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The UN Security Council and the Veto: Why Resolutions on Palestine Keep Failing

On the morning of 18 October 2023, eleven days after the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel and as Israeli bombardment of Gaza was killing hundreds of civilians a day, the United States cast a veto in the UN Security Council. The draft resolution, tabled by Brazil, called for humanitarian pauses to allow aid into a territory already running out of water, food, and medicine. It did not pass. The veto — single, unilateral, procedurally absolute — was enough.

That moment was not an aberration. It was the continuation of a pattern that stretches back to the early 1970s: the United States using its permanent-member veto to shield Israel from binding Security Council action. Understanding that pattern — its frequency, its legal consequences, and the rare moments when it has broken — is essential to understanding why the architecture of international law has so consistently failed to protect Palestinians.

How the Veto Works, and Why It Matters

The UN Charter, adopted in 1945, grants five permanent members of the Security Council — the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China — the power to block any substantive resolution with a single negative vote. Unlike General Assembly resolutions, which are non-binding, Security Council resolutions passed under Chapter VII carry the force of international law and can mandate sanctions, referrals to the International Criminal Court, or other enforcement mechanisms. The veto, in other words, does not merely delay action — it extinguishes the Council’s legal authority to act at all.

For Palestinians, the practical consequence has been stark: the body with the greatest enforcement power in the international system has been structurally prevented from applying that power to their situation whenever the United States has chosen to intervene.

Approximately Fifty Vetoes: A Record Without Parallel

The United States has used its veto on behalf of Israel — blocking resolutions on settlements, military operations, civilian casualties, and the status of Jerusalem — approximately 50 times since 1972, according to the UN’s own veto records and analyses published by scholars including Rashid Khalidi in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020). No other bilateral veto relationship comes close in volume or consistency.

Early vetoes blocked condemnations of Israeli military operations in Lebanon and raids into neighboring Arab states. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the United States vetoed resolutions criticizing settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem — land that the Fourth Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory, explicitly prohibits an occupying power from settling with its own civilian population. The vetoes did not change the legal status of settlements — the International Court of Justice reaffirmed their illegality in its July 2004 advisory opinion on the Wall, and again in its landmark July 2024 advisory opinion on the prolonged occupation — but they did ensure the Council could impose no consequences.

The pattern has not required a majority. Because the veto operates alone, a single American “no” has been sufficient to terminate Council action regardless of how the other fourteen members voted. In several cases, resolutions attracted twelve, thirteen, or even fourteen votes in favor before being killed by the United States acting alone.

UNSC Resolution 2334: The Exception That Proves the Rule

The clearest illustration of what happens when the veto is withheld came in December 2016. Resolution 2334, which declared Israeli settlement construction in the occupied Palestinian territory a “flagrant violation” of international law and demanded an immediate halt, passed 14–0. It passed for one reason: the outgoing Obama administration chose to abstain rather than veto.

The resolution was not new in substance — it restated obligations long recognized under international law. But its passage as a binding Security Council resolution gave those obligations a qualitatively different legal standing. It explicitly invoked the inadmissibility of acquiring territory by force, called on states to distinguish between Israel’s sovereign territory and the occupied territories in their dealings, and instructed the Council to monitor compliance. Rights organizations including Al-Haq and Human Rights Watch welcomed it as a rare moment of institutional accountability.

The incoming Trump administration immediately signaled it would not honor the resolution’s implications. Israeli settlement construction continued and accelerated in subsequent years, documented extensively by Peace Now’s Settlement Watch project. But 2334 remained on the books — a marker of what the Council could produce when the veto was not deployed, and a baseline for subsequent legal arguments before international courts.

Gaza, 2023–2024: The Veto in Real Time

The scale of Security Council paralysis during Israel’s military campaign in Gaza beginning in October 2023 has been documented in granular detail. Between October 2023 and mid-2024, the United States vetoed multiple draft resolutions calling for ceasefires or humanitarian pauses — including the October 2023 Brazilian draft, a December 2023 UAE-sponsored ceasefire resolution that attracted thirteen votes in favor, and further attempts in early 2024.

The humanitarian context in which those vetoes operated was documented by OCHA, UNRWA, WHO, and UNICEF in real time. UNRWA reported that by early 2024, more than 1.7 million Palestinians — the vast majority of Gaza’s population — had been internally displaced. WHO documented the systematic destruction of healthcare infrastructure. The UN’s own humanitarian coordinator described conditions in Gaza as among the worst the agency had recorded anywhere in recent decades.

It was not until March 2024 that the Council passed Resolution 2728, demanding an immediate ceasefire during Ramadan. The United States abstained, echoing the 2016 pattern. The ceasefire called for in the resolution was not implemented. No enforcement mechanism was triggered. The limits of even a passed resolution — without Chapter VII teeth and without US backing — were made plain.

The General Assembly, lacking binding authority but not a political voice, passed multiple emergency resolutions demanding ceasefires with large majority votes. And the International Court of Justice, responding to a genocide case brought by South Africa under the Genocide Convention, issued provisional measures orders in January and May 2024 instructing Israel to take all measures to prevent acts that could fall under the Convention and to ensure humanitarian aid access. Those orders were binding on Israel as a matter of international law — but the Security Council, the only body capable of enforcing ICJ orders, remained blocked.

The Legal and Human Cost of Structural Impunity

Noura Erakat, a Palestinian-American legal scholar and author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (2019), has argued that law in the Palestinian context has operated not as a neutral arbiter but as a terrain of political contest — one in which powerful states selectively invoke or suppress legal norms. The veto record of the Security Council is perhaps the most concrete institutional expression of that argument. When the body charged with international peace and security cannot act, the costs fall on the people — in this case, Palestinians — who most depend on it acting.

Those costs are not abstract. They are measured in unbuilt accountability, unenforced rulings, and the continued expansion of settlements across the West Bank that each passing year makes harder to reverse. The veto does not create Israeli policy. But for more than five decades, it has ensured that the international community’s most powerful legal instrument has not stood in its way.

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