With Israel, Palestine and Lebanon on Fire, Why is UN Mediation Absent?

Three weeks after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks precipitated the Israeli invasion of Gaza, the United Nations held an internal meeting in New York intended to shape its policy response.

A senior official who spoke to this analyst on condition of anonymity said he presented a paper arguing that the UN was confronted with a new type of conflict. He noted that the Palestinians view their struggle as existential, while non-state armed groups in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen further complicate and differentiate the conflict from those the UN has sought to mediate in the past. However, he said, most participants in the meeting dismissed his conclusions, contending that hostilities would soon end with the elimination of Hamas.

Seven months later, UN agencies in Amman held what one official in attendance described as a “surreal meeting” chaired by Sigrid Kaag, the recently appointed Senior Humanitarian and Reconstruction Coordinator for Gaza. “I was shocked by the interventions I heard because they all still seemed to think that this war would end with Hamas disappearing and the Palestinian Authority stepping up to administer Gaza,” said the UN official, also speaking on condition of anonymity. “It was UN business-as-usual, going from one agency chief to the next to outline what their agency could provide in a reconstruction scenario, with no one understanding that we’re now in a different ballgame.”

The war is now approaching ten months, with a death toll nearing 40,000. Yet UN officials interviewed for this article described their organization as being gripped by inertia and looming irrelevance. Not only has it been reduced to watching Gaza be destroyed, but its mediation imprint is also shrinking in other conflict-afflicted areas such as Africa.

Chris Gunness, a former spokesman for the embattled UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), said that “lots of active mediation is going on but almost nothing meaningful is being done by the UN. It’s in retreat as a mediator and national-level and smaller-level mediators are filling in the gap.”

UN missions have closed in Sudan – the scene of an even greater humanitarian disaster than Gaza — and Mali, at the host states’ request, while the mandates of missions in Iraq and Congo have not been renewed.

Several UN officials faulted Secretary-General António Guterres for shying away from high-profile mediations even as the international system experiences a particularly tense period. Guterres’ credibility has also been damaged by having to fire three appointees: his envoy for technology over harassment charges; the head of the UN Office for Project Services over embezzlement; and the head of the Economic Commission for Africa over an ill-considered appointment. Guterres’ deputy, Amina Mohamed, faces corruption charges in Nigeria, while Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) chief Rola Dashti is accused of mismanagement.

A Portuguese politician whose formative years were spent under a military dictatorship, Guterres is the only SG not to have initiated a peacekeeping mission. Despite promising a “surge in diplomacy for peace” when he came to office in 2017, failed mediations in Cyprus and Libya dialed back his engagement. Guterres’ greatest success has been the now-discontinued Black Sea Grain Initiative, which regulated the export of Russian and Ukrainian grain, but it was negotiated by an independent mediation body — the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue.

Guterres’ office did not respond promptly to a request for comment.

With the UN Security Council also hobbled by antagonism among its most powerful permanent members – the U.S., Russia, and China – local mediators have assumed roles once performed by UN entities.

UN bodies like the Jerusalem-based Office of the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process (UNSCO) and the Beirut-based Office of the United Nations Special Coordinator for Lebanon (UNSCOL) have been relegated to a back seat by Americans, Qataris, and Egyptians, often with intelligence backgrounds, running negotiations between Hamas and Israel.

Meanwhile, “UNRWA has been discredited and is fighting for its life,” said a UN official serving in the region speaking on condition of anonymity. “The Israelis PNG’ed the Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process’s deputy so that tells you under how much pressure UNSCO is.”

Israel accuses UNRWA of colluding with Hamas and has killed over 180 UNRWA staff in bombings in Gaza. Legislation introduced into the Knesset seeks to designate the UN body as a terrorist organization. An independent panel led by former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna reviewed UNRWA and made 50 recommendations for improving its neutrality, but did not investigate Israeli allegations that 12 UNRWA staffers participated in the Oct. 7 attacks.

Even if prolonged negotiations between Hamas and Israel finally produce a ceasefire, the question of who will administer post-conflict Gaza looms. The UN may hand over some of UNRWA’s functions to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the World Food Program.

