UN body calls for Israel to be held accountable for possible war crimes

The UN Human Rights Council on Friday adopted a resolution calling for Israel to be held accountable for possible war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the Gaza Strip.

The move came as Israel finally succumbed to unprecedented US pressure and opened new food corridors into Gaza. The Israeli Defence Forces also disclosed that it had sacked two senior military commanders responsible for ordering the killing of seven aid workers earlier this week.

The unusually swift investigation found the order to kill was made on the basis of one grainy piece of drone camera footage that mistakenly was taken as identifying an armed gunman. IDF rules are supposed to require multiple confirmations before a strike is ordered. A colonel and a major have been dismissed and three others reprimanded.

The military’s advocate general will now decide if they will face further punishment, or prosecution.

The vote by the UNHRC, a body that Israel reviles, marks another moment in the slow global ostracisation of Israel over its war in Gaza, which has so far killed an estimated 33,000 people. Twenty-eight countries voted in favour, 13 abstained and six voted against the resolution.

The findings about the clear disregard of procedures in the killing of the aid workers will only add to the outcry about Israel’s abuse of humanitarian law.

It follows what appears to have been a decisive phone call between Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday in which Biden warned US policy towards Gaza would change if Israel continued to defy calls to alter its approach to the supply of aid.

Israel said within hours of the phone call that it had approved the reopening of the Erez crossing into northern Gaza and the temporary use of Ashdod port in southern Israel, two longstanding demands of aid agencies and western powers. Israel also agreed to allow an increase in Jordanian aid through the Kerem Shalom crossing point.

It was a rare show of naked US power over Israel that many had been urging Biden to make for months. A total of 33,091 Palestinians have been killed since the Hamas massacre of Israelis on 7 October, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza.

In a further shift, Biden also urged Netanyahu to show a more flexible stance in talks over the release of the hostages taken by Hamas and of Palestinian political prisoners. For the first time, Biden said Israel should accept an immediate ceasefire.

William Burns, the director of the CIA, is expected to travel to Cairo this weekend to meet with his Egyptian and Israeli counterparts and the Qatari prime minister to try to reach a breakthrough in the talks, which have been deadlocked with both sides accusing the other of intransigence.

Hamas has been demanding the return of displaced residents of northern Gaza to their homes, but the key stumbling block is Hamas’s demand for a total ceasefire, as opposed to an interim truce, as a precondition to the deal. The two sides in successive rounds of talks have found it impossible to bridge the chasm.

As part of the apparent change of tone, Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, said the US would be looking at specific metrics to decide if Israel was heeding its demands. He said the US would be looking at the number of trucks entering Gaza and looking to see accountability for the Israeli strike on the World Central Kitchen aid convoy that killed six western aid workers. Indicators that the threat of famine was receding would be another US test, Blinken said. He welcomed the first steps taken by Israel but insisted Israel would be tested on the results of its actions.

Israel has vowed to investigate what it says was a tragic mistake in the aid convoy strike but which critics say is symbolic of the Israeli attitude towards aid entering Gaza. The incident appears to have been the final straw for the Biden administration, which had been under intense diplomatic pressure, as well as domestic political stress, to take a tougher line.

There was growing evidence that Israel was haemorrhaging support inside the US, particularly among Democratic voters.

Biden’s rival for the presidency, Donald Trump, warned on Thursday that Israel was “losing the PR war” in Gaza because of the flood of distressing images coming out of the territory.

In an interview with the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Thursday, Trump criticised Israel for releasing the “most heinous” and “most horrible” videos of buildings being destroyed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza.

“I’m not sure that I’m loving the way they’re doing it, because you’ve got to have victory. You have to have a victory, and it’s taking a long time,” he said.

Related: What aid routes into Gaza will Israel open and what will happen next?

The decision to open new aid routes was taken by Israel’s security cabinet within hours of the Biden phone call, and the normal objections from the rightwingers inside Netanyahu’s cabinet were swept aside. The national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was not present at the vote held at the beginning of the session, said: “They voted in the cabinet before I arrived even though they knew I was in a security meeting.”

Ben-Gvir asked: “Since when do we vote at the beginning of the session? Never. We always vote at the end. You knew I was delayed in a security meeting. You knew I would object, so you wanted to rush the vote at the beginning of the session. What kind of behaviour is this? Is this how critical decisions are made in the cabinet?”

John Kirby the US national security spokesperson, was reluctant to detail any specific threats made to Israel by Biden in the 30-minute phone call other than to say the US approach to Gaza would change.

He seemed unwilling to accept that the US was on the brink of suspending arms supplies to Israel, arguing that most of the arms being sent were needed by Israel to protect itself from threats by Iran rather than to be used against Hamas hideouts in Gaza.

But Biden must have made clear that the level of military support was on the agenda. Rishi Sunak had delivered a similar message from the UK early this week, but it is the US on which Israel depends for its military survival. Israel was also losing support from states with which it had struck normalisation deals, such as the United Arab Emirates.

Netanyahu faces a deep dilemma in that he has told the Israeli public and assured rightwingers in his cabinet that his objective is total victory, and this requires rooting out the final Hamas battalions sheltering in underground tunnels in Rafah, the city where more than 1 million displaced Palestinian refugees are sheltering.

The US is not willing to countenance an attack on Rafah, apparently leaving Netanyahu without a clear path to victory.