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The UN Security Council has passed a resolution calling for “urgent and extended humanitarian pauses and corridors throughout the Gaza Strip” to allow for aid delivery and medical evacuations, after four failed attempts to respond to the Israel-Hamas war.

The resolution, introduced by Malta on Wednesday, also called for “corridors throughout the Gaza Strip for a sufficient number of days” to safeguard civilians, particularly children, ambassador Vanessa Frazier told the Council.

It additionally asked for the unconditional release of captives held in Gaza.

It was adopted by 12 votes in favour, zero against and three abstentions – Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom.

“It is binding international law, but we know that there are many Security Council resolutions that are binding international law that Israel does not comply with. But I think it will add added pressure on Israel, particularly as the US allowed this resolution to go through – it could’ve used its veto,” said Al Jazeera’s diplomatic editor James Bays.

“Out of the previous four resolutions that didn’t go through, probably the one nearest to going through was the one on October 18, that’s when all the countries either voted for, or abstained, and the only country that voted against was the United States – it wielded its veto,” Bays said.

“We’ve had 29 days since that date, and we know all the death toll figures are undercounted, but in that time there have been 7,600 more deaths and 3,653 of those deaths were children. What was called for then was a resolution calling for humanitarian pauses,” he added.

The resolution made no mention of a ceasefire. It also didn’t refer to Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, during which Israeli authorities say about 1,200 people were killed and some 240 were taken captive.

It also omitted Israel’s retaliatory air strikes and ground offensive in Gaza, which Ministry of Health officials say have killed more than 11,000 Palestinians, two-thirds of them women and children.

The resolution listed fuel as among the items that must be allowed to be delivered “unhindered”. And it required that the UN chief give a report on its implementation at the next meeting of the Security Council concerning the Middle East.

Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, was quick to respond that the resolution would have “no meaning”, calling it “disconnected from reality”.

He maintained that Israeli is acting in accordance with international law in Gaza, a claim that has been rejected by several experts on the subject.

The @UN Security Council’s resolution is disconnected from reality and is meaningless. Regardless of what the Council decides, Israel will continue acting according to int’l law while the Hamas terrorists will not even read the resolution at all, let alone abide by it. It is…

— Ambassador Gilad Erdan גלעד ארדן (@giladerdan1) November 15, 2023

“It is unfortunate that the council is still unable to condemn or even mention the massacre that Hamas carried out on [October 7] and led to the war in Gaza,” he wrote on X.

“This is a disgrace,” he added, saying Hamas’s strategy is to “deliberately deteriorate the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip and increase the number of Palestinian casualties in order to activate the UN and the Security Council in an attempt to stop Israel”.

“It will not happen,” he continued.

Earlier, the US envoy to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, condemned council members that she said still have not condemned Hamas.

“I want to say that I’m horrified that a few members of this council still cannot bring themselves to condemn the barbaric terrorist attack that Hamas carried out against Israel on October 7,” she said. “What are they afraid of? There’s no excuse for failing to condemn these acts of terror.”

Speaking ahead of a vote on her country’s draft resolution, Malta’s ambassador to the UN said it “aims to ensure respite from the current nightmare in Gaza and give hope to the families of all victims”.

A last-minute amendment introduced by Russia called for an “immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce, leading to a cessation of hostilities”.

The amendment failed to get the support needed with only five of the 15-member council voting in favour. The US voted against it.

Over a two-week period last month, four previous resolutions failed in the Security Council, twice when Russia failed to get the minimum votes needed, once when the US vetoed a Brazilian-drafted resolution, and again when Russia and China vetoed a resolution put forward by the US.

The US, Russia, China, France and the UK wield veto power as permanent members of the body.

An initial Brazil-drafted resolution calling for humanitarian pauses was vetoed by the US for failing to “mention Israel’s right of self-defence”. A subsequent US-drafted resolution, which stated Israel’s “right to self-defence” but did not call for humanitarian pauses, was vetoed by Russia and China.

Two subsequent Russian draft resolutions were not vetoed but did not attain the nine votes needed to be approved by the council.

Chinese President Xi Jinping called the US-China relationship ‘the most important bilateral relationship in the world.’

US President Joe Biden has met Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of an economic summit in California, where they shook hands and spoke about ways to improve bruised relations.

The meeting took place on Wednesday during a conference for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperative (APEC), and comes amid a period of mounting tension between Washington and Beijing.

Biden said that the two countries should strive to make sure they do not “veer into conflict” and manage their relationship “responsibly”.

Xi called the US-China relationship “the most important bilateral relationship in the world”, and said he and Biden “shoulder heavy responsibilities for the two peoples, for the world, and for history”.

