The Washington Post Todays Worldview by Ishaan Tharoor with SAmmy Westfall - Mach 24 ,2024 : U.S. allows U.N. ceasefire vote, but it's too late for many in Gaza

 

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By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall Email U.S. allows U.N. ceasefire vote, but it’s too late for many in Gaza Members of the United Nations Security Council meet on the day of a vote on a Gaza resolution that demands an immediate cease-fire in Gaza and the release of all hostages, at U.N. headquarters in New York City on Monday. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters) In a surprise move Monday, the United States abstained during a United Nations Security Council vote calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza. The American abstention allowed the resolution to pass 14-0, marking the first successful measure to proceed in the U.N.’s top decision-making body in more than five months of punishing Israeli air and ground offensives against militant group Hamas. It also underscored the widening rift between the Biden administration and Israel’s wartime government, led by right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Unlike a U.S.-backed resolution that failed to pass last week, this one — supported by Russia and China — did not link a call for a cease-fire with the release of hostages in Hamas captivity. Instead, it articulated them as separate, independent provisions to take place during the holy month of Ramadan. And it hoped that an immediate truce would lead to “a sustainable lasting ceasefire.” As it has for decades at the Security Council, the United States wielded its veto as diplomatic cover for Israel three times since Hamas’s Oct. 7 deadly attack on southern Israel sparked the full-scale war. That it did not exercise that prerogative Monday was a sign of the White House’s frustrations with Israeli actions during the war, which includes the devastation of much of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, attacks on hospitals and restricting the flow of international humanitarian aid into the enclave. Top U.S. officials have also spoken against Netanyahu’s plans to launch a ground offensive on Rafah, the southern Gaza town where more than a million displaced Palestinians are seeking shelter. News of the U.S. abstention triggered an angry reaction from Netanyahu and his allies. The embattled Israeli leader canceled the visit of a delegation of his advisers to Washington, slated this week. Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant was already in town. The U.S. decision to not veto the U.N. resolution “hurts both the war effort and the effort to release the hostages, because it gives Hamas hope that international pressure will allow them to accept a cease-fire without the release of our abductees,” noted Netanyahu’s office in a statement. U.S. officials batted away such claims, insisting their abstention did not signal a shift in course. “There is no reason for this to be seen as some sort of escalation,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters. “Nothing has changed about our policy. We still want to see a ceasefire. We still want to get all hostages out. And we still want to see more humanitarian assistance get in to the people of Gaza.” For many people in Gaza, the passage of the Security Council comes far too late. We are already halfway through Ramadan, a month-long holy period marked by pronounced grief and suffering in the Palestinian territories. The Israeli campaign in Gaza has killed more than 32,000 Palestinians, including many women and children, forced the overwhelming majority of people in Gaza to flee their homes and plunged more than half of Gaza’s population into a de facto famine. Small children are dying of malnutrition in what U.N. officials describe to be the broadest and most severe food crisis in the world. ADVERTISEMENT   U.S. officials briefing reporters cast Netanyahu’s reaction to their abstention as part of the prime minister’s posturing in his battles for political survival at home. Netanyahu has also delved into Washington’s partisan fissures, appearing virtually in a briefing with Republican senators while publicly squabbling with Democratic lawmakers and the Biden administration. But his domestic rivals similarly dismissed the impact of the resolution, which U.S. officials deemed “nonbinding.” “The State of Israel has a moral obligation to continue fighting until the hostages are returned and the threat of Hamas is removed and that is what we will do,” said Benny Gantz, an erstwhile Netanyahu foe who is a minister in the current wartime cabinet. “The Security Council’s decision has no operational significance for us.” On Monday, Israeli forces continued their week-long raid of al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City amid Israeli claims of a Hamas presence in the facility. Israel also said it would cease cooperation with UNRWA, the U.N. agency that distributes most aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and what U.N. Secretary General António Guterres describes as “the one ray of light for millions of people” subsisting of its support. Through all this, the United States has operated hand-in-glove with Israel, greenlighting a surge in arms transfers to reinforce the Israeli military’s relentless bombing campaigns. Veteran watchers of U.S.