has yet to formally respond to the ceasefire proposal. The unusual display of relative unity in the deeply divided Security Council has helped pressure both sides to reach a deal, even as both sides have shown themselves to be more influenced by local constituencies and leaders’ personal interests than international opinion. .
The prospect of hostages and a ceasefire became extremely complicated after Israel launched a raid in Gaza on Saturday to rescue four hostages, killing 274 Palestinians.
One of the recent changes to the US draft resolution was to make it more acceptable to Israel. The report said the council rejected any attempts to change Gaza’s demographic or geographical boundaries but omitted wording from an earlier version that explicitly rejected the creation of a buffer zone along the coast.
