The United States has announced that it will oppose Palestine’s entry as a full member of the United Nations during the vote in the UN Security Council scheduled for this Thursday and has defended that the best way to establish a Palestinian state is through direct negotiations with Israel.
The deputy spokesman for the United States Department of State, Vedant Patel, reported in a press conference that these “premature actions, even with the best intentions, will fail to establish a state for the Palestinian people.”
“The fastest path to the creation of a State for the Palestinian people is through direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority with the support of the United States and other partners who share this objective,” he indicated.
Patel has stressed that they have repeatedly asked the Palestinian Authority to “take the necessary measures” to prepare for the creation of a State so that Gaza, where the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) currently has a presence, can be “a integral part of the State provided for” in said resolution.
Likewise, he assured that “there has not been unanimity” among the members of the Admission Commission to submit the proposal to the Security Council. “There are unresolved questions about whether it can meet the criteria to be considered a state,” she said.
The resolution must have the support of at least nine of the Council’s 15 members, with no permanent member — the United States, Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom — voting against it. Once this procedure has been completed, the resolution must go through a second vote in the General Assembly, where it must be approved by a two-thirds majority of the 193 member states.
The petition was initially presented in 2011, although the process was paralyzed and has been relaunched again after the Palestinian representative to the UN, Riad Mansur, requested in early April in a letter to the Secretary General, António Guterres, that the non-member observer status be reviewed.