United Nations Security Council diplomats will hold an emergency session to discuss escalating violence in Israel and Gaza, the top U.S. diplomat in New York announced amid reports that Israeli ground forces had joined anti-Hamas operations.
“The U.S. will continue to actively engage in diplomacy at the highest levels to try to de-escalate tensions,” Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield tweeted Thursday evening.
President Joe Biden’s administration reportedly had been objecting to the meeting this week, while U.S. officials lobbied for an end to the fighting and the president credited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with avoiding an “overreaction” to the rocket attacks from terror groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad. That posture drew sharp criticism from the left flank of the congressional Democrats, while China and Russia also pushed for additional pressure in the U.N.
“We are currently blocking the United Nations Security Council from calling [for a] ceasefire,” Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democratic member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said on the House floor late Thursday afternoon. “And to this day, we, as members of Congress, have not had yet a hearing or a briefing on this conflict or gotten answers on whether our weaponry or money is being used to commit human rights abuses.”
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Secretary of State Antony Blinken said earlier Thursday that he was expecting a Security Council meeting to take place next week.
“I think we’re looking at early next week,” he told reporters at the State Department. “This, I hope, will give some time for the diplomacy to have some effect and to see if, indeed, we get a real de-escalation and can then pursue this at the United Nations in that context.”
That timeline progressed more quickly than he forecast, a shift that coincided with an Israel Defense Forces announcement that “air and ground troops are currently attacking in the Gaza Strip.” Subsequent reports suggest that the ground personnel are striking from within Israeli territory without yet crossing into Gaza.
“It will take time, but with great decisiveness, both defensively and offensively, we will achieve our goal — to restore quiet to the state of Israel,” Netanyahu said earlier Thursday.
Omar has drawn criticism in the past for making comments about Israeli influence in the United States that prominent fellow Democrats deemed antisemitic, particularly her suggestion in 2019 that other lawmakers “push for allegiance to a foreign country.” Yet, several congressional Democrats have attributed the current crisis to Israel’s attempt to evict several Palestinian families from an east Jerusalem neighborhood.
“The precipitating flashpoint was, in my mind, the unjustifiable attempted eviction of Palestinian families from their homes in east Jerusalem,” Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, told the Middle East Institute Thursday morning. “The Netanyahu government’s campaign to make practically impossible a viable future Palestinian state has [created] a sense of hopelessness for the future, in the West Bank and Gaza. It shouldn’t surprise anybody that, at some point, the pot was going to boil over.”
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Israeli officials, for their part, have argued that Hamas and Islamic Jihad instigated the crisis and escalated the violence with unprecedented waves of rocket barrages as part of an intra-Palestinian power struggle that reached a boiling point after Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas canceled parliamentary elections that his party was expected to lose.
