Does a viral video prove that Israel voted "for Palestine" during a United Nations Security Council meeting? No, that's not true: In the meeting the then-president of the U.N. Security Council read a list of the countries supporting a resolution on Gaza days after the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. He included Israel but he immediately corrected himself and clarified that Israel was "not part of this list." Furthermore, Israel doesn't vote in the U.N. Security Council.
The claim reappeared in a post (archived here) on Instagram where it was published on January 28, 2024. It opened:
Israel votes for Palestine in a meeting of United Nation's Security Council!
The vote was to collect Humanitarian aid for Gaza.
#unitednations #politics #israel #palestine #gaza #politics #usa #funny #meme #memes #funnyvideos #funny
This is how it appeared on Instagram at the time of writing:
(Source: Instagram screenshot taken on Tue Apr 23 14:20:44 2024 UTC)
Published in January 2024, the post implied that the video was recent to the time of publication. However, the video predated the date of the post by more than three months.
The video shared in the post captured Sérgio França Danese (archived here), a representative of Brazil in the U.N. who also was the president of the U.N. Security Council in October 2023 on a rotating basis. He was seen in the clip listing different countries:
Belarus, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Indonesia, Israel...
After a puzzled look to the side, he continued:
Jordan...
The footage reused on Instagram was taken from a much longer recording (archived here) that documented a U.N. Security Council meeting on October 16, 2023. Its agenda was dedicated to "the situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question", as described on the U.N. website (archived here.)
The meeting took place 11 days after Hamas invaded Israel and Israel responded with a military operation directed at Gaza.
The longer video shows that immediately after Danese finished reading the list of countries, a woman in a yellow jacket reached out to him whispering, "You should correct... Not Israel." And at the 02:29 mark, Danese did so out loud:
I should correct myself: Israel is not part of this list.
Furthermore, the fragment reused in the post on Instagram was not even about voting -- it was the list of the countries that supported a humanitarian ceasefire resolution proposed by Russia, and not all of them could vote.
As clarified by Danese, Israel was not in that group.
As seen at the 1:28 mark (archived here), Israel, a U.N. member state (archived here), participated in the meeting. But between its admission and this writing, Israel has never been elected (archived here) as a U.N. Security Council member to be able to vote. The Security Council consists of five permanent members -- China, the U.S., the U.K., France and Russia -- and 10 elected member nations that are in the Council for two-year terms.
The transcript of the meeting confirms that Israel was not among those who participated in voting on the humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza on October 16, 2023:
(Source: UN screenshot taken on Tue Apr 23 15:17:12 2024 UTC)
Previously, the same claim was debunked by AFP (archived here.)
Other Lead Stories fact checks about the Hamas-Israel war can be found here.
