The U.N. General Assembly voted almost unanimously on Wednesday to support two non-binding resolutions, one that demands that Israel end its war against the Hamas terror group in the Gaza Strip and the other allowing the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to continue to operate in the Jewish state.
UNRWA “has failed the people of Gaza and has been infiltrated by Hamas terrorists,” Jonathan Harounoff, international spokesman for Israel’s mission to the United Nations in New York, told JNS. “The ceasefire vote was another moral failure. The resolution failed to make an immediate and permanent ceasefire contingent on the release of all 100 hostages.”
Arsen Ostrovsky, a human rights lawyer and CEO of the International Legal Forum, told JNS that “countries which voted in favor of this resolution, or cowardly abstained, only abandoned the hostages and rewarded the murderers, rapists and abductors of Hamas.”
The truce resolution failed to mention Hamas, “the terrorist entity that perpetrated the Oct. 7 massacre and is the party responsible for the humanitarian situation that Gaza finds itself in today,” Ostrovsky said. It also didn’t condition the ceasefire demand on releasing the 96 hostages, whom Hamas has continued to hold in Gaza for 433 days since Oct. 7, according to Ostrovsky.
“Simply put, the United Nations has become the diplomatic arm of Hamas, where with each resolution, it is voting itself into utter irrelevance,” he told JNS.
The resolution, which calls for an “immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire, to be respected by all parties” and “reiterates its demand for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages,” drew 158 “aye” votes of the General Assembly’s 193 members.
Israel, the United States, Argentina, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Paraguay, Papua New Guinea, Tonga and Nauru were the nine who opposed, per an official U.N. tally, and Ukraine and Lithuania were among the 13 abstentions.
‘They did not act’
The UNRWA resolution, which demands that Israel “respect the mandate” of UNRWA and “act forthwith to enable its operations to proceed without impediment or restriction in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank,” received 159 votes in favor, nine opposed and 11 abstentions. (The United Nations, the Biden administration and some others refer to Judea and Samaria as the “West Bank.”)
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Hungary and the Czech Republic, which opposed the ceasefire resolution, weren’t among those to oppose the UNRWA one, and Micronesia and Palau opposed the UNRWA resolution without voting against the ceasefire one.
The Knesset voted overwhelmingly to ban UNRWA in October, following the exposure that some employees of the U.N. agency took part in Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack. (The United Nations, United States and other countries opposed the ban.)
Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, told the General Assembly on Wednesday that “to stand by UNRWA today is to stand by Hamas.”
“In my hand is a letter written in November 2003, 21 years ago, in which we warned about terrorists hiding, meeting and even training in UNRWA facilities,” the Israeli envoy said. He cited three other examples when he said the U.N. agency did not take action.
“These are only a few examples out of many over decades,” Danon said. “They did not act when we presented evidence. They did not act when Hamas turned schools into ammunition stores. They did not act when the lives of innocent Israelis were at stake.”
Robert Wood, deputy U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said “the messages we send to the world through these resolutions matter, and both of these resolutions have significant problems.”
“One rewards Hamas and downplays the need to release the hostages, and the other denigrates Israel without providing a path forward to increasing humanitarian assistance to Palestinian civilians,” the U.S. diplomat stated.
