Conflict: Israel and Gaza at the 2026 UN General Assembly

0:28This is Ira Glass. The United Nations General Assembly is underway in New York. This week on 1A, we've talked about the global balance of power, about President Trump and his America First foreign policy is causing allies to recalculate their friendships with the United States. And of course, we've talked about the war in Iran. Today, the Israel-Hamas war and Gaza at the U.N. Here's Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Tani. There can be no talk of a just international order as long as Palestine remains a blind spot within it. And here is King Abdullah from Jordan. This Israeli government's expansionist appetite is now a regional threat.

1:15And here is President Emmanuel Macron of France. What is our credibility worth if we remain inactive on Gaza? Some claim that peace has been achieved, but this has not opened up humanitarian deliveries. This spectacle, it's shameful. Shame on all of us. It's been nearly three years since October 7th, and this week, as the UN confronts the deadly war that continues to drag on, the Palestinian Authority's president, Mahmoud Abbas, isn't in the room. The United States denied him a visa. He addressed the assembly by video. I'm Todd Zwilligan for Jen White. You're listening to the 1A podcast. Today, Gaza at the UN General Assembly.

2:01Where do world leaders stand and what role does the United Nations still have in a conflict that's been defined by a flaunting of international norms and allegedly international laws as well? We'll get to that and more right after this.

2:19Austin Tice is an American journalist who disappeared over a decade ago while reporting in Syria. And for years, we've been searching for him. This looks like a secret passage. I'm just pushing the door so he can get in. Go, go, go. Listen to Where Is Austin Tice from NPR's Embedded and BBC Radio 4 on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This week on NPR's Newsmakers, Tucker Carlson has broken with President Trump over the war with Iran and says he warned the president to his face that the war would be a mistake. And he looked at me and said, yes, you're right. But in the end, we all die anyway.

3:00So it doesn't matter. Tucker Carlson, this week on NPR's Newsmakers. Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts. This fall, there are a lot of movies and TV shows on tap for you to see. And we're as excited for all of it to arrive as you are. On Pop Culture Happy Hour, we've got a guide to what's worth keeping on your radar. Listen via the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's jump in with our guest. Elizabeth Hagedorn is All Monitor's diplomatic correspondent. She's reporting from the United Nations this week. Elizabeth, welcome. Hi, Todd. Good to be here. Also with us from New York, Akbar Shahid Ahmed, diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Sun.

3:43He's out with a new book this week. It's called Crossing the Red Line, Biden, His Advisors, and Israel's War in Gaza. We're going to talk about the book a little bit later in the show. Akbar, great to have you back. Thanks, Todd. Great to have both of you back. Elizabeth Hagedorn, let's start with some of the news that came out of the General Assembly this week. The Board of Peace, that's the Trump-led council tasked with planning Gaza's reconstruction. Trump announced this body in January. So new developments. On Wednesday, the board briefed the U.N. unveiled this new$2.45 billion recovery plan.

4:20That's just a small fraction of the more than$70 billion they say is going to be needed over the next decade in Gaza. Elizabeth, you were there. Tell us about this new plan, the reaction, how it looks. Well, this plan and the presentation for donors and diplomats and journalists here in New York yesterday was heavy on PowerPoint presentations and ambitious proposals for rebuilding Gaza at a time when there are few signs of concrete progress on the ground there. It was very reminiscent, I thought, of the board's meeting back in February when they also unveiled many similar sounding proposals. As you mentioned, there's this nearly$2.5 billion price tag for a six-month plan, 66 projects planned, spanning everything from rubble removal to repairing schools and hospitals, as well as training for the yet-to-be-deployed international and Palestinian security forces.

5:21Of course, there's a major political obstacle to all of this, and that is Israel has rejected the board's proposal from July that calls for its troops to withdraw in exchange for Hamas handing over its weapons. Neither of those things have happened yet. This is something that the board's high commissioner for Gaza, Nikolai Mladenov, acknowledged yesterday, that winning support from Netanyahu's government right now will be tough with their elections approaching. Akbar, your view on the Board of Peace plan, given what Elizabeth just described, Israeli withdrawal from Gaza has not happened. Hamas disarmament has not happened.

