UAE warns US time running out to avoid wider Mideast crisis, calls for immediate ceasefire

The United Arab Emirates has urged the United States to support an immediate ceasefire of Israel’s war in Gaza, warning that the risk of a regional conflagration is growing daily as the three-month-long conflict rages on.

“We need a humanitarian ceasefire now; we can’t wait another 100 days,” the UAE Ambassador to the United Nations, Lana Nusseibeh, said in an online interview from New York.

“The risks are high, the war in Gaza is very clearly an open wound and it’s destabilising the region,” she said, adding that the US could play a critical role in easing the tensions.

The warning by one of Washington’s key allies in the region marks a new level of concern about the spiral of attacks involving Israel, Iran and its proxies and US forces as fighting drags on in Gaza amid widespread destruction and a soaring civilian death toll.

The Iranian-backed militant group Hamas, designated as a terrorist organisation by the US and European Union, killed 1,200 people and abducted 240 others in its October 7 incursion into southern Israel. In retaliation, Israeli troops displaced most of Gaza’s 2 million population and killed more than 24,000, according to the Hamas-run health authorities.

In mid-December the World Bank estimated Israeli bombardment had damaged or destroyed more than 60 per cent of Gaza’s infrastructure.