In Lebanon, the newly appointed head of UNSCOL, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, is charged with keeping channels open with Israelis, Iranians, and Saudis as fears rise of a widening war. “We were on the cusp of restarting negotiations when war broke out on 7 October,” said the high UN official in New York, “with the Americans assuring both sides that Hezbollah would pull their forces south of the Litani [River] and the Lebanese Army would redeploy troops [into the South].”

This is the formula established by UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the last Israel-Lebanon war in 2006.

UNIFIL, the UN mission overseeing the Blue Line separating Israel from Lebanon, continues to hold regular meetings between representatives of the Israeli and Lebanese armies but was not part of negotiations by U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein, which fixed the maritime boundary between the two countries in 2022. An agreement over the land boundary is still subject to 13 points of contention, which, according to a UN official formerly working in Lebanon, have been whittled down to six, with the larger sticking points in Ghajar and Shebaa. Israel occupied the northern section of Ghajar, a Druze village, in 2006.

In the Red Sea, the UN has limited itself to adopting a resolution in January demanding that the Houthis immediately cease attacks on merchant and commercial vessels off the coast of Yemen, and another reiterating the same message on June 28. The countries sponsoring the resolutions opposed linking the targeting of commercial ships with the Israeli invasion of Gaza, the reason the Houthis say they are engaging in this conduct. On July 19, a Houthi drone hit Israel proper for the first time, killing one person in Tel Aviv.

“There isn’t a strong sense of a regional strategy,” said Richard Gowan, UN director for the International Crisis Group. “It does feel incredibly fragmented, and all with this fundamental reality that it comes down to dealing with Iran, but does the UN have a way of talking with Iran [the patron of the anti-Israel non-state groups]?”

‘Intelligence Diplomacy’ Supplants the UN

While the UN is sidelined, ‘‘intelligence diplomacy’’ is taking an increasingly assertive role. CIA director Bill Burns is the chief U.S. envoy to the Hamas-Israel negotiations, where he liaises with Egyptian and Qatari intelligence, while the Israeli team is led by Mossad Director David Barnea and includes the chief of the Shin Bet.

“Why are we sending the CIA director instead of the Secretary of State?” asked Bruce Cronin, a professor of political science at City College of New York and Columbia University. “It’s an interesting phenomenon that the intel agencies are getting more involved and reminiscent of the Iraq occupation when the military played a major diplomatic role because they were on the ground.”

Although the UN employs officials with an intelligence background, it does not have access to the kind of information that might give it leverage in mediation. A current UN mediator speaking on condition of anonymity highlighted the advantages of dealing with intelligence officials as mediators: “You know that they have direct access, are pragmatic, and are talking directly with the ultimate decisionmaker.”

“Spies have always been involved in negotiations but there’s a feeling now that in many cases intel services are simply more influential internally than diplomatic services,” said Gowan. “You have the rise of the non-western intel services such as the Gulf Arabs, where definitely their intelligence services are often shaping policy, and this is very much a growing influence in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East.”

The UN’s Middle Eastern travails are part of a bigger picture of fragmentation that relates to ambitious new regional powers taking larger roles in their backyards. “It’s more and more difficult for the UN to play the role it had in the 90s where there was a tendency for it to do a process solely on its own or to be recognized as a lead,” Gowan said. “You have the reality of being in a much more complex world where many actors either don’t want mediation processes to succeed or they want to control them.”

Regional powers such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and Egypt have taken the lead. Turkey has been running a high-profile mediation between Somalia and Ethiopia over their land dispute; Saudi Arabia has been mediating between the sides in the Sudanese civil war, and Oman is running talks on Yemen between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia.

Another mediation which the UN has subcontracted is Libya, where former Special Representative of the Secretary-General Ghassan Salameh brought in the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue. The UN’s disengagement, combined with a hard cash crunch as traditional donors delay pledged payments or offer less, is also a source of anxiety for UN employees.

“The Russians and the Chinese will never let the UN go down the drain as the veto and platform are too important, but they want it to continue under their agenda, no longer the Western, liberal one,” said a NY-based senior UN official speaking on condition of anonymity. “The damage done is not irreversible, but it will take a strong new leader to rebuild relationships.”

Iason Athanasiadis is a writer, documentary filmmaker, and former UN officer covering the Middle East.