 The United States vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire. Now, let's say that again, the U.S. was the only country to object to calling for an end to the brutal Israeli bombing of Gaza. Now, this bombing has killed over 17,000 people, including thousands of children. In this week and episode of Daily Debrief, we take a look at what happened at the UN Security Council on Friday, and what is the connected issue? The U.S. proposal for a military budget. On Friday, the UN Security Council debated the situation in Gaza where brutal Israeli attacks have led to over 17,000 deaths. The discussion came about as a result of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres invoking Article 99 of the UN Charter, bringing the matter to the Council's notice. A resolution for a ceasefire was voted on. 13 countries backed it. One country, the United Kingdom, abstained. One country, that perturbed a permanent member of the Council that's the United States, exercised its veto power blocking the resolution. Of the many moments in the past two months that have revealed the truth about the U.S. position and its backing of Israel, this is perhaps the most stark. We go to Abdul for more on what happened. Abdul, thank you so much for joining us. Security Council discussion and a resolution which I think really provided a clarity on where the world stands at this point. 13 countries voting in support of an immediate ceasefire. The U.K. long close ally of the United States, of course, abstaining and the U.S. being the sole country exercising its veto power against. But could you maybe take us through what happened during these proceedings? The UN Secretary General also making some very powerful remarks. So could you maybe take us through all of that? Well Prashant, yet again on Friday United Nations Security Council failed to adopt a resolution demanding immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza despite the fact that the most of the United Nations Security Council permanent members voted in favor. This was not adopted primarily because the U.S. vetoed the resolution claiming that the language of it is not balanced. It basically does not criticize Hamas and only talks about ceasefire and a return of all the hostages. Apparently this was not enough for the United States to support the resolution. The meeting of the United Nations Security Council was held primarily on the invocation of article 99 of the United Nations Charter by the United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres last week. It was considered to be a very rare move considering the overall situation in Gaza which is becoming back towards every day. More than 17,000 people have Palestinians have been killed and around 47,000 Palestinians have been injured apart from the overall destruction of the besieged Palestinian territory. This is not sustainable and on the basis of that Guterres had basically asked the Security Council to basically take a decisive step and ask Israel to stop its aggression in Gaza. But of course the U.S. which is considered to be supporting the Israeli aggression decided not to go ahead with the rest of the world community and that was obvious because except for the UK which abstained rest of all the 13 countries in the Security Council voted in favour of the resolution. Following the failure of the United Nations Security Council and this is not the first time, this is four or fifth time since the war began on October 7 when the United Nations Security Council has failed and primarily because the U.S. has been adamant to not vote in support of any such resolution finding one excuse or another. The failure of the Security Council to adopt the resolution and the U.S. veto invited of course strong reactions from the permanent members like Russia and China calling it hypocrisy particularly invoking the fact that the U.S. is repeatedly saying that the Israel should avoid killing civilians in its operation in its war in Gaza saying that this particular statement is a hypocrite when you do not support ceasefire resolution in the Security Council. Russia also had a similar thing to say and apart from that of course the overall mood across the members in the United Nations Security Council was of course against this particular veto. Right in the aftermath of the veto we have seen I think a wide variety of responses of condemnation of course from across the globe aid agencies on one hand many many countries also taking a strong position so could you maybe also detail what some of the positions and responses to this veto have been. Well Prashant the failure of the United Nations Security Council to adopt the permanent ceasefire resolution on Friday and the U.S. veto which was primarily responsible for this failure have invited strong reactions from all across the world various human rights organizations including the Doctors Without Borders Amnesty International Human Rights Watch and others have called it basically U.S. defense of something which cannot be morally defensible. Drs Without Borders have called it kind of U.S. double standards primarily in the context that it talks about human rights it talks about peace it talks about avoiding the killing of civilians on various platforms and often has been seen championing the cause of civilian casualties in all across the world but when it comes to Palestine when it comes to Israel U.S. basically completely goes opposite to its stance in the global foras and defends the killing of innocent civilians, children, women and elderly and that's exactly what the veto means. Doctors Without Borders has said this the Human Rights Watch says that U.S. move to