Last week, the U.S. secretary of state, Antony Blinken, announced that he intends to bring America back into the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), where it will join representatives of some of the world’s most brutal despots. Although Blinken was straightforward about addressing the body’s problems, including the fact that it tends to ignore the most serious human-rights abuses while obsessively producing condemnations of Israel, he argued that American involvement will be “the best way to improve the council.” Gerald Steinberg believes this hope is poorly placed:

The structure of the UNHRC is largely impervious to change, reflecting the nature of the UN with its 193 member states, and the built-in majority for autocracies; the dictatorships Russia, China, Cuba, and Venezuela are among the [council’s] current members.

The [anti-Israel] bias is also built into the permanent agenda, specifically item seven, which concerns “the human-rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories,” ensuring that every quarterly session will include attacks against Israel. No other single issue, conflict, or country has its own permanent agenda item, and it is under this framework that the majority of the council’s anti-Israel reports and resolutions are adopted. Here again, the ability of the U.S. (joined perhaps by a few courageous allies, depending on the council’s membership in a particular year) to change this is essentially non-existent.

The lack of allies for change, particularly among Western Europeans, is another obstacle. In most anti-Israel votes, the best that the EU representatives can agree on is to abstain, which has very little significance.

The structural factors are also reflected in the political biases of many of the officials and employees who make up its secretariat. As noted, in order to be elected, candidates [for these staff positions] must be ideologically acceptable to the majority of UN member states, as in the case of the current high commissioner, Michelle Bachelet.

It is these permanent staff members that dictate the council’s agenda and compose the reports that inform its work.

On Tuesday, a Hizballah drone attack injured three people in northern Israel. The next day, another attack, targeting an IDF base, injured eighteen people, six of them seriously, in Arab al-Amshe, also in the north. This second attack involved the simultaneous use of drones carrying explosives and guided antitank missiles. In both cases, the defensive systems that performed so successfully last weekend failed to stop the drones and missiles. Ron Ben-Yishai has a straightforward explanation as to why: the Lebanon-backed terrorist group is getting better at evading Israel defenses. He explains the three basis systems used to pilot these unmanned aircraft, and their practical effects:

These systems allow drones to act similarly to fighter jets, using “dead zones”—areas not visible to radar or other optical detection—to approach targets. They fly low initially, then ascend just before crashing and detonating on the target. The terrain of southern Lebanon is particularly conducive to such attacks.

But this requires skills that the terror group has honed over months of fighting against Israel. The latest attacks involved a large drone capable of carrying over 50 kg (110 lbs.) of explosives. The terrorists have likely analyzed Israel’s alert and interception systems, recognizing that shooting down their drones requires early detection to allow sufficient time for launching interceptors.

The IDF tries to detect any incoming drones on its radar, as it had done prior to the war. Despite Hizballah’s learning curve, the IDF’s technological edge offers an advantage. However, the military must recognize that any measure it takes is quickly observed and analyzed, and even the most effective defenses can be incomplete. The terrain near the Lebanon-Israel border continues to pose a challenge, necessitating technological solutions and significant financial investment.