6:01A political Palestinian government, of course, has not happened. We're all talking about what's been known as phase two, none of which really has happened. So new investments announced$2.45 billion. Your view on where it stands? So this moment, Todd, is just so reminiscent of, and as we've had since October 7, 2024, three years into this period of unprecedented conflict in Israel-Palestine, two presidents, two parties, and yet the factor has remained the same, the refusal to use U.S. leverage consistently and effectively relative to Israel. So as Elizabeth pointed out, all of these ideas of rubble removal, of school reconstruction, of getting people back into potentially their homes, more than 1.5 million Palestinians remain in camps, all of that hinges on someone actually getting Netanyahu's government to agree.

6:56And what we've seen is consistently the Biden and now Trump administrations have identified the problems to a degree, that when it comes to actually turning their own promises, America's credibility online, this question of any sentiment, any sort of belief in the international system, they haven't been willing to actually make that effective. I think back to, and Angai covered closely this, but I think you were there too, two years ago, 2024, when we had an active conversation around, will this UN General Assembly session be where the Biden administration is able to stop Prime Minister Netanyahu from expanding his war in Gaza into a war in Lebanon?

7:36And ultimately, Netanyahu thumbed his nose at the Biden administration. No consequences. We've seen a literal repeat of that with the Trump administration in both Gaza and Lebanon. Elizabeth, what's different on the floor of the General Assembly or in the wings around the meeting in the way world leaders are talking about Gaza now? We heard some clips at the top. We heard voices raised, strong words from Emmanuel Macron and others. In some ways, it's not new. But what is new? What's different now? Well, I mean, last year when the U.N. convened, there was no permanent ceasefire in Gaza. The hostages were still held by Hamas and Israel was bombing the territory.

8:18The conversation has shifted now to implementing the remainder of this 20-point peace plan that has stalled. And so to the extent that I've heard Gaza on the agenda this week, including, of course, at the Board of Peace meeting yesterday, the focus has been on how do you break the impasse to allow badly needed reconstruction to begin in Gaza. But, you know, I've been here all week and these discussions of Gaza have really been pushed to the sidelines, I feel, by the war in Iran and its spillover into Yemen, which has really dominated, I think, the talk this week at the General Assembly. I mean, Akbar, we'll talk more from your book about your thesis about the war in Iran and sort of the long scope of where the war in Gaza sits, not just an episode, but part of a longer term problem in American diplomacy, in your view.

9:10But what about it? What about this week at the UN General Assembly? Is Iran overshadowing the war in Gaza, which is really part of the same conflict? Right. And an extension of the same patterns of kind of US-Israeli foreign policy failures, frankly, with a really huge human cost. I think about, you know, the fact that today we've got that split screen of Israeli Prime Minister that Netanyahu being here in New York, while Netanyahu can't even access the UN, right? And this, if you think about what you're hearing from Palestinians about this moment, they're looking at figures like Tony Blair being recycled to essentially give lectures saying, don't talk about free Palestine, trust our plan, which has sold.

9:56So I do think when we think about the actual victims of this conflict, whether they are, by the way, including Israelis who feel trapped in three years of persistent instability and expanding war, not to mention vulnerability to outside attack, they're not getting a solution. And to Elizabeth's point, too, about kind of this broader regional peace question that all these leaders keep saying they want to address, wind down Iran, control the expanding war in Yemen and Saudi Arabia as well, What's the pathway to that? It is not just economic, it is truly political. And what we're hearing instead from leaders repeatedly is this kind of technocratic frame.

10:35Oh, we'll just have a PowerPoint slide and fix this problem without addressing these deep fundamental questions of international law, human rights concerns, and the political beliefs of Palestinians and others in the region. Elizabeth, we've mentioned a couple of times, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas denied a visa to attend this meeting. It's the second year in a row. Now, Palestinian Authority president, not Hamas leader, two different organizations. Hamas is, of course, the problem in Gaza. Why is Abbas being denied a visa? Right. And this administration has sort of shattered what taboo remains when it comes to speaking with terrorist groups when necessary.

11:19So it does openly speak with Hamas as well as the Houthis and, of course, is willing to sit down with the Iranians. And so there is a sort of interesting contradiction playing out this week that the U.S. had denied visas to the Palestinians while approving them for officials from Iran, a country with which the U.S. is in an active war but seeks talks with and did have talks with, albeit indirectly, this week. And to me, this just sort of speaks to how irrelevant the Trump administration sees President Abbas and the PA when it comes to its Gaza diplomacy and its wider Middle East agenda. Akbar, we have just a couple of seconds before we head to a break.

