BarcelonaFor the first time since he started the war in the Gaza Strip, the President of the United States, Joe Biden, has publicly scolded the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, and abandoned his full alignment with the Israeli positions. In a private event in Washington, Biden warned Israel that it is “starting to lose support” internationally after more than two months of war that has left 18,000 dead in the Gaza Strip. At the same time, he has said that Netanyahu should change his coalition government with the extreme right, to distance himself from partners who oppose the two-state solution.
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Biden, more specifically, has criticized that Netanyahu leads “the most conservative government in the history of Israel” and has considered that this coalition with the extreme right should change in order to reach a long-term solution with the Palestinians.
Netanyahu himself had acknowledged a few hours earlier, and also for the first time, that there were differences of position between Israel and the United States. In particular, he explained that they differ in the way they see what needs to be done after the war, since Israel still flatly refuses that Gaza be governed by the Palestinian National Authority, the proposal that Washington likes best and that the Union Europe has already blessed.
The alliance between the two powers, therefore, begins to crack. And this is, above all, bad news for Tel-Aviv: Washington is its great ally, the one who offers it the most economic and military aid and who, politically, can guarantee it the most support and influence when things go wrong. Without the White House, Netanyahu would be unprotected. The killings of civilians in the Strip, victims of Israeli bombs, have had something to do with it: Biden has lost popularity ratings for having given “full support” to Israel. Many Americans see their government as complicit in the images of death and horror coming from the Palestinian enclave.
The paper from Washington to the UN
That Israel would be much weaker without the shelter of the United States was demonstrated again last Saturday. The American government was the only one that voted against a ceasefire in the UN Security Council session. They were left alone defending the Israeli postulates in front of the other members of the Council: all the rest voted in favor except the United Kingdom, which abstained.
This Tuesday, however, the UN General Assembly did manage to approve, despite Washington’s opposition, a non-binding resolution calling for “an immediate humanitarian ceasefire” in Gaza. The text, presented by twenty countries and the Palestinian National Authority, went ahead with 153 votes in favor, 10 against and 25 abstentions. Among those who have rejected the proposal, there are, in addition to Israel and the USA, two European countries, Austria and the Czech Republic, seconded by others from Latin America and Oceania and one from Africa (Liberia).
The resolution also calls on both sides to comply with international law and respect for the protection of civilians, as well as demanding the “immediate and unconditional release of all hostages.”
It is, therefore, the second resolution that the assembly ratifies to call for a cease-fire in Gaza. The previous one, which called for an “immediate, lasting and sustained humanitarian truce”, was approved on October 26 with 120 votes in favor, 14 against and 45 abstentions.
The same UN high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, admitted this Tuesday that the situation in the Gaza Strip is “a failure in the application of international law” and demanded a return “to the legal foundations that the international community adopted after the Second World War”.
Only 11 hospitals in the entire Strip
Also this Tuesday, the WHO reported that in the Gaza Strip, which continues to be under intense Israeli bombardment – especially in the south – there are only 11 “partially operational” hospitals left out of the 36 that were operating before the conflict. Of these centers that are still half functioning, there is one in the north and 10 in the south. The population is concentrated in the southern part of the Strip by order of Israel, which forced them to evacuate the north, but now fighting and bombings are raging in the south. This Tuesday they were particularly bloody in Rafah.
The WHO has also denounced yet another breach of international law by Israel: accusing it of detaining, harassing and threatening Palestinian health personnel who were carrying out an emergency health evacuation. A Palestinian member of the International Red Crescent had reported that Israeli soldiers forced him to kneel at gunpoint, beat him, stripped him and made him walk south barefoot, naked and with his hands tied on the back.
Shortly before the start of the UN session in New York, Canada, Australia and New Zealand issued a joint statement on Tuesday calling for a sustained ceasefire in Gaza. “We are alarmed by the shrinking of safe spaces for civilians in Gaza. The price of defeating Hamas cannot be the continued suffering of all Palestinian civilians,” the three prime ministers said in their joint statement. They add that the cessation of hostilities cannot be unilateral and that Hamas must release all abductees and stop using civilians as human shields.
2023-12-12 21:08:26
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