U.S. veto defeats U.N. condemnation of Israel

The United States vetoed a Security Council resolution Saturday that would have condemned Israel’s military actions in the Gaza Strip and demanded a withdrawal of Israeli troops.

The resolution, sponsored by Qatar after an Israeli attack last week killed 18 civilians in the town of Beit Hanoun, received 10 votes in favor and four abstentions, but was killed by the U.S. veto.

U.S. Ambassador John R. Bolton said the resolution “does not display an evenhanded characterization of the recent events in Gaza, nor does it advance the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace to which we aspire and for which we are working assiduously.”

Palestinian U.N. observer Riyad Mansour told the Security Council that the vote was a double disappointment.

“You have conveyed today two wrong messages,” he said after the vote. “For Israel, you have conveyed to them they can continue to behave above international law. For the Palestinian people, you have conveyed that justice is not being dealt with in a proper way.”

The U.S. veto highlights the difficulty of achieving Security Council accord on taking any action on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. The United States, a close ally of Israel, contends that resolution of the conflict should be handled by the peace intermediaries known as the quartet -- the U.S., Russia, the European Union and the U.N. Washington almost always rejects resolutions related to Israel that don’t mention Palestinian provocation or contain a denunciation of terrorism.

The veto Saturday by the U.S. was its fourth in three years on the issue. The U.S. vetoed a similar resolution in July that sought to condemn Israeli military operations in Gaza after the capture of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian militants, calling it “unbalanced.”

The other permanent members -- Britain, France, Russia and China -- say the long-standing conflict is a clear matter of peace and security that should be handled by the council.

But Britain abstained Saturday, along with Denmark, Japan and Slovakia, all saying the resolution lacked balance, even after intensive negotiations that produced several dilutions intended to win more support.

Israel apologized for the civilian deaths, saying that they had been caused by a “technical error” but that its army would continue to defend the country against rocket attacks launched from Gaza.

At the United States’ insistence, the draft resolution was amended to demand a halt to violence, including the firing of rockets into Israel.

It also dropped demands for a U.N. observer force on the border and an inquiry into the civilian deaths in Beit Hanoun, calling instead for international help protecting civilians and a U.N. fact-finding mission to investigate the killings.

But Bolton said that even with the amendments, the draft was too one-sided and “politically motivated,” because it equated what the U.S. considers Israel’s right to self-defense with the rocket attacks from Gaza, which it calls acts of terrorism.

British Deputy Ambassador Karen Pierce condemned the Israeli attacks, saying, “It is hard to see what this action was meant to achieve and how it can be justified.” But she said Britain abstained because it did not consider the resolution to be “sufficiently balanced nor to reflect the complexity of the current situation.”

Mansour, the Palestinian representative, said Arab League foreign ministers meeting in Cairo today would decide what to do next, perhaps reviving the resolution in the Security Council or taking it to the General Assembly, where it probably would receive overwhelming, but nonbinding, support.

In any case, Mansour told reporters, the U.S. veto sent the wrong message to the Israeli army and Palestinian militants.

“Will that help extremist elements to take issues into their own hands on both sides?” he said. “You bet.”

maggie.farley@latimes.com