Deepali Kalia
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres summoned a Unified Security Council over the Israel-Palestine conflict still in progress.
When asked about what the expectations were of the Secretary General from Sunday’s emergency meeting of the Security Council, Guterres’s spokesman Stephane Dujarric stated the following on May 14, “What we would like to see is a strong, unified voice for de-escalation, for a cessation of hostilities and a push to get the parties back on track to find a political solution to this conflict that has been going on and on and on.”
When further questioned on the fact that the Unites States on Friday, May 14 had blocked a UNSC meeting on the escalating violence between Israel and Palestine wanting to hold it later, Dujarric stated that Guterres expressed concern about the state of multilateralism “ as we’ve seen it during the pandemic and as we’ve seen it in other aspects”.
“We would like to see member states put to action the ideas that we all have to live up to within this organization” was further added by him.
In relation to the Security Council, he stated that the more unified it is, the stronger would be its voice and its impact.
A high level debate was held on May 7 in the Security Council on the requirement to uphold multilateralism and the same was supported by all the council members but a few days later US had blocked the proposal for a Friday meeting pushing it to Sunday.
The violence reported in Gaza this week has been considered the worst since 2014.
The escalation between Israel and Palestine began when unrest was witnessed in East Jerusalem at a holy site due to an Israeli court’s ruling to evict several Palestinian families from the area.
Then Hamas( militant group that controls Gaza) after warning Israel to withdraw from the site started firing rockets which resulted in retaliatory airstrikes.
Since May 10, around 1,800 rockets have been fired at Israeli territory and 430 of them have mate it inside the strip.
Eight deaths have been reported by Israel due to the rockets out of Gaza and Gaza’s Health Ministry stated that around 119 deaths have occurred and 830 have been injured due to Israel’s retaliation.