By Arthur Bassas / PassBlue
On May 10, 2024, the General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to enhance the status of Palestine in the UN, taking it one step closer to full membership, prompting the Palestinian envoy, Riyad Mansour, to call it a “really good day.” But that wasn’t the case for Gilad Erdan, Israel’s envoy. He used a transparent miniature shredder to destroy pages of a copy of the UN Charter during his speech at the Assembly rostrum before the vote. Neither the US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, nor the US secretary-general participated in the UN gathering, as they were traveling. (See Friday’s writeup.)
Monday, May 6
• Spokesperson’s briefing: Stéphane Dujarric said Israel‘s orders to Gazans in Rafah, the southernmost city in the enclave, to evacuate to Al Mawasi, in East Gaza, which is “already overcrowded and lacking safety and essential humanitarian services,” will “only worsen the civilians’ suffering.” More than three-quarters of Gaza is under evacuation orders, and Dujarric said the UN won’t take part in such “involuntary evacuations” or help set up displacement zones in southern Gaza. The organization, he added, is “not able to physically protect civilians in Gaza from military operations.”
Tuesday, May 7
• Spokesperson’s briefing: After Israel seized control of the Rafah and Karem Shalom crossings into Gaza on May 7, Guterres said at a media stakeout in the morning that closing the routes is “especially damaging to an already dire humanitarian situation [in Gaza].” The UN now can’t “access the nutrition supplies we need to treat more than 3,000 children with acute malnutrition” or the fuel for relief work. The crossings “must be re-opened immediately,” Dujarric said. [UPDATE, May 9: The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that as of May 8, about 80,000 people have been displaced from Rafah since Tuesday, when the Israeli military’s ground offensive began and turning aid crossings into militarized zones. Most of the displaced Gazans are seeking refuge in Khan Younis and Deir al Balah, even though these areas lack basic services like food and water. Additionally, no humanitarian aid or fuel to power UN operations in Gaza has been able to enter the Rafah crossing from Egypt in recent days.]
• Belize, Jamaica and St. Vincent and the Grenadines ended mother-to-child transmission of HIV, syphilis and HepB, the World Health Organization (WHO) said, marking “significant progress to strengthen maternal and child health programmes” and advancing the Caribbean‘s Sustainable Development Goals, including “ending AIDS as a public health threat.”
Wednesday, May 8
• Spokesperson’s briefing: Guterres said he is “deeply concerned” about the prosecution of a former International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) official, Claudia González, “for her activities relating to her work for that body.” He recalled the “important contribution of the [CICIG] and its personnel to the fight against corruption and impunity in Guatemala” and reiterated his call on Guatemalan authorities, “in accordance with the agreement between the UN and the Government establishing the Commission,” to “protect the personnel of [the] Commission from abuse, threats, reprisals or acts of intimidation because of their work for that very Commission.”
Thursday, May 9
• Spokesperson’s briefing: Asked by a reporter if the UN would answer calls from Human Rights Watch (HRW) to protect civilians in Sudan against war crimes, Farhan Haq, deputy spokesperson, said UN peacekeepers aren’t “present with those forces now” and “would need a mandate by the Security Council in order to be deployed.” A year into the civil war between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the human rights watchdog organization said on May 9 that the RSF committed “widespread war crimes” in carrying out an “ethnic cleansing campaign against the ethnic Massalit and other non-Arab populations” in West Darfur, killing “at least thousands” and leaving “hundreds of thousands as refugees.”
Friday, May 10
• In a major display of global support to Palestinians, the General Assembly voted overwhelmingly (143 yes; 9 nos; 25 abstentions) to grant Palestine, a UN nonmember observer state, elevated status in the UN system. (The US and Israel voted no.) The vote does not, however, award full membership, which would give Palestine the all-important ability to vote in the General Assembly. (Palestine will still not be allowed membership in another main pillar of the UN, the Economic and Social Council, either.)
Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian envoy to the UN, said after the vote: “Seventy-seven years after the General Assembly voted to partition Palestine, today it voted to correct this historic injustice by bringing Palestine one step closer to its rightful place among nations.”
But Israel’s envoy to the UN, Gilad Erdan, was so incensed by the mere act of the Assembly voting on the draft resolution that at the rostrum he used a transparent miniature shredder to destroy pages of the UN Charter. He also called “so many of you” — UN members who backed the resolution — “Jew-hating.”
The UN Charter’s Article 4 states that the “admission of any such state to membership in the United Nations will be effected by a decision of the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.” On April 18, the US vetoed an Algerian-led draft resolution proposing Palestine’s full-membership application. As a result, Palestine went to the 193-member General Assembly on May 10 to push its quest further. The Assembly’s final approval of a nonbinding resolution “recommends” that the Security Council “reconsider the matter favourably” in light of “this determination” and of the “advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice of 28 May 1948, and in strict conformity with Article 4 of the Charter.”
The annex to Resolution A/ES-10L.30/Rev1 of May 10 lists the privileges newly accorded to Palestine, including the right to be seated among member states in alphabetical order and to “full and effective participation” in UN conferences and meetings convened by the General Assembly or other organs of the UN.
The US has been saying in the last few weeks that Palestine should negotiate with Israel for a two-state solution to end the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict instead of striving for full membership in the UN. Bob Wood, a high-level US diplomat at the UN, has told reporters falsely that Palestine’s attempt will “circumvent the UN Charter.” On May 9, US Senator Bob Risch (R-Idaho), ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, proposed an amendment to block funding to entities giving more rights and privileges to the Palestinian Authority.
Although the US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, did not attend the Assembly vote, Bob Wood said of the US decision against the resolution: “Our vote does not reflect opposition to Palestinian statehood; we have been very clear that we support it and seek to advance it meaningfully. Instead, it is an acknowledgement that statehood will come only from a process that involves direct negotiations between the parties.” — DULCIE LEIMBACH
• Spokesperson’s briefing: On Thursday evening, Israeli residents set fire twice to the perimeter of the UNRWA headquarters in “occupied East Jerusalem,” Farhan Haq, deputy spokesperson, said. This occurred while UNRWA and other UN agencies’ staff were present in the compound. “While there were no casualties among our staff, the fire caused extensive damage to the outdoor areas,” Haq added, saying that a crowd accompanied by armed men were witnessed outside the compound chanting, “Burn down the United Nations.”
• Barrie Freeman of the US is the new deputy special representative for West Africa and the Sahel (Unowas).
Don’t Miss It
• Africa Is a Country’s report on the youngest president in Senegal‘s history seeming to embody “retrograde views about women.”
Most-read story this week: Haiti Can’t Survive Without the Kenyan-Led Global Security Force
The month: Which Woman Should Be the Next UN Secretary-General? Our Survey Results
From PassBlue this week:
• Is the UN Failing in Gaza?, by Dawn Clancy (reposted from Diplomacy Now)
• Summit of the Future: A Historical Pivot or Mere Footnote?, op-ed by Richard Ponzio
• Israeli Forces Hit the Main Fertility Clinic in Gaza. Legal Experts Ask, Is It Genocide?, Dawn Clancy
• Biden’s Gaza War Policy ‘Has Failed’: Why a US Diplomat Quit the State Dept., Q/A text and podcast episode with Hala Rharrit, by Jessica Le Masurier
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