The UN human rights council has adopted a resolution calling for Israel to be held accountable for possible war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the Gaza Strip.
The resolution came as Israel finally succumbed to unprecedented US pressure and opened new food corridors into Gaza.
The vote by the UNHRC, a body that Israel reviles, marks another moment in the slow global ostracisation of Israel over its war in Gaza, which has so far killed an estimated 33,000 people. Twenty-eight countries voted in favour, 13 abstained and six voted against the resolution, including the US and Germany.
The resolution emphasised “the need to ensure accountability for all violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law in order to end impunity”. It also expressed “grave concern at reports of serious human rights violations and grave breaches of international humanitarian law, including of possible war crimes and crimes against humanity in the occupied Palestinian territory”.
Meirav Eilon Shahar, Israel’s permanent representative to the UN in Geneva, accused the council of having “long abandoned the Israeli people and long defended Hamas”.
The resolution follows what appears to have been a decisive phone call between Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday in which Biden warned US policy towards Gaza would change if Israel continued to defy calls to alter its approach to the supply of aid.
Israel said within hours of the phone call that it had approved the reopening of the Erez crossing into northern Gaza and the temporary use of Ashdod port in southern Israel, two longstanding demands of aid agencies and western powers. Israel also agreed to allow an increase in Jordanian aid through the Kerem Shalom crossing point.
It was a rare show of naked US power over Israel that many had been urging Biden to make for months. A
The EU head of foreign affairs, Josep Borrell, said that opening up new corridors would still not be enough to prevent starvation in Gaza.
In a further shift, Biden urged Netanyahu to show a more flexible stance in talks over the release of the hostages taken by Hamas and of Palestinian political prisoners. For the first time, Biden said Israel should accept an immediate ceasefire.
William Burns, the director of the CIA, is expected to travel to Cairo this weekend to meet his Egyptian and Israeli counterparts and the Qatari prime minister to try to reach a breakthrough in the talks, which have been deadlocked with both sides accusing the other of intransigence.
Hamas has been demanding the return of displaced residents of northern Gaza to their homes, but the key stumbling block is Hamas’s demand for a total ceasefire, as opposed to an interim truce, as a precondition of the deal. The two sides in successive rounds of talks have found it impossible to bridge the chasm.
As part of the apparent change of tone, Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, said the US would be looking at specific metrics to decide if Israel was heeding its demands. He said it would be examining the number of trucks entering Gaza and seeking accountability for the Israeli strike on the World Central Kitchen aid convoy that killed seven aid workers earlier this week.
On Friday, Israel said an inquiry had found that a series of “grave errors” by officers were to blame for the attack and that two middle-ranking officers had been dismissed and a general reprimanded.
Indicators that the threat of famine was receding would be another US test, Blinken said. He welcomed the first steps taken by Israel but insisted Israel would be tested on the results of its actions.
The convoy attack appears to have been the final straw for the Biden administration, which had been under intense diplomatic pressure, as well as domestic political stress, to take a tougher line.
There was growing evidence that Israel was haemorrhaging support inside the US, particularly among Democratic voters.
Biden’s rival for the presidency, Donald Trump, said on Thursday that Israel was “losing the PR war” in Gaza because of the flood of distressing images coming out of the territory. In an interview with the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Thursday, Trump criticised Israel for releasing the “most heinous” and “most horrible” videos of buildings being destroyed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza.
“I’m not sure that I’m loving the way they’re doing it, because you’ve got to have victory. You have to have a victory, and it’s taking a long time,” he said.
The decision to open new aid routes was taken by Israel’s security cabinet within hours of the Biden phone call, and the normal objections from the rightwingers inside Netanyahu’s cabinet were swept aside.
The national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was not present at the vote held at the beginning of the session, said: “They voted in the cabinet before I arrived even though they knew I was in a security meeting.
“Since when do we vote at the beginning of the session? Never. We always vote at the end. You knew I was delayed in a security meeting. You knew I would object, so you wanted to rush the vote at the beginning of the session. What kind of behaviour is this? Is this how critical decisions are made in the cabinet?”
John Kirby, the US national security spokesperson, was reluctant to detail any specific threats made to Israel by Biden in the 30-minute phone call other than to say the US approach to Gaza would change.
He seemed unwilling to accept that the US was on the brink of suspending arms supplies to Israel, arguing that most of the arms being sent were needed by Israel to protect itself from threats by Iran rather than to be used against Hamas hideouts in Gaza.
But Biden must have made clear that the level of military support was on the agenda. Rishi Sunak had delivered a similar message from the UK early this week, but it is the US on which Israel depends for its military survival. Israel was also losing support from states with which it had struck normalisation deals, such as the United Arab Emirates.
Netanyahu faces a deep dilemma in that he has told the Israeli public and assured rightwingers in his cabinet that his objective is total victory, and this requires rooting out the final Hamas battalions sheltering in underground tunnels in Rafah, the city to which more than 1 million displaced Palestinian refugees have fled.
The US is not willing to countenance an attack on Rafah, apparently leaving Netanyahu without a clear path to victory.
