(LifeSiteNews) — Following a fourth U.S. veto in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on November 20, the overwhelming majority of nations in the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) voted last Wednesday to demand an “immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire” in Gaza, to reject “any effort to starve Palestinians,” and to back the region’s U.N. relief agency that the Israeli parliament has voted to ban.
In the first of two resolutions, the world body with 193 member nations voted 158 to 9 with 13 abstentions to support the immediate ceasefire measure, and 159 to 9 with 11 abstentions in support of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).
While Security Council resolutions are legally binding, those passed in the General Assembly are not, though they do provide an indication of world opinion and can serve to leverage international political pressure. No national delegations have veto power in the UNGA.
READ: ‘No justification’: Palestinian UN envoy delivers stirring rebuke following US ceasefire veto
In addition to its demand for an immediate ceasefire, Wednesday’s UNGA resolution further reiterated “its demand for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages.”
While militants in Gaza are reportedly holding approximately 100 Israeli hostages, Christian leaders in the Holy Land have often lamented the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners (i.e. “hostages”) that Israel has arrested and maintained for decades, often holding them without charges or trial. These include children who are likewise subject to significant abuse. Today, such Palestinian hostages being held by Israel number around 9,000.
READ: How do Christians in the Holy Land understand the Israeli occupation of Palestine?
The tiny minority of nations who voted with Israel and the United States against the measure included Czechia, Hungary, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Tonga and Argentina whose formerly Catholic president Javier Milei rejected Jesus Christ and converted to Judaism soon after winning election last year.
Two previous ceasefire resolutions (Oct. 27, 2023, and Dec. 12, 2023), which employed weaker language, were passed with overwhelming majorities as well, 121-14 and 153-10, respectively.
Having previously abstained in each prior resolution, Wednesday’s vote marked the first time Germany and Italy affirmed their support for a ceasefire casting their ballot in favor of the measure. This shift left the United States as the only member of the “Group of 7” (G7) major industrialized nations still opposed to ending what Amnesty International, and many others, have judged to be a genocide.
READ: Genocide ‘only reasonable conclusion’ to Israel’s crimes in Gaza: Amnesty International
The resolution further demands “immediate access by the civilian population in the Gaza Strip to basic services and humanitarian assistance indispensable to its survival, while rejecting any effort to starve Palestinians.” This includes “the facilitation of full, rapid, safe and unhindered entry of humanitarian assistance, at scale and under the coordination of the United Nations.”
Conservative estimate of total Palestinian deaths includes 224,375 of which 98,725 are children
In their recent report, Amnesty International concluded that Israel is deliberately imposing conditions upon the 2.3 million people of Gaza aimed at creating “a deadly mixture of malnutrition, hunger and diseases,” exposing the Palestinian people “to a slow, calculated death.”
These conditions include Israel’s total siege on Gaza cutting-off food, water, electricity and fuel while persistently refusing to facilitate any meaningful humanitarian aid to be accessed by their Palestinian victims, and proactively obstructing the import of any such life-saving goods.
These actions combined with the mass displacement of the population, the extensive damage to Gaza’s homes, hospitals, water and sanitation facilities, and agricultural lands, have compounded catastrophic levels of hunger, and the rapid spread of disease.
Taking such factors into consideration, a July study in the Lancet provided a rationale for estimating total deaths, including indirect fatalities due to causes like starvation, lack of medicine or proper medical care. Multiplying the current reported number of direct deaths, 44,875, by five, it is possible to reach a conservative estimate of over 224,375 total deaths in Gaza in the 14 months since October 7, 2023. And with a recent U.N. Human Rights Office report identifying fatalities in Gaza comprising of approximately 44 percent children, it is reasonable to estimate 98,725 total deaths of children.
By way of comparison, the number of United States military personnel (not civilians) killed over the 20-year period of the Vietnam War (1955-1975) is logged at 58,281.
