Ahead of a likely vote on a new Israel-Hamas ceasefire resolution, the United Nations Security Council met on Monday and called for a surge in humanitarian aid for Gaza.
The session, chaired by British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, focused on what the U.N. claims is a dire humanitarian crisis in the enclave.
Lammy, representing the United Kingdom in its role as UNSC president for the month of November, said there needs to be a “huge, huge rise in aid,” claiming that “famine is imminent” as the winter approaches.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a U.N.-linked agency, has made multiple claims of ongoing or imminent famine during the war, only to have those assertions and projections rejected by the committee that reviews its work.
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the UNSC that Hamas is to blame for another breakdown on ceasefire negotiations. She said the terror group “refused to engage on any of the numerous proposals put forward in the past eight weeks.”
Still, the Biden administration is pushing Israel to improve the flow of aid, a week after the State Department said Jerusalem was not impeding aid delivery and, therefore, was not in violation of U.S. law.
Israel must “urgently take additional steps to alleviate the catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza,” said Thomas-Greenfield, who added that Israel was working to implement 12 of the 15 steps the Biden administration laid out in an Oct. 13 letter to Israeli officials to address the situation in Gaza.
Those steps, Thomas-Greenfield said, include Israel allowing commercial trucks into Gaza, confronting a breakdown in civil order and implementing humanitarian pauses across high-population areas in the Strip to allow assistance to reach those in need.
The Washington Post reported on Monday that U.N. officials blame Israel for increasingly large-scale looting of humanitarian trucks by armed Gazan gangs, with allegations that Israel is turning the other way or actively helping the perpetrators. Israel denies the allegations, and such gangs have been looting trucks throughout the war.
On June 18, 47 aid trucks in a row were looted, with 41 looted on June 15. The U.N. took its humanitarian-aid information site offline for days shortly thereafter, claiming under questioning from JNS that it was for routine maintenance.
At Monday’s UNSC meeting, Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon sought to get ahead of a potential vote on the latest Gaza resolution, which calls for a ceasefire and release of the hostages, but does not condition the latter on the former.
Danon said that failure “means abandoning the 101 hostages to the hell of the terrorist monsters.”
Danon also critiqued the lack of classification of Hamas as a terror organization, calling those found to be employed by UNRWA—some of whom actively participated in the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre—”monsters on the U.N. payroll. ”
He also cited the massive amount of aid that Israel has cleared into Gaza, but which the U.N. fails to pick up. The number of trucks waiting for U.N. delivery reached around 600 in recent weeks, according to Israeli officials.
Several UNSC members, including China, Malta and Ecuador, lamented the lack of implementation of four Security Council resolutions already passed regarding the Israel-Hamas war.
