UN General Assembly adopts resolution boosting standing of Palestinian mission
Overwhelming vote urges UNSC to reconsider statehood bid; move gives Palestinians spot in UNGA’s member’s hall, but not voting rights; Israel slams ‘prize for Hamas’
UNITED NATIONS — The United Nations General Assembly on Friday overwhelmingly backed a Palestinian bid to become a full UN member by recognizing it as qualified to join and recommending the UN Security Council “reconsider the matter favorably.”
The vote by the 193-member General Assembly was a global survey of support for the Palestinian bid to become a full UN member — a move that would effectively recognize a Palestinian state — after the United States vetoed it in the UN Security Council last month.
The assembly adopted a resolution with 143 votes in favor and nine against — including the US and Israel — while 25 countries abstained. It does not give the Palestinians full UN membership but simply recognizes them as qualified to join.
The General Assembly resolution “determines that the State of Palestine … should therefore be admitted to membership” and it “recommends that the Security Council reconsider the matter favorably.”
Foreign Minister Israel Katz labelled the decision a “prize for Hamas,” in a statement released by his office.
“The absurd decision taken today at the UN General Assembly highlights the structural bias of the UN and the reasons why, under the leadership of UN Secretary-General [Antonio] Guterres, it has turned itself into an irrelevant institution,” Katz said.
The Palestinian push for full UN membership comes seven months into a war between Israel and the Hamas terror group in the Gaza Strip, and as Israel is expanding settlements in the West Bank, which the UN and most of the international community considers to be illegal.
An application to become a full UN member first needs to be approved by the 15-member Security Council and then the General Assembly. If the measure is again voted on by the council it is likely to face the same fate: a US veto.
The General Assembly resolution adopted on Friday does give the Palestinians some additional rights and privileges from September 2024 — like a seat among the UN members in the assembly hall — but they will not be granted a vote in the body.
The Palestinians are currently a non-member observer state, a de facto recognition of statehood that was granted by the UN General Assembly in 2012.
“We want peace, we want freedom,” Palestinian UN Ambassador Riyad Mansour told the assembly before the vote. “A yes vote is a vote for Palestinian existence, it is not against any state….It is an investment in peace.”
“Voting yes is the right thing to do,” he said in remarks that drew applause.
Under the founding UN Charter, membership is open to “peace-loving states” that accept the obligations in that document and are able and willing to carry them out.
Israel’s UN Ambassador Gilad slammed the proceedings.
“As long as so many of you are ‘Jew-hating,’ you don’t really care that the Palestinians are not ‘peace-loving’,” Erdan, who spoke after Mansour, told his fellow diplomats. He accused the assembly of shredding the UN Charter — as he used a small shredder to destroy a copy of the Charter while at the lectern.
“Shame on you,” Erdan said.
Today, I demonstrated to the General Assembly what they are doing to the UN Charter by ignoring it and shredded it on the stage. I told the ambassadors that today will go down in infamy and I want the world to remember when they shredded the UN Charter to advance a Nazi regime… pic.twitter.com/NulOtHsAdK
— Ambassador Gilad Erdan גלעד ארדן (@giladerdan1) May 10, 2024
Erdan also held up a picture of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, with the caption “President Sinwar, the terror state of Hamas, sponsored by the UN,” with the Israeli envoy telling the plenum that the terror leader was indebted to the UN for its assistance to the group.
US Deputy Ambassador to the UN Robert Wood told the General Assembly after the vote that unilateral measures at the UN and on the ground will not advance a two-state solution.
“Our vote does not reflect opposition to Palestinian statehood; we have been very clear that we support it and seek to advance it meaningfully. Instead, it is an acknowledgment that statehood will only come from a process that involves direct negotiations between the parties,” he said.
Before the vote the US mission said in a statement that the resolution would not lead to practical solutions to solve issues facing the Palestinians.
“Additionally, the draft resolution does not alter the status of the Palestinians as a ‘non-member state observer mission.’ Even if the resolution were adopted, the text explicitly outlines that the Palestinian non-member-state observer mission would not gain the right to vote in the General Assembly. It also would not gain the right to put forward candidates in UN organs or to be elected as a member of the Security Council,” the statement read.
The United Nations has long endorsed a vision of two states living side by side within secure and recognized borders. Palestinians want a state in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip — all territory captured by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War with neighboring Arab states.
They are represented at the UN by the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The Palestinian Authority, created under the Oslo Accords signed by the PLO and Israel, has limited self-rule over parts of the West Bank. Hamas ousted the PA from power in Gaza in a bloody takeover in 2007 and has a charter calling for Israel’s destruction.
War erupted when Hamas-led terrorists launched the October 7 massacre on southern communities, murdering 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 252 hostages to Gaza, sparking the ongoing war in Gaza.
According to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, at least 34,943 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s military offensive in Gaza since October 7. The figures have not been independently verified and include at least 15,000 Hamas gunmen Israel says it has killed in battle. Israel also says it killed some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.
A total of 271 IDF soldiers have been killed in the army’s Gaza ground operation.
Erdan said on Monday that, if the General Assembly adopted the resolution, he expected Washington to cut funding to the UN and its institutions.
Under US law, Washington cannot fund any UN organization that grants full membership to any group that does not have the “internationally recognized attributes” of statehood. The United States cut funding in 2011 for the UN cultural agency, UNESCO, after the Palestinians joined as a full member.
On Thursday, 25 Republican US senators — more than half of the party’s members in the chamber — introduced a bill to tighten those restrictions and cut off funding to any entity giving rights and privileges to the Palestinians. The bill is unlikely to pass the Senate, which is controlled by President Joe Biden’s Democrats.