UN backs critical relief organization targeted for closure by Israeli officials
The second resolution affirmed the mandate of UNRWA which was established by the General Assembly in 1949 and currently serves as “the backbone of all humanitarian response in Gaza.” The measure further states that “no organization can replace or substitute the Agency’s capacity and mandate to serve Palestine refugees and civilians in urgent need of life-saving humanitarian assistance.”
The UNRWA and its critical mission has been the target of vicious calumnies by Israeli officials and their American Zionist backers. Not only have the likes of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made political accusations that the organization is “totally infiltrated by Hamas,” but Israeli forces have literally attacked and killed over 250 of the agency’s personnel.
READ: Netanyahu utilizes ‘big lie’ tactic in address to US Congress, receives 58 standing ovations
Yet, in April, an independent report commissioned by the United Nations found that Israel had supplied “no evidence” to back its claims. Nevertheless, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, one of many high-level Jewish Zionist appointments to the Biden White House, maintained at the time that the charge was “very, very credible.”
As a result, the U.S. backing for Israel’s grave, unsupported accusations, led to the suspension of funding for UNRWA, which is widely acknowledged to be the main provider of food, water, and medical supplies to Palestinians in Gaza. According to Israeli media, this was the aim of an Israeli “campaign” to defund the only agency capable of preventing famine in Gaza.
And thus, in late October, Israel’s parliament followed-up by passing two laws essentially banning this most critically needed humanitarian organization in the Strip.
In response, the UNGA resolution affirmed the national governments of the vast majority of the world, “Deplores the legislation adopted by the Israeli Knesset on 28 October 2024, and calls upon the Israeli Government to abide by its international obligations, respect the privileges and immunities of the Agency and uphold its responsibility to allow and facilitate full, rapid, safe and unhindered humanitarian assistance in all its forms into and throughout the entire Gaza Strip, including the provision of sorely needed basic services to the civilian population.”
Continued Israeli genocidal attacks on civilians continue at rapid pace with impunity
In spite of such resolutions passing, Israel continues its unprecedented genocidal terrorist attacks against the civilians of Gaza with impunity, including the Sunday bombing of a UNRWA-run school which had been turned into a shelter for displaced families. This strike, which happened in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, killed at least 20 civilians, including children.
The same day in the north, Israeli militants stormed a school sheltering displaced Palestinian families killing at least 15 people, including two journalists, and an entire family of four, with two children, after the room where they were sheltering was struck by Israeli artillery fire.
Another journalist and five civil defense workers were also killed in a separate attack by the Israeli army in central Gaza’s Nuseirat camp on Sunday.
Despite such repeated resolutions, U.N. special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, criticized the lack of concrete responses taken by U.N. member nations to hold Israel accountable during a panel at the United Nations office in Geneva on Wednesday.
Francesca Albanese, at a UN press conference, says that it’s impunity which has allowed the israelis to commit their criminal genocide on Gaza pic.twitter.com/FY2AWaZjQR
— Sarah Wilkinson (@swilkinsonbc) December 12, 2024
“How did we get here?” she asked. “Impunity. This is the key word to understand the barbaric scale that the Israeli genocide has taken. Since its birth, Israel has never been held to the same standard as most of the members of the international community. Israel has defied countless General Assembly, Security Council resolutions, International Court of Justice advisory opinions, and has targeted U.N. personnel and facilities … without ever bearing consequences.”
“There are never sanctions on Israel. Judicial processes are either ignored or circumvented, and trade continues, and diplomatic ties remain intact,” the Italian international attorney rebuked. “Member states seem to be paralyzed, awestruck, many of them still normalizing the occupation, the repression of the Palestinian people, depicting their resistance in the territory that Israel occupies as ‘terrorism,’ or at best as a tantrum of an unruly population incapable of abiding in silence to what the international community has decided as its fate.”
“As a human rights expert and as a human being, I have to stand against this,” Albanese concluded.
The continued assaults of the Israeli army upon the besieged Gaza Strip are the subject of a genocide case initiated by South Africa in the International Court of Justice. Additionally, the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant along with a Hamas leader for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
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