Meetings Coverage

With extreme levels of gang violence continuing to erode state authority in Haiti and no improvement in sight, a senior United Nations official urged Member States to boost their contributions to the acutely under-resourced Multinational Security Support Mission at an open briefing held by the Security Council to discuss a proposal to transform that Support mission — authorized by the 15-member body in 2023 to assist the Haitian National Police — into a UN peacekeeping operation.

Concluding its work for the current session, the Fourth Committee (Special Political and Decolonization) approved five texts today, four of which were draft resolutions concerning Israel and Palestine, which took recorded votes.

With another two vetoes cast this week in the Security Council — one on a cessation of hostilities in Sudan and one on a Gaza ceasefire — the importance of the “veto initiative” is now “even more profound”, the General Assembly heard today.

The Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural) approved five draft resolutions addressing the human rights situations in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Myanmar, Iran, Syria and the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, and forwarded them to the General Assembly for adoption.

The Security Council today failed to adopt a text, put forward by its 10 elected members, that called for an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza and demanded the release of all hostages, on account of a negative vote cast by a permanent member.

The report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices is a distortion of reality and promotes a particular political agenda aimed at “destroying Israel’s image as a democratic State,” that country’s delegate told the Fourth Committee (Special Political and Decolonization) today, while other speakers called for a permanent end to the Israeli settler activities, in keeping with the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice.

As the Security Council meeting of 18 November concluded, regional delegations, condemning the horrific aggression being wrought upon the Palestinian people by Israel, along with that country’s attacks against Lebanon, urged the 15‑nation organ to adopt a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza before famine consumes it and the dangerously escalating violence engulfs the entire Middle East.

In his bi-annual briefing today to the Security Council on the situation in Libya, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) urged Member States’ cooperation in executing arrest warrants against those suspected of war crimes committed in the town of Tarhuna, spotlighting the recent unsealing of arrest warrants for individuals linked to the Al Kaniyat militia, and Libyan authorities’ collaboration to pursue accountability.

Delegates at the Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary) today heard Secretariat officials lay out the details behind their request for a $2.09 million appropriation to keep the Office of the Personal Envoy of the Secretary-General for the Sudan running smoothly in 2025.

Israel’s methods of war align with the characteristics of genocide, the Chair of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories told the Fourth Committee (Special Political and Decolonization) today.