By Matthew Russell Lee, Exclusive
UNITED NATIONS, January 10 -- The humanitarian consequences of Israel's policy of settlements was raised in the UN Security Council late on Tuesday afternoon, after a closed door meeting about Children and Armed Conflict.
Morocco, replacing Lebanon as the Council's Arab member, requested that the Council get a briefing on the topic. There was an attempt to expand the topic to cover other issues, and actors, but it was resisted.
And then "one country" -- the host country, the US, a well placed source told Inner City Press -- called Morocco's request "ill-timed and counter-productive." Others said after that it is the settlements that are ill-timed.
The request made by Morocco was foreshadowed by recent statements by Palestine's Observer to the UN Riyad Mansour. He often refers, including on the question of Palestine's application for full UN membership, to the opposition of "a single powerful member," the US.
Whether or not there are now nine votes in the Council in favor of Palestinian UN membership, the US remains the outlier, the source said, even behind closed doors.
The meeting that preceded Morocco's request involved the UN's Children and Armed Conflict representative Radhika Coomaraswamy being questioned about how her Office decides to include countries in her Annual Reports.
Already India and Colombia, as current Council members, had been raising these questions. Now Pakistan has joined the Council.
Coomaraswamy's report says that the UN has no access to the Federally Administered Territories in Pakistan; it says that Colombia's national army used Children for intelligence.
One quip in reply was that, "We have very intelligent children." A more detailed presentation from those most skeptical of what they call Coomaraswamy's "mandate creep" has been promised -- watch this site.
