US vetoes Gaza ceasefire call at UN Security Council

The 15-member council voted on a resolution put forward by its 10 non-permanent members in a meeting that called for an “immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire” and separately demand the release of hostages.

A senior US official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity ahead of the vote, said the US would only support a resolution that explicitly calls for the immediate release of hostages as part of a ceasefire.

“As we stated many times before, we just can’t support an unconditional ceasefire that does not call for the immediate release of hostages,” the official said.

Israel’s 13-month campaign in Gaza has killed nearly 44,000 people and displaced nearly all the enclave’s population at least once. It was launched in response to an attack by Hamas-led fighters who killed 1,200 people and captured more than 250 hostages in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Ahead of the vote, Britain put forward new language that the US would have supported as a compromise, but that was rejected, the US official said.

Some of the council’s 10 elected members (E10) were more interested in bringing about a US veto than compromising on the resolution, the official said, accusing Russia and China of encouraging those members.

“China kept demanding ‘stronger language’ and Russia appeared to be pulling strings with various (elected) 10 members,” the official said. “This really does undercut the narrative that this was an organic reflection of the E10 and there’s some sense that some E10 members regret that those responsible for the drafting allowed the process to be manipulated for what we consider to be cynical purposes.”

17 killed in Israeli strikes

In Gaza, civil defence agency said that at least 17 people, including a baby, were killed in Israeli air strikes on the war-ravaged Palestinian territory.

The Israeli military said one of its soldiers was killed and another seriously wounded during combat in the north of the Gaza Strip.

The baby was killed in nighttime shelling of the Nuseirat refugee camp, civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal said, adding a shell killed two other people west of the camp in central Gaza.

A drone strike killed two people, including a 15-year-old girl, at a school-turned-shelter for displaced people in the northern city of Beit Lahia, he said.

Since early October, the Israeli army has been waging an operation in Gaza’s far north that it says is aimed at preventing Palestinian militant group Hamas from regrouping.

The military campaign has forced at least 100,000 people to flee for Gaza City and nearby areas, said Louise Wateridge, spokeswoman for the UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA.

In Jabalia, also in Gaza’s far north, emergency workers on Wednesday recovered the bodies of seven people from under the rubble of a house hit by an air strike the night before, Bassal said.

In southern Gaza, a person was killed when a group of Palestinians was targeted near another school in the city of Rafah on Wednesday, he said.

Strikes on a residential building in Gaza City killed two people, Bassal said, while a first responder from the agency was killed while trying to evacuate wounded people in the same area.

In the city’s Zeitun neighbourhood, an air strike killed another person and wounded several others, Bassal added.

The war in Gaza began after Hamas’s unprecedented October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which resulted in 1,206 deaths, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed nearly 44,000 people in Gaza, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, which the UN considers reliable.