12:02But your thoughts on that dynamic, Mahmoud Abbas excluded while American designated terrorists get talks. It speaks to this question, too, of who the Trump administration is taking seriously, whether it is a political representative or frankly saying, if you're tough, if you're using violence and potentially committing what are seen as war crimes, we'll take you seriously. And that's been Hamas, the Houthis, and even Iran, which they call out as a violator of international law. Well, we'll take a quick break. But coming up, why hasn't the United Nations played a bigger role in Gaza? Stay with us.

12:40The company behind Flock cameras sold itself as a boon for public safety. But these cameras have had another consequence, more surveillance. When you kind of give thousands of cops access to this very powerful system, they're going to touch the electric fence and see like what they can do. Is Flock making communities safer? Find this and more stories from the Indicator from Planet Money on the NPR app. Back now to the United Nations and how the international community is approaching the war in Gaza. Let's go to this message that we got from Aidan in Palatine, Illinois. Since October 7th, but also looking back at past conflicts, I've found myself questioning what the purpose of the United Nations is, where its effectiveness is, because it seems that they have basically zero power to intervene in the conflict in Gaza that may or may not amount to a genocide at this point.

13:39And I'm curious how this is happening, what political forces are at play here to prevent them from using their combined might to prevent these massive civilian casualties in this humanitarian crisis. Elizabeth, your reaction to Aidan and his concerns about sort of the long-term weakness of the United Nations when it comes to Israel and Gaza? Certainly many Israelis have written off the UN a long time ago. They consider it to be an organization completely stacked against them. They don't seem to care much what the UN says or doesn't say, and that's important. But what about his concerns that the UN has become ineffective here?

14:20And is there a way for them to leverage any power in this war? You know, it's a longstanding critique of the UN and specifically its most powerful body, the Security Council, which throughout the Gaza war did try to pass ceasefire resolutions, nearly all of which were vetoed by the United States, which has long shielded Israel at the Security Council. Under the Biden administration, we saw the U.S. allow passage of just one resolution endorsing a ceasefire. But even then, the United Nations has an enforcement issue. It lacks an independent military force. And in the case of Gaza, there were no sanctions or arms embargoes that would have helped thwart that Israeli military action.

15:06And looking at today, the U.N. has an even more limited role in Gaza, having voted last year to effectively place responsibility for Gaza's post-war governance and security into the hands of the Trump-led Board of Peace. Akbar? I'll note all those weaknesses out there. that Elizabeth raises, and especially on the Security Council, the ability of countries like Russia and China to say, you as the U.S. are shielding Israel, essentially everyone's accusing each other of double standards, which becomes a race to the bottom, right? The U.S. will say, Russia, you're doing this in Ukraine. The Russians will say it about Gaza.

15:42That's a huge problem. But I'll just stick up a tiny bit, Todd, for the U.N., because we have to remember, too, that it's not just diplomats. It's U.N. experts on the ground. more UN personnel have been killed in Gaza than any other conflict. And these are the people who are running schools, gathering up, being able to diffuse mines, who are really the technical expertise that's needed. It's a political choice by the US to pull back funding from that, to pull back funding from UNRWA, kind of the only hope for Palestinians in the region. So when you look at the UN as a flawed institution, those flaws are not just because of the UN's own structure.

16:20And I'd also note on the Board of Peace, this has been framed as an alternative, but it's an extremely ad hoc alternative with no real accountability or principles that people can hold it to, right? This is a board on which President Trump has said he will, for the duration of his life, be the president, whether he's America's leader or not. And it's not constrained, of course, by questions of consensus among other countries, funding, all of that. We're hearing from many of you on Israel, Gaza, and the UN. David writes, I totally oppose virtually everything that has happened under the Netanyahu administration in Israel.

16:56Under his policies, Israel has become a pariah. And Daryl in Ohio writes this, the UN is simply theater that allows for fancy speeches and little else. Iran and Hamas want to destroy Israel. Putin does not believe in an independent Ukraine. Until those philosophies are tackled, nothing will change in the short or the long term. Akbar, I'm interested in your reaction to that. You've made clear that the UN does more than fancy speeches. There are people on the ground and they do get targeted. They are in harm's way. But you mentioned the fundamentals and unless the fundamentals of Israel's occupation, now occupation in Gaza and the West Bank and those things change, that the realities won't change.

