Calls for Israel to allow more aid into Gaza and to accept a future Palestinian state as necessary for its own security are expected to dominate a meeting of the UN security council in New York on Tuesday.
Before the meeting, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, met his Iranian counterpart, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, in New York to urge Israel to agree to a ceasefire and warn the US not to fuel the spread of the conflict.
The meeting comes against a backdrop of a second US-UK coordinated raid against Houthi strongholds in Yemen, as well as intensified fighting in southern Gaza.
Amir-Abdollahian said he had told the UK foreign secretary, David Cameron, in Davos last week that “your action in escalating tension in the Red Sea and against Yemen is a strategic mistake”.
Turkey’s Hakan Fidan and France’s Stéphane Séjourné are among the foreign ministers who have flown to New York for the security council debate. Attenders are likely to hear extended criticism that Israel has not acted on a resolution passed by the council before Christmas demanding a big increase in aid deliveries to Gaza.
In a flavour of the concern about aid flows into Gaza, the UK Foreign Office briefed that Tariq Ahmad, the Middle East minister, would tell the security council that the humanitarian crisis was “worsening daily, suffering is unacceptable, and our priority must be to alleviate it”. He will add that “an immediate pause is now necessary to get life-saving aid in and hostages out”.
US officials continue to defend Israel’s right to take military action, despite the public falling out between Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu last week over Netanyahu’s open rejection of a two-state solution as a way out of the crisis.
Among US Democrats, support for Netanyahu is eroding. Key Democratic senators such as Chris Van Hollen, a member of the Senate foreign affairs committee, have joined calls for an immediate ceasefire. Van Hollen is now one of 20 Democratic senators calling for aid to Israel to be made conditional on the application of international humanitarian law.
Van Hollen said: “As many families of those kidnapped have stated, PM Netanyahu has deprioritised the return of their loved ones, including Americans, to prolong the war and postpone his own political reckoning, even as we face the rising risk of a regional war that sucks in the US.”
He claimed Netanyahu was “now publicly stiff-arming President Biden and his postwar plan for a two-state solution”.
In Brussels, the EU foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, presented to EU foreign ministers a 12-point plan leading to a two-state solution. He challenged Israel: “Which are the other solutions they have in mind? To make all the Palestinians leave? To kill … them?”
Borrell said: “I think more deaths, more destruction, more hardship for the Gaza people, for the Palestinian people, will not help to defeat Hamas or its ideology. It will not bring more security to Israel.”
He said the number of aid trucks reaching Gaza – averaging 100 a day – was not acceptable. On Monday the number was 66.
Borrell’s plan did not receive immediate unanimous support but Annalena Baerbock, the foreign minister of Germany, one of Israel’s staunchest allies, said a two-state solution was “the only solution and all those who don’t want to know anything about it have not yet put forward any other alternative”.
She called for humanitarian breaks, not a ceasefire, and for the liberation of the hostages and more humanitarian aid in Gaza.
Biden’s aides, long suspicious of Netanyahu, are now having to gauge whether the Israeli prime minister is calculating that his own chances of political survival are strengthened by a public confrontation with the US president.
The strategy has risks for Netanyahu. An Israeli poll found that 53% of Israelis believe that what drives Netanyahu’s decision-making during the war against Hamas is what personally benefits him, while only 33% believe Netanyahu’s actions are for the good of the country.
