Security Council ceasefire resolution brings ‘little hope’ to Gaza as Israeli genocide rages on

It has been nearly a week since the UN Security Council’s ceasefire resolution, but little has changed in Gaza. When the resolution first passed with a U.S. abstention, it was met with Israeli protests and gave rise to the perception that, this time, Israel would be beholden to the UN. That turned out to be a fantasy, provoking discussion on whether the UN system has any real influence over what happens on the ground.

For one thing, airstrikes continued in Rafah, and the assault on al-Shifa hospital has entered its twelfth day. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suspended the Israeli delegation that was supposed to meet with Biden in Washington before agreeing to reschedule the visit. The White House, for its part, said that the Biden administration hadn’t changed its position towards Israel’s war and that the resolution was “non-binding and has no impact on Israel’s capacity to go after Hamas.”

Throughout decades, the U.S. has used its Security Council veto 46 times to block resolutions related to Israel — roughly half of its total number of vetoes. The first time the U.S. used its veto on behalf of Israel was in 1972 to stop a resolution that called for ending an Israeli offensive in southern Lebanon.

Three of these 46 U.S. vetoes have been used in the past few months alone to block resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. The U.S. position towards the resolution, especially its claim that it is non-binding, raises questions about the point of the UN Security Council in the first place.

In Gaza, the resolution was received “with little hope,” Huda Amer, a Palestinian journalist based in Gaza City in the northern part of the Strip, told Mondoweiss.

‘We believe reality, not the security council’

“The reality is much harder than described, to a point that people here have lost interest in international resolutions,” said Amer. “Hunger, the lack of goods, and skyrocketing prices all made people lose the taste for life — to the point that the majority in Gaza City don’t listen to the news anymore.”

“On the one hand, we hear that the Security Council issued a resolution. On the other hand, we continue to hear the bombings and the explosions of Israeli missiles. We hear the shooting in the street. We believe the reality around us, not the Security Council.”

This skepticism towards the resolution’s effectiveness is fueled by the claims voiced from within the UN itself in the immediate aftermath of the resolution’s passing — that it was non-binding — before U.S. spokespersons Mathew Miller and John Kirby made statements to that same effect. 

For instance, the representative of South Korea questioned the legal validity of the resolution at the Security Council itself. His argument was based on the wording of the resolution, which states that the council “calls for” a ceasefire, and not that it “decides” to implement a ceasefire.

Political will is the real debate

“The logic of a Security Council resolution is that there is a necessity for intervention because the rules of conflict are being broken,” Tahseen Alian, senior international law expert at Al-Haq, a leading Palestinian human rights group, explained to Mondoweiss.

“In the case of Palestine, we are precisely talking about the 4th Geneva Convention on the cases of occupation,” said Alian. “The Geneva Convention states explicitly that all contracting parties commit to enforcing the implementations of its rules, and that is done through the Security Council,” he pointed out.

In other words, the UN Security Council obligates its participants to enforce its resolutions.

“Even more, the UN charter itself states that all Security Council resolutions are binding, regardless of the wording,” Alian argued. “A [UNSC] resolution is, by definition, a decision, and if it weren’t meant to be binding, the Security Council wouldn’t have had to intervene.”

From a legal point of view, Alian stressed that all Security Council resolutions are binding. “But this has little to do with its applicability,” Alian clarified. “Because the resolution does not include any mentioned mechanisms for its application, like the forming of a force or a committee as in previous cases of conflict.” 

“The implementation and its mechanisms are subject to political will, and therefore to political interests, and that should be the center of the debate,” he noted.

‘The UN resolution is what we do with it’

Aside from the internal workings of the international legal system and its political limitations, the resolution might have another unforeseen impact. According to Jamal Jumaa, the coordinator of the Palestinian grassroots campaign, Stop The Wall, the UN resolution “can be a catalyst for a new phase of Palestine activism.”

“The BDS movement itself was launched on the first anniversary of the International Court of Justice’s ruling that the Israeli apartheid wall was illegal and had to be dismantled,” explained Jumaa.

“Nobody expected the Israeli occupation to comply with the court’s ruling, but it provided a new legal basis for a campaign that grew into a global movement,” he pointed out.

“The recent ICJ ruling that the occupation state is plausibly committing genocide sets new terms for Palestine solidarity activism, especially that the occupation is not complying with the measures that were ordered,” Jumaa indicated. “The same applies to this new UN resolution. In other words, the resolution’s usefulness outside of the UN system depends on us, citizens who stand with Palestine, and what we do with it.”