US vetoes 'biased' UN resolution condemning Israel

The United States vetoed a UN Security Council resolution on Nov. 11 condemning Israel in the wake of the artillery attack which killed 18 Palestinian civilians last week in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun. The veto on the resolution came despite efforts to redraft the original text to make it more acceptable to its opponents. Ten of the 15 members were in favor of the draft resolution, while four abstained, including the United Kingdom, Denmark, Japan and Slovakia. The US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, said the resolution, proposed by Qatar and also calling on Israel to withdraw its forces from the area "does not display an even-handed characterization of the recent events in Gaza, nor does it advance the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace." He added that the draft's preamble "equates Israeli military operations, which are legal, with the firing of rockets into Israel, aimed at civilians, which are acts of terrorism." Although the resolution was modified by Qatar to include condemnation of rocket attacks into Israel, Bolton described it as "in many places biased against Israel and politically motivated." France and Russia voted in favor of the resolution, which called for Secretary-General Kofi Annan to launch a 30-day fact-finding mission to investigate the attack on Nov. 8. Human rights organizations have called for a fuller investigation into killings than the internal inquiry by the Israeli military, which found that a defect in the artillery battery's hi-tech guidance system had misdirected the shells. The new UN text vetoed on Nov. 11 dropped the word "massacre" to describe the shelling, in which 17 members of the Athamneh family died as they tried to flee shells landing on their home, and substituted the term "military operations." It also called on the Palestinian Authority to take "immediate and sustained action" to end the rocket fire. The US "no" vote effectively killed the resolution. Only the five permanent members of the Security Council (France, the UK, China, Russia, and the US) have veto power. The veto–the fourth by the US on resolutions criticizing Israel–is likely to fuel anti-US sentiment in the Palestinian factions after the claim by Khaled Mashaal, the exiled Damascus-based Hamas leader, that the attack had been conducted "under American cover."