-Israel ties argue that Biden was too reluctant to wield the considerable leverage Washington has over the Jewish state, including withholding or conditioning military aid. That’s something even Republican administrations in the 20th century did, though recent U.S. governments have been far more keen to hold Israel close. “In recent years, the willingness to use the aid relationship for leverage has dramatically diminished,” Martin Indyk, a special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in the Obama administration, told the New York Times. “The relationship of dependence is there, just waiting to be used.” ADVERTISEMENT   Palestinian critics of the U.S. approach find little cause for optimism in the minor ruptures between Biden and Netanyahu. What efforts the White House claims it’s pursuing in restraining Israel and rushing aid to Gaza, wrote Tariq Kenney-Shawa of Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank, is “buying Israel time by distracting the public with lofty rhetoric about human rights and concerns for Palestinian civilians while doing everything in its power to ensure that the flow of weapons to Israel continues uninterrupted.” And analysts are growing more skeptical about what may follow a cessation in hostilities, whenever that may be and no matter U.N. resolutions. Beyond Netanyahu’s right-wing nationalist camp, there’s little appetite among the Israeli public for a discussion about a “two-state solution” or a political process to address Palestinian demands for equal rights or statehood. The costs for reconstruction in Gaza will be astronomical and it may take decades — the territory was still arguably recovering from the impact of a much smaller-scale Israeli campaign in 2014. Arab governments are floating vague, tenuous plans for the administration of Gaza, dependent on an Israeli political acquiescence that’s yet to materialize, on the neutralizing of Hamas that may yet be impossible, and on international funds that have yet to be raised. “Few believe that any kind of multinational peacekeeping force can be set up, or that the Gulf states will put up the vast sums necessary for reconstruction,” wrote the Guardian’s Jason Burke in a pessimistic piece on the lack of any clarity on Gaza’s postwar future. “The result is a slow slide to the default option, where the men who can muster the most coercive force take control.” 1,000 WORDS What would have happened to friends and family if Gaza was home?: Israel’s retaliatory war in Gaza has shattered the foundations of daily life. Five months of siege and strikes have destroyed much of the enclave and killed more than 32,000 people according to the Gaza Health Ministry, including 13,000 children. The numbers coming out of Gaza can be hard to comprehend. So let’s bring it down to a smaller scale. Imagine one person, the people closest to them, and everyone else they know by name. For a typical American, that would be a social network of about 472 people, researchers say.  This is what would happen to those people if they were in Gaza. After five months of war, seven people are dead. Almost no one has enough to eat. Only 20 people can scrape together a minimally adequate diet. Everyone else is hungry. Nearly one in three are at risk of starving to death.  Already about half of them cannot return to their homes after the war ends because their residences have been destroyed or severely damaged. READ THE FULL STORY:    Friends, family, acquaintances: What would have happened to them if Gaza was home? By Alyssa Fowers, Leslie Shapiro and Cate Brown   TALKING POINTS • Russian president Vladimir Putin said the deadly attack on a Moscow concert venue was carried out by radical Islamist actors, but he continued his earlier attempts to pin it on Ukraine. He cast doubt on whether a branch of the Islamic State had orchestrated it, saying there were many “unanswered questions,” including who ordered the attack and whether the United States was covering up Kyiv’s role in the assault. Ukraine strongly denied any involvement. • Bassirou Diomaye Faye, a tax collector and anti-establishment figure, won Senegal’s presidential election. Ruling party candidate Amadou Ba, who had the backing of outgoing President Macky Sall, conceded defeat. Sall last year ruled out running for a third term — which would have been widely viewed as unconstitutional — but then shocked many at home and abroad with his decision last month to indefinitely delay the election. He backed down after a constitutional court decision. • Our colleague Rebecca Tan profiles the renaissance of Indigenous food practices in Borneo, which is following a turning tide of Indigenous chefs globally finding new popularity: “Malaysian chefs who left for fine-dining restaurants abroad are returning home to set up shop in the state of Sarawak, venturing into the forests to forage for rare jungle produce such as the flowers of wild-growing durian trees, which bloom sometimes for less than a week,” Tan writes. These chefs and restaurateurs say they believe what Sarawakians want is not to restore Indigenous ways