17:39And here's Daryl pointing to other realities on the ground, which is Hamas is dedicated to Israel's destruction. Putin does not believe in a free Ukraine and that these are fundamentals that need to change as well. When we look at obstinacy, right, among international actors, whether that is Hamas's dedication to militancy against Israel, whether that's Putin's kind of view of Ukraine as a free country, frankly. it's the question of how do you get a third party to massage those issues to massage that obstinacy and reach a compromise is really important because it's not necessarily going to be those who have a direct stake there that's where having an independent body has been seen as kind of the only way to achieve compromises when you look at something like the iran deal right that didn't take away iran's opposition to israel or to the u.s as long-standing foes it did through a UN Security Council resolution-backed process and through the lifting of sanctions, again, through the UN, through professional diplomats, not just America and Iran negotiating directly, was able to put a cap on Iran's enrichment of its nuclear sort of stockpile, again, through a UN agency, a UN-linked agency, the IAEA.

18:51So again, having that independent third party is important, even when everyone's maybe quite opposite. that. We're talking about the U.N., Elizabeth Hagedorn, and we have to look back to a year ago because you might have forgotten that it was only a year ago that major nations, U.K., Canada, Australia, France, formally recognized the state of Palestine. Have those recognitions brought any tangible changes to the dynamic at the U.N. this year? I mean, we have seen some limited steps from the UK, several other European countries that recently moved to sanction or restrict goods from Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

19:32That was significant. Also, this week, Canada announced about$71 million in support for Palestinian institutions. It also said it would restrict goods from settlements. But at the end of the day, this Palestine recognition wave still feels largely symbolic. It is not significantly changed conditions on the ground where settlement growth and settler violence in the West Bank have continued on land that Palestinians envision as part of their future state. And in Gaza, the situation on the humanitarian side and the security side remains dire. And Israel still controls more than half the territory there.

20:15Elizabeth Hagedorn, we're going to let you go in just a moment. I know you're busy with reporting, but I want to check in on Iran on the sidelines before we do. You mentioned it before, but Iran, of course, does not have diplomatic relations with the United States, does have a delegation in New York at the UN. We've seen pictures online of the Iranian government jet on the tarmac at JFK, which is quite a sight. U.S. and Iran haven't had diplomatic relations in many, many decades. They are talking at the summit. What's going on behind the scenes this year? Give us some more detail. Well, we don't have a lot of detail, and that's because both sides aren't really sharing.

20:56I asked Secretary of State Rubio about this yesterday in his press conference, and he would not be specific when it came to the format of the talks between the U.S. and Iran or what was discussed, other than to say that there was no major breakthrough, but that it was positive that the two sides were meeting at all, even if it was indirectly via mediators, the Iranians, are downplaying the exchange. They say it's just a continuation of indirect contacts with the U.S., that this is not necessarily a new negotiation. And I just think the bigger issue here is there's no simple return to the interim deal we saw the two sides reach in June.

21:37That agreement had a temporary ceasefire. It called for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, a path forward towards nuclear talks. That collapsed. And since it's collapsed, both sides have hardened their demands. Interestingly, both Trump and Pazashkian left the door open to diplomacy in their speeches to the UN this week. I think the question now is, can these indirect talks we're seeing here in New York kickstart a more formal process, or are they just representing a continued exchange of messages that we've seen for these past few months? That's Elizabeth Hagedorn from All Monitor reporting from the sidelines at the U.N.

22:18General Assembly meeting in New York. Elizabeth, thank you so much. Thanks, Todd. Well, Akbar Shahid Ahmed of The Washington Sun is sticking with us because Akbar has a new book. It's called Crossing the Red Line, and it's a deeply reported account of how the Biden administration handled the war in Gaza from October 7th until the end of Joe Biden's term. It's an account of how that happened, who made those calls and what it all cost. Now, Akbar, you interviewed over 150 officials, diplomats, insiders over the course of those two years. So let's start here. October 7th, 2023, Israel's reeling from the October 7th attack.

23:00Hamas and Islamic Jihad, murdered some 1 ,200 people in southern Israel, took 251 hostages, and shared videos of this horrific violence all over the world. It was obvious at that point that an Israeli response was coming. Everyone knew it. Here was the message that President Biden had for Israel on October 18th. Justice must be done. But I caution this while you feel that rage, Don't be consumed by it. After 9-11, we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes. Akbar, you write that despite this entreaty from Biden, the administration ignored overt public warning signs that Israel was set on a policy of collective punishment.

