Did the US Just Derail a UN Peace Plan for Gaza?

The Trump plan for Gaza has taken an even darker turn as a UN block to a real peace plan to make way for it has just emerged. Right, so here’s the thing nobody at the United Nations wants to say out loud: Gaza didn’t get a peace plan this year, it got a paperwork barricade, and the only people it protects are the ones who built it. Colombia tried to drag the UN toward that fabled Uniting for Peace resolution because the Security Council had choked six ceasefire resolutions in a row thanks to the dratted US veto, yet Washington still moved faster than anyone expected, leaning on states until the whole thing stalled. Then, just to make sure the escape route was sealed, the US pushed through a resolution, Trump’s peace plan for Gaza, that created a Board of Peace with no members willing to sit on it and a stabilisation force with no troops seemingly joining that either and yet this somehow still counts as the Council “acting.” And once you grasp that, you can see the shape of the game: a plan that never had to work, that only had to pass in order to achieve an outcome that ends up sparing Israel from international censure once again. Right, so here’s where we are, the world had a tool sitting right there on the table, a tool designed for exactly the situation we’ve been living through, a Security Council paralysed by a permanent member’s veto, a humanitarian crisis unfolding in front of everyone, small states demanding that something be done, and large states blocking it. That tool is Uniting for Peace. It’s been there since 1950. It’s been used before. And for a brief moment back in September, it looked like the world might actually use it again because Colombia stepped forward and said that if the veto is being used to stop the UN from acting, then the General Assembly needs to take over. This is after all what the Uniting for Peace Resolution, Resolution 377A as it’s officially known, is for – to break the deadlock. And that is the moment the United States moved to shut it down, because Washington could see exactly where this might go if they didn’t intervene, and they weren’t about to let the General Assembly take Gaza out of theirs and Israel’s hands. The thing about Uniting for Peace is that it isn’t magic. It doesn’t hand you an army or guarantee peacekeepers or give you a switch that stops a war. What it does is remove the veto as the choke point. If the Security Council fails to act because a permanent member keeps saying no, the General Assembly can take the file and recommend collective measures. It gives the rest of the world a legal pathway around a blockade.