basically veto the UN resolution basically amounts to complicity in the war crimes which Israel is committing inside Gaza Strip. Apart from these human rights groups there are various other countries including Palestinians who have condemned the U.S. veto calling it for example Russia calling it assigning a debt warrant for thousands of more Palestinians in the coming days U.S. has done it China called it hypocrisy particularly in underlining the fact that U.S. has been stating that it is concerned about the death of civilians in Gaza and asking Israel to avoid the death of civilians. Chinese Ambassador in the United Nations Security Council said on one side you are talking about avoiding the death of civilians but on the other side vetoing the resolution which talks about ceasefire in Gaza this stand is not this stand is contradictory and this basically amounts to hypocrisy. That's exactly those words by Chinese. Apart from that for example Iran saying that this act again provokes regional escalation and that is not good for the peace of the reason and peace in the world. Apart from that several other countries including some of the close allies of the United States have condemned its veto on to the UN resolution asking for ceasefire on Friday. And finally Abdul of course another week of relentless bombing atrocities of various kinds maybe could you also take us through what the situation on the ground is especially the humanitarian situation and what is happening as far as the war is concerned or rather the genocidal war is concerned where what is the nature of Israel's attacks like at this point. Well Prashant the overall situation in Gaza has further deteriorated since we last talked about it. The overall number of Palestinians killed since the war began on October 7 is about to reach 18,000. The figure is around 17,700 including the murder of civilians in Palestinian civilians in occupied West Bank. The number of Palestinians injured is reaching as 47,000 and if you see the displaced Palestine almost entire Gaza Strip is now can be called displaced because none of the residential areas all across the Gaza Strip none of the shelters are safe and people wherever they are they have been targeted so most of the people are living in tents or in the open air or in unroy schools the overall most of the hospitals when it comes to the health situation in Gaza are shut whatever hospitals are operating they are operating with a very limited resource very limited supply of medicines most of the medical staff is also under stress working more than their capacity the aid situation is also not improving in fact it has deteriorated ever since the ceasefire the humanitarian pause the truce which was there for a week almost a week was basically violated by Israel and since then the number of trucks which basically carry the essential items for the Palestinians affected by war in Gaza have gone down tremendously so the overall situation when it comes to the supply of food medicine, fuel, basic clothing, drinking water everything is becoming back to us and the situation of course has been alarming for a very long time now and gradually there is a scene of collapse in humanitarian operations also so for example the aid workers are also overworked and since this war is now reaching almost two and half months this basically creates a situation where no system can be sustained any longer and that basically means a total collapse of all kind of order and system in the occupied Gaza and that is the overall situation at this moment and it is since the bombing continues ground offensive continues in south and in north more and more people are basically forced to evacuate by the Israeli ground forces when they bomb their houses they bomb their shelters and moved to temporary shelters so it is overall the situation in occupied Gaza is completely out of control at this moment and this is going after a point we will not have words to describe it if this continues for any longer Thank you Abdul for joining us we will come back to you next week Continuing with the US every year Congress debates what is called the National Defence Authorization Act which sanctions money for the Pentagon in the coming year every year we see how the US spends more than the next five to seven countries combined in military expenditure this year the number is at 886 billion and more could have been sanctioned were it not for internal political squabbles we go to Anish for details on the US defence budget Defence bill is something we often talk about mainly because of the fact that every year the numbers seem to keep increasing so what is this proposal, what does this bill look like this year? Well, it is a couple of things actually it is a mixed package in many ways one thing that is quite obvious is the fact that it has a significant increase again we are now closing to about 900 billion dollars of annual funding it is something that no other country like in fact the next couple of countries that actually spend on military defence would not be able to catch up with that kind of budget anytime soon and this is something that is going to continue at a time when the US has other priorities as well something that a few very rare legislators in the Congress have talked about but nevertheless all of that has fallen to tech fears on the other hand what we are seeing is the reinforcement of the AUK-US alliance which is pretty much the key part of the key victory that the Democrats are now claiming for themselves obviously going against all the warnings from Australian activists or even US activists have been talking about how this is going to just militarise a region