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

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. And what Gustavo Petro of Colombia was saying in September was that this was the moment to do exactly that because Gaza was being bombarded, because the US had vetoed ceasefire resolutions again and again, because the usual channels were obviously not working, and because civilians were dying while Washington kept insisting that the Council just needed more time. Petro wasn’t being abstract. He was citing Resolution 377A directly. He was pushing states to make the move. And Colombia was doing the diplomatic legwork behind it, sounding out governments, looking for support, raising the idea inside the system. That’s not speculation. That’s what diplomats said happened. That’s the attempt that was underway until US pressure choked it off, and you don’t have to squint very hard to see why Washington wasn’t having it, because for the first time since the war began, the usual Security Council cycle of draft, veto, stall, repeat wasn’t holding. There was momentum elsewhere, and the US wasn’t controlling it.
Now, the US doesn’t have a veto in the General Assembly, so they can’t just shut down 377A the way they shut down a ceasefire resolution. What they can do is stop it ever reaching the floor, stop states from backing it, stop coalitions from forming in the first place. And that’s exactly what happened. The US applied pressure inside the UN, and the Colombian push lost the oxygen it needed. And here’s the thing: even that wasn’t enough, because by September the argument for invoking Uniting for Peace wasn’t just political, it was legal. The Security Council had failed six times to pass a ceasefire because the US kept vetoing. The conditions for 377A were sitting right there. And if the General Assembly decided to act, Washington would have had very little room to manoeuvre, which is why the next move came where it did, at the Security Council itself, because if you want to block the General Assembly from stepping in, all you have to do is make the Security Council appear functional again. You just need one resolution to pass. It doesn’t need to be sensible. It doesn’t need to be enforceable. It just needs to get through without a veto. And that is exactly what happened on the seventeenth of November when the United States drafted and pushed through Resolution 2803.
Now, Resolution 2803 is one of those documents that sounds big when you read the first paragraph and empties out almost immediately afterwards. It creates something called a Board of Peace, a transitional authority for Gaza that nobody has joined, nobody has defined, and nobody seems keen to lead. It authorises an International Stabilization Force that is supposed to operate until at least the end of 2027, and yet there are no commitments, no troop lists, no willing contributors, no outline of what this force would actually do, and crucially it says that everything this force does must be carried out in close cooperation with Israel and Egypt. So what you’ve got is a governing mechanism that can’t govern, a security framework that can’t secure, and a peace structure that depends on the approval of the state currently waging the war. And if you look at that and think it wasn’t built to function, you’re not alone, because diplomats quoted at the time were already describing the US move as bulldozing the prospect of Uniting for Peace, and once you follow the mechanics, you can see why.
Because here’s the thing: the moment the Security Council passes a resolution, the Council is no longer considered deadlocked, and the General Assembly cannot invoke its emergency powers. And that’s the door that slammed shut the moment 2803 passed. The fact the plan doesn’t work is irrelevant to the way UN procedure interprets deadlock. The UN isn’t measuring implementation. It isn’t measuring outcomes. It’s measuring whether the Council has acted. And 2803 means the Council has acted, which is why Washington and Israel don’t actually need the Board of Peace to assemble or the Stabilization Force to deploy. The plan’s failure is not a threat to them. The plan’s collapse would be a threat to them, because if it collapses openly, if it becomes obvious inside the UN system that the Security Council isn’t exercising its responsibilities, a member state can force a new vote, Washington can be cornered into vetoing again, and then deadlock would return in the legal sense, which would allow Uniting for Peace to be invoked. But as long as the plan is nominally alive, even if it’s hollow and non-functional, deadlock stays off the table.
That creates a perverse incentive. The US and Israel gain more by keeping the illusion of 2803 alive than by implementing any part of it. And you can see how that plays out. No country is agreeing to sit on the Board of Peace. No country is volunteering troops for the ISF. No country is stepping forward to help administer Gaza under a framework that requires Israel’s approval for every move. The structure exists on paper because its existence is what matters. Its implementation would drag states into political and legal exposure they don’t want. And if it fails visibly, the whole thing becomes vulnerable to a new round of Security Council action. So in a very real sense, the worst outcome for Washington and Israel is that 2803 is tested. The best outcome is that it sits there untested, unstaffed, undelivered, functioning only as the procedural firewall it became the moment it passed.
And I’ll come back to that firewall because it’s the key to all of this. If the world wants to use Uniting for Peace now, it cannot do so by pointing at the failure of 2803. UN procedure doesn’t care about failure. It cares about veto patterns. There must be a new resolution on Gaza brought to the Security Council. It must reach a vote. And the United States must veto it. Only then does deadlock return. Only then does the General Assembly regain the authority to intervene. That is the path back. No amount of diplomatic embarrassment over the Board of Peace changes that. No amount of international frustration changes that. The General Assembly could pass a hundred resolutions urging withdrawal or recognising Palestinian rights and none of it changes the legal blockage sitting in front of 377A. The only way back is through another US veto, which is why you can see why Washington will fight so hard to prevent any state from bringing a new substantive Gaza resolution to a vote. Because once that vote is held, they have to choose between a binding ceasefire and restoring the deadlock they have spent months trying to erase.
And this is where the political stakes meet the legal mechanics. Because if you are sitting in Gaza, or anywhere else watching this unfold, none of this looks like a peace plan. It looks like a containment strategy, a way of keeping the world away from the crisis. And when you see the General Assembly passing resolutions urging Israel to withdraw, you can feel the shape of the problem: the world is speaking, but not through the one mechanism that could actually bypass the veto. The paralysis isn’t natural. It’s maintained. And it’s maintained by a piece of paper that never had to work in the first place. That’s the part that lands hardest once you walk through the events in order: the Security Council acted without acting, and because of that, the General Assembly is bound, and because of that, Gaza sits where it always sits, under bombardment, under blockade, under the authority of a Council that has technically done its job and practically done nothing.
