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An Isolated Netanyahu Resists Pressure to End Conflicts

By Shayndi Raice

The Wall Street Journal: International efforts to isolate and punish Israel for its conduct in Gaza and intensifying clashes with Hezbollah are nowhere more evident than at the United Nations, where world leaders gather this week for a General Assembly expected to feature more calls to end the conflict.

The annual meeting in New York will mark the culmination of a nearly yearlong effort to stop the war in Gaza through condemnations, resolutions and legal cases brought before U.N. courts.

And yet, for all the effort, Israel has barely budged.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has consistently refused to end the war to destroy Hamas, which led the assault on Oct. 7 that left 1,200 people, mostly civilians, killed and another 250 taken hostage. Efforts by the U.S. to negotiate a pause in the fighting in Gaza that would see the release of hostages held by Hamas militants are all but dead. And a full-blown war between Israel and Hezbollah appears closer by the day.

The failures of these efforts underscore the limitations of the U.N., where countries can easily vote for resolutions against Israel’s government without severing diplomatic ties or imposing other consequences on the nation. Israel’s most vocal critics at the U.N. include Arab nations like Jordan, which allowed its airspace to be used to shoot down a massive barrage of missiles and drones by Iran in April. The most reliable flights out of Israel after the state’s own national airline is Emirates, the flagship carrier in the United Arab Emirates. Discussions with Saudi Arabia over normalization with Israel that would include an end to the war have continued for most of the year.

“If you were to make the mistake of confusing the U.N. with the world, then Israel does look enormously isolated,” said Richard Gowan, an expert on the U.N. for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank. “People are using their U.N. appearances to criticize Israel but cover up the fact that they’re not really taking any sort of actions that would penalize Israel.”

U.N. agencies and officials have been at the forefront of criticizing Israel for its war in Gaza, where more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, mostly civilians, according to local health authorities, who don’t specify how many were combatants. The international body has been among the most outspoken on the sweeping humanitarian crisis in Gaza by warning that limitations on aid were likely to cause a famine.

The impact has revived sympathy and support for the Palestinian cause in the halls of the U.N., in some foreign capitals and on college campuses. Cases before the U.N.’s International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court at The Hague have also amplified the concerns over the death toll in Gaza and Israel’s settlement policies in the occupied West Bank.

The U.N.’s credibility as an honest broker, however, has been damaged after it emerged that some of the employees in the primary body for distributing aid in Gaza, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, may have played a role in the Oct. 7 attacks >>>