The humanitarian situation in Gaza consumed most of the United Nations Security Council’s meeting on Tuesday for its quarterly open debate on the Israeli-Palestinian file. But Jonathan Miller, the deputy Israeli ambassador to the global body, told the council that it must take a larger regional view to understand how to resolve the problems in the Middle East.
“We have a chance to widen that lens, and we must,” the envoy told the council. “Danger and opportunity walk side by side.”
Miller called on the international community to do more to help the Lebanese government rein in the Iranian proxy Hezbollah, as Israel continues to locate and strike the terror group’s hidden arsenals, including in a civilian area in Beirut, “which contained precision missiles intended for use against Israel,” earlier this week.
Miller asked the council to act urgently, with a new Lebanese government in place that says it seeks to disarm Hezbollah.
“Public voices, civil society leaders and elements within its new government are calling for sovereignty,” he said. “For an end to Hezbollah’s tyranny over their country.”
“The Lebanese people have made one thing unmistakably clear,” he added. “They want peace, stability and a future free from terror.”
The situation in Syria is also urgent after its longtime dictator, Bashar Assad, was deposed last year, according to Miller.
“Syria must not become a permanently fractured state governed by guns, but by the rule of law,” the Israeli envoy said.
The new government is ruled by a U.S.-designated terror group and composed of jihadis, who “now hold command over military infrastructure that could be used to destabilize the region and threaten the security of neighboring states, including Israel,” Miller said.
The Syrian population deserves “a future not dominated by sectarianism and foreign interference,” according to the Israeli envoy. “They deserve international support that empowers local stability, not the enabling of jihadism and chaos.”
Until the council deals with Iran and its other proxies, including Hamas and the Houthis in Yemen, it cannot talk about security for the region with any seriousness, according to Miller.
The envoy told the council that a conference about a two-state solution, which France and Saudi Arabia have called for in early June at the United Nations, is “destined to fail.”
“Such an initiative is disconnected from the current reality and risks doing more harm than good, particularly in the post-Oct. 7 environment,” Miller said. “It creates false expectations while ignoring the underlying dysfunction of the Palestinian Authority.”
Dorothy Shea, the interim U.S. envoy to the United Nations, told the council that “the United States will do its part to help forge a new reality alongside Israel and our Arab partners.”
“The future must start in a Gaza without Hamas,” she said. “Meetings or international conferences will not change this reality.”
Shea agreed with her Israeli counterpart on the importance of examining the region more broadly.
“We must also recognize the insidious violence, suffering and instability throughout the Middle East that Iran promotes through its malign actions, including its sponsorship of terrorism,” she said. “Through Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and countless other terrorist proxies it backs, Iran poses a threat to the millions of people who call this region home.”
António Guterres, the United Nations secretary-general, warned that a two-state solution is “near a point of no return” and pushed U.N. member states to take “irreversible action” to implement it.
“I encourage member states to go beyond affirmations and to think creatively about the concrete steps they will take to support a viable two-state solution before it is too late,” he said.
In his remarks before the council on Tuesday, Guterres decried the U.S. Justice Department’s decision to strip immunity from the U.N. Relief and Works Agency in a lawsuit against the agency and its leaders from victims of the Hamas-led terror attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“I emphasize the obligation under international law to respect the privileges and immunities of the United Nations and its personnel, including the absolute inviolability of United Nations premises, property and assets and the immunity from legal process of the United Nations,” Guterres told the council.
“Such immunity applies to all U.N. entities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including UNRWA, a subsidiary organ of the General Assembly,” he said. “I call on member states to fully support all of these efforts.”