of life but to incorporate aspects of it in addressing contemporary challenges, from underinvestment in East Malaysia to the climate crisis. Mina Trang-Witte, 65, a home cook from the Kelabit tribe in Malaysia’s Sarawak state, has received a growing number of guests eager to learn what she knows about cooking with jungle produce. (Alvin Lau for The Washington Post) TOP OF THE POST Trump reels from competing court decisions as trials disrupt campaign By Isaac Arnsdorf   NBC facing on-air ‘insurrection’ over hiring of Ronna McDaniel By Jeremy Barr   Biden-Netanyahu rift grows, as Israel cancels delegation visit By Karen DeYoung, Yasmeen Abutaleb and Toluse Olorunnipa   VIEWPOINTS End a reporter’s year-long nightmare in Russia: Free Evan Gershkovich now By The Washington Post Editorial Board   A house is not a home By Iman Fayyad | The New York Times   What have fourteen years of conservative rule done to Britain? By Sam Knight | The New Yorker   ISIS'S REACH Dilovar Islomov, suspected of taking part in the attack on a suburban Moscow concert hall that killed 139 people, awaits his pretrial detention hearing on Monday. (Tatyana Makeyeva/AFP/Getty Images) A few months before being killed in a U.S. Special Forces raid, Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi released a final video message that symbolically passed the torch to far-flung followers in distant lands. His self-declared caliphate had been defeated, he acknowledged, and it was now up to the terrorist group’s regional chapters to carry out “revenge operations” around the world. “Our battle today is one of attrition and stretching the enemy,” Baghdadi said in the April 2019 video, released just after the fall of the Islamic State’s last stronghold in Syria. “They should know that jihad is ongoing until the Day of Judgment.” Friday’s bloodbath at a suburban Moscow concert hall, which killed at least 139, is but the latest reminder of how effectively Baghdadi’s brutal vision is being carried out. While his self-proclaimed Middle East “caliphate” is in ruins, a constellation of Islamic State regional affiliates is gaining strength in many parts of the globe, fueled by a mix of traditional grievances as well as new ones, including the war in Gaza, counterterrorism officials and experts say. Some Islamic State chapters or “provinces” in Africa now support large, well-equipped armies. Especially in West Africa and the Sahel region, they have repeatedly shown an ability to seize and hold territory and beat back government forces when they try to intervene, experts say. By contrast, Islamic State-Khorasan (ISIS-K) — the hyperviolent strain linked to the Moscow attack — appears to be increasingly specializing in external attacks. The group has dispatched terrorist operatives to Russia, Iran and Turkey while also plotting attacks against Western countries, including the United States, U.S. intelligence reports show. In two attacks just so far this year, in Iran and Russia, ISIS-K terrorists targeted large groups of civilians, killing nearly 250 people — assaults that were celebrated by the Islamic State’s propaganda organs as proof that the group is again on the ascent. The Islamic State quickly claimed responsibility for Friday’s rampage in Moscow. More attacks may be coming, counterterrorism officials warn. In a development that has been largely overshadowed by the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, ISIS-K and other regional groups have been expanding in size and ambition in recent years. In the past 12 months, the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for more than 1,100 attacks that killed or wounded nearly 5,000 people globally, according to a terrorism monitoring project launched by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank. An Islamic State group in Mali, in North Africa’s Sahel region, seized portions of two provinces last year. For ISIS-K and its parent organization, the targeting of Russia is deliberate. Islamic State propaganda has railed against Russian President Vladimir Putin since Moscow intervened in Syria’s civil war in 2015, sending bomber aircraft and helicopters to attack rebel groups opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Assad ultimately prevailed, mostly due to military assistance from Russia and Iran, Syria’s closest ally. Islamist groups since then have repeatedly condemned Putin as having the blood of Muslims on his hands. Many also remember Putin’s harsh campaign against Muslim Chechen separatists in Russia in the early 2000s. More recently, ISIS-K appears to have assumed the mantle as chief avenger. In September 2022, ISIS-K claimed responsibility for a bomb attack outside the Russian Embassy in Kabul. Last year, ISIS-K set up a Tajik-language propaganda network. The four men accused of carrying out Friday’s attack were identified in Russian media as Tajik migrant workers, at least three of whom had Russian registration papers. – Joby Warrick, Robyn Dixon and Souad Mekhennet Read more: Moscow rampage reveals ambition, deadly reach of ISIS successor groups AFTERWORD Haiti’s ‘deal with the Devil’: A malicious tale that emerges each crisis (Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images) By Matthew Hay Brown Read more