“For two large countries like China and the United States, turning their back on each other is not an option,” he said. “It is unrealistic for one side to remodel the other, and conflict and confrontation has unbearable consequences for both sides.”

Officials on both sides of the Pacific have set expectations low as Biden and Xi are set to discuss Taiwan, the South China Sea, the Israel-Hamas war, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, North Korea and human rights – areas where the leaders have been unable to resolve long-standing disagreements.

Cooperation between the US and China, which make up the first and second-largest economies in the world, respectively, remains vital for progress on global issues such as climate change. But both sides have expressed mounting frustration with the other, disagreeing over issues such as technology and global politics.

Washington has accused China of offering Russia an economic lifeline as Moscow carries out a bloody invasion of Ukraine, which the US has backed with military assistance and humanitarian aid.

The two sides have also differed on issues in the Middle East, where China has called for a ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinian armed group HaInternalmas. The US has used its position on the United Nations Security Council to veto calls for a ceasefire and has thrown its support behind Israel.

The two have also clashed over technology and trade, with the US instituting new measures in an effort to hobble China’s microchip industry.

Iran, fentanyl

During the meeting, Biden is expected to press Xi to use China’s influence to urge Iran to avoid provocative action or encouraging its proxies to enter the fray in moves that could spread the Israel-Hamas conflict across the Middle East.

He is also expected to raise alleged Chinese operations to influence foreign elections, the status of US citizens that Washington believes are wrongly detained in China and human rights.

US officials expected concrete steps to restore staff-level conversations between the two countries on issues from military-to-military communications to reducing the flow of fentanyl, managing the growth of artificial intelligence technologies, and managing trade and climate.

Many of the chemicals used to make the opioid drug fentanyl come from China, US officials say.

Before the meeting, both countries backed a new renewable energy target and said they would work to reduce methane and plastic pollution, a renewal of climate cooperation that was suspended after former US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in 2022.

Watchdog says stonewalling of inspectors ‘extreme and unjustified’ as stockpile reaches 22 times the nuclear deal limit.

Iran continues barring several experienced nuclear inspectors, and has enough uranium enriched to up to 60 percent purity, close to weapons-grade, for three atom bombs, according to confidential reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The United Nations nuclear watchdog on Wednesday slammed Iran’s decision to withdraw the accreditation of several inspectors, announced in September, as “extreme and unjustified” and said it “directly and seriously affected” the agency’s work.

“Iran’s stance is not only unprecedented, but unambiguously contrary to the cooperation that is required,” IAEA chief Rafael Grossi wrote in a report to the agency’s member states.

Iran in September withdrew the accreditation of several inspectors, a move Tehran described as retaliation for “political abuses” by the United States, France, Germany and Britain.

The move targets eight top inspectors, with French and German nationals among them, according to a diplomatic source.

In the report, the IAEA said it received a letter from Iran on Wednesday, reiterating its position “that it was within its rights” to withdraw the accreditation, but was “exploring possibilities to address the request” of the agency to reinstate it.

Member states can generally veto inspectors assigned to visit their nuclear facilities under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Grossi expressed “his hope that this matter will be resolved promptly”.

In a separate confidential report, the IAEA said that Iran’s estimated stockpile of enriched uranium had reached more than 22 times the limit set out in the 2015 accord between Tehran and world powers.

Iran’s total enriched uranium stockpile was estimated at 4,486.8kg (9,891.7lb) as of October 28, up by 693.1kg (1,528lb) from August, the report said. The limit in the 2015 deal was set at 202.8kg (447lb).

The report comes amid long-standing tensions between Iran and the agency, which is tasked with monitoring a nuclear programme that Western nations have long suspected is aimed at eventually developing a nuclear weapon. Iran denies wanting to build nuclear weapons.

In 2015, major world powers reached a deal with Iran, aimed at curbing Tehran’s nuclear programme in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions.

That started to unravel in 2018 when then-US President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from it and reimposed sanctions, and Iran retaliated by stepping up its nuclear activities.

European Union-mediated efforts to revive the deal have so far proved fruitless.

 

Palestinian authorities in Gaza reject Israeli claims that weapons were found in raid on al-Shifa Hospital.

The United States has denied giving Israel a green light for a raid on al-Shifa Hospital in the Gaza Strip after backing Israeli claims that the medical facility was being used for military purposes.

Speaking on Wednesday, US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby countered accusations from Hamas that President Joe Biden’s administration was complicit in the raid.

“We did not give an OK to their military operations around the hospital,” Kirby told reporters.

Kirby declined to say whether Israel gave the US advanced warning of the attack during talks between Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday.

