Malta's UN ambassador Vanessa Frazier, circulates new draft resolution focusing on Gaza’s children

According to reports, Malta’s ambassador to the UN, Vanessa Frazier, has circulated a new resolution among the Council members for consideration and a potential vote, hoping to finally pass a resolution on the war on Gaza.

Diplomatic sources said that the new resolution is being drafted with a focus on children in the hopes that all 15 members of the UNSC can agree on protections for children in the ongoing conflict.

Malta is one of 10 elected members of the Council and has been the penholder on children in armed conflict since 2022. This position gives Malta the opportunity to play a leading role in the UNSC’s efforts to protect children in conflict zones.

With the Maltese resolution, a key question that might come up for debate is the duration of the pauses in fighting.

Humanitarian groups, and even US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have said the four-hour pauses that Israel has agreed to are currently not enough to ease humanitarian suffering meaningfully. However, it is unclear whether the US will agree to pauses that last several days at a stretch.

The UN General Assembly – which represents all of the UN member states – has expressed its clear opinion, calling for a humanitarian truce that passed on October 27 with 120 votes out of the 193 members. Such a resolution is not binding but has moral weight as a temperature check of the world’s mood.

Previous UNSC draft resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza have failed. Two resolutions drafted by Russia did not get enough votes, with the US among the countries that voted against them. Even though a resolution proposed by Brazil received 12 votes out of the 15 member states, the US vetoed the draft. And, Russia and China vetoed a resolution drafted by the US.

While the five permanent members of the UNSC – China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the US – have the power to veto any resolution that they do not like, it remains reasonably rare.

The US and Russia are the two countries that have exercised their veto power the most in the past. In recent years, the US has mostly used its veto to protect its ally Israel.

The head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) said a child was killed every 10 minutes in Gaza. “Nowhere and no one is safe,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the UN Security Council on Friday, adding that Gaza’s health system was “on its knees”.

The UN’s human rights chief, Volker Türk, has called for an investigation into what he described as Israel’s “indiscriminate” bombardment and shelling in densely populated areas in the Gaza Strip. “The extensive Israeli bombardment of Gaza ... is clearly having a devastating humanitarian and human rights impact,” Türk told reporters in Jordan.

The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said “far too many Palestinians had been killed” in the war. He said that while the US “appreciates” Israel’s steps to minimise civilian casualties, it was not enough. Blinken said the US had proposed additional ideas to the Israelis, including longer “humanitarian pauses” and expanding the amount of assistance getting into Gaza.

Earlier today PN MP Albert Buttigieg appealed to his Parliamentary colleagues to break the silence on the actions of Israel in Gaza.

“Malta cannot remain silent! We cannot remain indifferent! There’s no neutrality in front of evil!” Buttigieg wrote on Facebook. “It seems clear that the leaders of Hamas and of Israel have both committed war crimes.”

Buttigieg emphasised that “in the name of thousands of innocent people on both sides” the Maltese Parliament should make its voice heard.

Following the attack by Hamas in Israel on 7 October, Israeli military actions have killed 11,078 people including 4,506 children. Another 27,490 Palestinians in Gaza had been wounded according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Israel had initially reported that 1,400 had been killed by Hamas, but it has now revised the number to 1,200.

The revision was “due to the fact that there were lot of corpses that were not identified and now we think those belong to terrorists … not Israeli casualties”, an Israeli foreign ministry spokesperson said.