23:52Just go back to that statement and its aftermath. That moment, those kind of first two weeks after October 7th, set the tone for everything we've seen for three years, and importantly for a much greater escalation I know we'll talk about in the Trump era, including likely the empowerment of Trump as the president again. The Biden administration processing Israel's trauma, seeing what it had gone through, nearly 800 civilians killed in that attack on October 7th, and Israel worrying about a joint attack, not just by Hamas, but also by Iran and by Hezbollah in Lebanon, essentially was talking to the Israelis and saying, there are various ways you can go about responding here.

24:34What I highlight in the book is that U.S. officials discussed, Todd, an option that wasn't a massive sweeping ground invasion of Gaza. They, in fact, actually restricted the Israelis from launching an offensive into Lebanon on October 11th. they had an awareness that this violence could both be hugely costly on a human scale and also not achieve any of Israel's stated strategic ends in terms of actually disempowering Hamas, bringing home the hostages. They were willing to use that leverage. And that Biden warning is so crucial in that the US administration is tying October 7th to America's own experience of 9-11 and saying, we've been there with you on trauma, be smart in how you respond to this.

25:19We've seen Iraq and Afghanistan where it's done to our country. And then Akbar, talk about the days after that. Here's the president of the United States. Yes, recognizing the collective trauma, tying it to 9-11 and a public warning, don't make the same mistakes we made. In other words, overreach and rage in the reaction to 9-11. I'm gonna decode that message a little bit and say the war in Iraq, right? The Iraq war, mistake, retrospect proves it. The war in Afghanistan, less so, but 20 years of quagmire, of course. Don't make the mistakes of rage that we made. What happened then in the weeks as it became clear that Netanyahu would ignore that advice?

26:05Precisely what the Biden administration worried would happen, a tremendous civilian toll. you saw Israeli strikes backed by the U.S. with American-provided bombs, wipe out entire neighborhoods, target civilian buildings, target schools, target hospitals, target medical personnel. And to the question of the Iraq war and the Afghanistan war, the failure there that the U.S. is referencing and that many Biden administration officials had said they had learned a lesson from was both that it was strategically and just economically costly at home, also that kept fueling problems the U.S. then had to go back and address, right?

26:43So the Iraq war, direct line to the rise of ISIS. These Biden administration officials who have managed those policies, figures like Brett McGurk, an advisor to Bush, advisor to Obama, advisor to Trump, now advisor to Biden, are deeply rooted in Middle East policymaking. They've seen how your choices can fuel a backlash. What they're not doing is restraining Israel. And as my reporting reveals, there's suddenly, and fueling a huge amount of alarm among government professionals, a distortion of normal U.S. government processes. So a distortion of how intelligence is treated, a distortion of how weapons transfers happen to support this Israeli campaign while Biden administration figures are saying this might not achieve what it wants to.

27:28Well, your book is called Red Lines. I mean, there was a warning there from Biden before the war started. Then flash forward to southern Gaza, to Rafah. Really, I mean, I think that's where probably largely the title of the book comes from because the United States did draw a red line in Rafah. Here's John Kirby, May of 2024, after an Israeli airstrike killed at least 45 people in refugee tents in Rafah. Again, we're in the southern part of Gaza. The president has been very clear and very direct about what our expectations are for Israeli operations in Rafah specifically, but in Gaza writ large.

28:07We don't support, we won't support a major ground operation in Rafah. And Akbar, Israel blew through that expectation and through that red line. What happened behind the scenes? Publicly and flagrantly, Prime Minister Netanyahu looked at Biden's red line and shattered into a million pieces. What was going on behind the scenes at this point, we're now six or seven months into Israel's U.S.-backed offensive in Gaza. It's told is clear, allegations of tens of thousands of war crimes have already been made, and upwards of 20 ,000 Palestinians have already been killed. Biden, in setting that red line in March of 2024, is kind of echoing what he said post-October 7th, where being able to learn from our foreign policy mistakes lets change course.

28:54Many people I talked to at that time within government actually became hopeful, right, that the Biden administration might learn a lesson. The fact that they then, at that point where Kirby is saying we had a clear expectation, don't impose any consequences for the Israelis blowing through the red line, sends that broader message of impunity and really disheartens people working on the policy. Just very quickly, Akbar, are we seeing, When Kirby set those expectations and then nothing changed, is that a sign of dissension in the Biden administration? Were we seeing the pressure points of people who disagreed?