“I won’t go into detail about the conversation,” he said, adding that “there’s no expectation by the United States to map it all out.”

The US had previously stated that an intelligence assessment backed up Israel’s claims that al-Shifa Hospital, the largest in Gaza, sat atop a large Hamas command centre.

Kirby said the US remained “comfortable with our own intelligence assessment”.

Israeli forces raided al-Shifa, which is sheltering hundreds of patients and thousands of displaced Palestinians, early on Wednesday, drawing alarm from international organisations and political leaders.

“Hospitals are not battlegrounds,” the United Nations undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and its emergency relief coordinator, Martin Griffiths, said in a social media post in response to the raid.

While Biden had called on Israel to take “less intrusive action” at al-Shifa on Monday, Israel does not appear to have taken those demands seriously.

“It really does underscore that even as the US is supporting – not just in spirit but also militarily in billions of dollars annually – Israel’s ‘defence’, as they call it, the Israelis are really proceeding against the wishes, sometimes, of the United States,” Al Jazeera’s Kimberly Halkett reported from the White House.

Omar Zaqout, an emergency room worker at the Gaza City facility, told Al Jazeera that Israeli soldiers “detained and brutally assaulted” some of those seeking shelter at the hospital.

The attack followed several days of encirclement by Israeli forces. Hospital staff said on Tuesday that they were barred from exiting the facility and they were forced to bury decomposing bodies in a mass grave.

The Israeli military said its troops found an operational command centre and assets belonging to Hamas in its raids on the hospital, but it has not produced any firm evidence to substantiate the claim that it is a central node of Hamas operations.

Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari said the troops had found weapons, combat gear and technological equipment there and were continuing their search.

The military also released a video that they said showed some of the materials recovered from an undisclosed building in the hospital compound, including automatic weapons, grenades, ammunition and flak jackets.

The Ministry of Health in Gaza said on Wednesday that the Israeli military did not find any weapons when it stormed the hospital.

“The occupation forces did not find any [military] equipment or weapons in the hospital. Essentially, we don’t allow this [weapons in a hospital],” Munir al-Bursh, Health Ministry director, said in a statement.

Turkish president sharpens criticism of Israel and its allies and calls for Israeli officials to be tried for war crimes.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called Israel a “terror state”, stepping up his condemnation of the Israeli assault on the besieged Gaza Strip ahead of a sensitive visit to Germany.

Erdogan said on Wednesday that Israel’s military campaign against the Palestinian armed group Hamas included “the most treacherous attacks in human history” with “unlimited” support from the West.

He called for Israeli leaders to be tried for war crimes at the International Court of Justice in The Hague and repeated his view – and Turkey’s position – that Hamas is not a “terrorist organisation” but a political party that won the last Palestinian legislative elections held in 2006.

“I say clearly that Israel is a terror state,” Erdogan told members of his Justice and Development Party (AK Party) in parliament.

“While we curse the Israeli administration, we do not forget those who openly support these massacres and those who go out of their way to legitimise them,” he said, pointing to the United States and other Western allies of Israel.

“We are faced with a genocide,” Erdogan added.

He called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to announce whether Israel has nuclear weapons and added that Netanyahu would soon be a “goner” from his post.

Ankara would take steps to ensure Israeli settlers in occupied Palestinian territories are recognised as “terrorists”, he said.

Netanyahu, speaking at an event in Israel, said he will not be “morally lectured” by the Turkish leader, saying Erdogan supports “the terrorist state Hamas”.

The Turkish leader had taken a more nuanced line immediately after Hamas launched attacks on southern Israel on October 7. About 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed and about 240 people taken hostage, according to Israeli officials.

But Erdogan’s rhetoric has escalated as the scale of Israel’s military response has grown.

Health officials in the Hamas-run territory said more than 11,300 people have been killed in Gaza, including more than 4,000 children.

Turkey this month recalled its ambassador to Israel and broke off official contacts with Netanyahu, suspending recent attempts by the two countries to repair their rocky relations.

Israel has also said it is “re-evaluating” relations with Ankara after calling back its diplomatic staff from Turkey and other countries in the region as a security precaution.

Erdogan made his comments two days before a planned meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who has been forced to defend his decision to receive the Turkish leader.

Germany has backed Israel, and Scholz said he is opposed to an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza.

“I don’t think the calls for an immediate ceasefire or long pause – which would amount to the same thing – are right,” Scholz said on Sunday.

“That would mean ultimately that Israel leaves Hamas the possibility of recovering and obtaining new missiles,” he added, echoing the position of the US government and calling instead for “humanitarian pauses”.