that does not require a militarisation that has been known for being peaceful for more than a decade for nearly a century now and this is something that is going to aggravate and escalate tensions that is not going to be very good for anybody in the world and on top of that you have an expansion of military aid to Taiwan now there is a separate set of budget being earmarked for training the Taiwanese forces and supposedly upgrading their defence capabilities now that is again going to just put every kind of talks about going for peace or reconciliation that we spoke about actually with the previous Biden sheen meeting in San Francisco completely out of the window that is going to just jeopardise the entire thing altogether and nevertheless tensions are going to keep rising so what we are looking at is like militarisation of newer regions but in some ways the right wing republicans are the ones that are now responsible for scuttling a supplemental bill of about 106 billion dollars for Ukraine and Israel something that would have actually brought the budget close to about a trillion dollars which would have been a record breaking thing obviously but definitely the fact that the US and the Biden administration and the Democrats obviously by and large were advocating for it and you only had like one lone senator among the Democrats or the Democratic blog which is Bernie Sanders voting against it clearly shows that all this lesser evilism is really not about lesser evil it's pretty much just coming together in favour of imperialism and so the scuttling of that doesn't necessarily mean that US is going to stop funding the military programs or all sorts of reactionary movements in Ukraine or the genocide of war in Israel they might find other ways to fund it or other ways to aid these wars but it is a setback that they never expected to happen because even the republicans by and large not just right wing republicans but republicans entirely were against it so that is the only decently good thing that happened of the compromise that actually but nevertheless it actually gave what I said it gave an expanded budget in fact 32 billion dollars extra was given handed to the president by this compromise than what was asked for even so that clearly shows that US is in no way close to any kind of attempt to bring down its militarization programs it is going to continue its new cold war against the world essentially right Anish also ironic because it's taking place during COP 28 at a time when the US military is of course one of the largest institutional polluters but also looking at it what does it mean in terms of you know deployments in terms of weapon systems what does it really mean for world peace actually it is not good news definitely but we are looking at as I pointed out the tensions are going to aggravate because newer deployments are going to happen more modern weaponry and that will also put a strain on budgets around the world including Australia which is you know the submarine nuclear submarine deals have been taken up has been passed by the congress right now despite a descent within the congress even within the republican party but in general what we are looking at is an expanded set of deployments on a more spread out basis around the world and that is going to be a bigger problem than you know even just targeted deployments at some level because what we are looking at is that they are trying to open fronts in different parts of the world obviously and we have talked about these fronts the kind of port lines that they are trying to exploit for their geopolitical aims one thing that I want to add about is also very significantly very clear targeting of China again and it is not just through Taiwan they are going to cut down or phase out a completely end battery imports from China for different purposes saying that it somehow pushes cyber threats against the US military and on top of that there is going to be a funding criteria for films or any kind of production that Pentagon will be spending money on which will include that there should be no censorship from China or that the said work should not censor anything at the behest of China so this kind of anti-China drivel obviously is just magnified and this is supposedly the more level headed president that we are supposed to be having right now but obviously that is something that is quite clear it pretty much shows their target is China China who it sees as a threat it very clearly sees as a threat even with the discourse that we have seen over the past few weeks over the budget and that is now becoming more and more apparent even in like different spending bills now and that is going to clearly show that you know peace is not something that the US is really aiming for right now if it's the only reason why the supplemental bill was cut it is because it is going to put an extra strain on the country's budget and nothing else and it's just the fact that if only if they go bankrupt that they are going to start scaling down their military spending clearly shows that their priorities are far has no scope for peace at any point in fact Ananish thank you so much for that analysis not to mention that like you said a very important point about other NATO countries also ramping up their military expenditures so overall I think the next report might have a lot to say about what is happening in the world right now I'll come back to you when such more such details come out that's all we have in this episode of Daily Deep Brief we'll be back on Monday with a fresh episode meanwhile do visit our website peoplesdispatch.org and follow us on all the social media platforms