Palestine seeks vote on full UN membership at Security Council

The Palestinian Authority wants the United Nations Security Council to vote this month to make it a full member of the world body, the Palestinian UN envoy has told the Reuters news agency, a move that can be blocked by Israel's staunch ally, the United States.

Riyad Mansour, who has permanent observer status in the UN, made the Palestinian plans public on Monday as the brutal Israeli war on besieged Gaza is in its six-month, and Israel is expanding illegal Zionist settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Mansour told Reuters that the aim was for the Security Council to take a decision at an April 18 ministerial meeting on the Middle East, but that a vote had yet to be scheduled.

He said a 2011 Palestinian application for full membership was still pending because the 15-member council never took a formal decision.

"The intention is to put the application to a vote in the Security Council this month," he added.

Malta will be president of the Security Council in April.

Malta's UN Ambassador Vanessa Frazier said she had yet to receive a formal request for action from the Palestinians.

Malta established relations with Israel in 1965, and both sides maintain relations to this day, with certain points of tension in 1973 and 1987.

Since its independence in 1964, Malta also had relations with Palestine.

Alongside a push to end the war, global pressure has grown for a resumption of efforts to broker a two-state solution — with an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

UN approval

An application to become a full UN member needs to be approved by the Security Council — where the United States can cast a veto — and then at least two-thirds of the 193-member General Assembly.

The US mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Israel's UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan said that the Palestinian Authority had not met the required criteria for statehood in its 2011 bid for full UN membership and "has only moved further from the goals it should achieve since."

"In addition, whoever supports recognising a Palestinian state at such a time not only gives a prize to terror, but also backs unilateral steps which are contradictory to the agreed upon principle of direct negotiations," Erdan said.

A Security Council committee assessed the Palestinian application in 2011 for several weeks.

But the committee did not reach a unanimous position and the council never voted on a resolution to recommend Palestinian membership.

At the time, diplomats said the Palestinians did not have enough support in the Security Council to force a veto by the United States, which had said it opposed the move.

A resolution needs at least nine votes in favour and no vetoes by the US, Russia, China, France or Britain to be adopted.

Instead of pushing for a council vote, the Palestinians went to the UN General Assembly seeking to become a non-member observer state.

The assembly approved de facto recognition of the sovereign state of Palestine in November 2012.

Illegal settlements and genocide

Little progress has been made in achieving Palestinian statehood since the signing of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in the early 1990s.

Among the main obstacles is expanding Israeli illegal settlements. Israeli settlements risk eliminating any practical possibility of a Palestinian state, UN human rights chief Volker Turk said last month.

He said the transfer by Israel of its own population into occupied territory amounted to a war crime.

US President Joe Biden's administration said in February that Israel's illegal expansion of settlements in occupied West Bank was inconsistent with international law, signalling a return to long-standing US policy on the issue that the previous administration of Donald Trump had reversed.

Israel has killed nearly 32,800 Palestinians and wounded 75,300 others since the start of the war amid mass destruction and shortages of necessities.

Israel has imposed a crippling blockade on the Gaza Strip, leaving its population, particularly residents of northern Gaza, on the verge of starvation.

The Israeli war has pushed 85 percent of Gaza's population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water, and medicine, while 60 percent of the enclave's infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.

Israel stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice [ICJ], which last week asked Israel to do more to prevent starvation crisis in Gaza. A leading UN expert in her finding reported that Israel was carrying out genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.