And this is the shape the crisis takes once you strip away the diplomatic language. You’ve got a region where the violence hasn’t stopped, where the humanitarian crisis hasn’t eased, where the political rights of Palestinians remain unaddressed, where the occupying power still calls the shots, and where the United Nations has technically implemented a plan that exists only as a shell. And when you look at how that shell was assembled, you can see the incentives baked into it; a Board of Peace that is meant to manage Gaza but has no members, a stabilisation force that is meant to secure Gaza but has no troops, and a mandate that runs until at least the end of 2027, which means this whole structure is designed to sit in the system for years whether it functions or not, which is the sort of detail that tells you everything you need to know about how Washington and Israel intend to use it. They don’t need to deliver anything through it. They just need it to remain in place long enough to stop anybody else delivering anything through the only route that could sidestep them.
So you end up with this extremely modern kind of blockage, where the appearance of action is used to shut down the possibility of action. You end up with a Security Council that has technically exercised its responsibilities even though everyone watching can see the responsibilities have not been met in any meaningful sense. And you end up with a General Assembly full of states that would act if they could but can’t, because the conditions for acting have been removed. And of course, this runs deeper than Gaza, because once you establish a precedent that a major power can put forward a resolution tailored to obstruct the escape hatch rather than resolve the crisis, every other crisis becomes vulnerable to the same tactic. If you can pass something hollow but passable, you can disable the General Assembly every time the Council’s permanent members fall out, and you can create a world where the only real power sits with the veto and everything else is theatre, and nobody should pretend that isn’t the direction Washington has been pushing for years now because the record is right there: veto after veto on Gaza, six by the time Colombia stepped in, each one blocking a ceasefire the world asked for, each one reinforcing the idea that the Security Council exists to manage American interests rather than international peace and security, and when even that wasn’t enough, you got the manoeuvre that gave us Resolution 2803, a text drafted to create the impression of movement while locking the doors behind it.
Now, if you’re looking at this and thinking this is all very legalistic, very procedural, very technical, that is the point. Power hides in procedure. Washington didn’t have to justify its vetoes on moral grounds. It didn’t have to justify sabotaging Uniting for Peace. It just had to make sure the Council wasn’t technically failing. Israel didn’t have to secure support for a real stabilisation force or accept oversight from a real transitional authority. It just had to sit back and watch while its main ally drafted a resolution that required any such force to operate in close cooperation with Israel, which is the diplomatic way of saying Israel gets to approve the whole thing, and because no state wants to be trapped inside that structure, the plan remains empty, which suits Israel perfectly. A functioning Board of Peace might restrict its military options. A functioning stabilisation force might limit its freedom of movement. A functioning international presence might gather evidence or impose obligations. An empty plan does none of that, and an empty plan is exactly what 2803 delivered.
And I’ll come back to the question people keep asking, because it’s the one that sits beneath all of this: if the plan collapses, does Uniting for Peace come back? And the answer is no. Not automatically. Not because the plan is absurd. Not because the Board of Peace is a ghost. Not because the stabilisation force is a mirage. Uniting for Peace comes back only when the Security Council attempts to act again and fails because of a veto. The failure has to be procedural, not practical. And because the US knows that as well as anybody, they will do everything they can to stop a new substantive resolution ever reaching a vote. That is the real battlefield now. Not the battlefield in Gaza, tragic and devastating as it is, but the battlefield inside the UN where the veto is defended at all costs, where the legal definition of deadlock is protected as if it were a strategic asset, because in a very real sense it is. The veto is Washington’s last line of control when the rest of the world wants to act, and the moment someone triggers a vote that forces the US to use it again, the whole edifice of Resolution 2803 becomes vulnerable to the argument that the Council has failed once more, and that the General Assembly can take over.
So when you listen to diplomats saying the US “bulldozed” the prospect of Uniting for Peace, you can see why the word fits. It wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t careful. It wasn’t a misunderstanding. It gives the impression of clearing of the ground before 377A could take root. Colombia put the idea on the table. The US cleared the table. And then they replaced the whole thing with a resolution that made sure the table couldn’t be set again. And the world is left with a mechanism that doesn’t operate, a conflict that hasn’t ended, and a procedural blockade that has become more important to the major powers than the crisis that created it.
The truth is that the only way out of this now sits with the states that were willing to move in September, because they are the only ones who can force the issue. They can table a new ceasefire resolution at the Council. They can force Washington to make the choice it has worked so hard to avoid. They can redraw the lines of authority inside the system by making the veto visible again. And they can reopen the only legal pathway left for the General Assembly to intervene. That is the route to peace that still exists, because everything built to obscure it is hollow. Everything built to delay it is vulnerable. Everything built to deter it depends on other states accepting the illusion that Resolution 2803 is a peace plan rather than what it has actually been, which is a procedural shield designed to keep the world away from Gaza for as long as possible.
The plan Washington wrote hasn’t stabilised Gaza. It hasn’t protected civilians. It hasn’t created governance. It hasn’t delivered security. What it has done is keep the United Nations divided, keep the veto intact, keep the world locked out, and keep Gaza trapped behind a resolution that never had to work to achieve its purpose. And until a member state forces that deadlock back into view, that is where the system will stay: hiding behind a peace plan that was never built to deliver peace.
For more on how Trump’s plan is failing to get off the ground do check out more on this story right here.
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