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Gordon Brown called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza yesterday after a rare split with America at the United Nations.

Hours after the United States blocked an attempt by Britain to make the UN Security Council issue a ceasefire call, Mr Brown told the BBC: “We need an immediate ceasefire. The blame game can continue afterwards, but this dangerous moment, I think, requires us to act.”

The US insists that a ceasefire must be accompanied by assurances that Hamas will stop rocket attacks on Israel. Vice-President Cheney said yesterday: “We think, if there’s to be a ceasefire, you can’t simply go back to the status quo ante, what it was a few weeks ago, where you had a ceasefire recognised by one side but not adhered to by the other.

“It has to be a sustainable, durable proposition. And Hamas has to stop rocketing Israel. I don’t think you’re going to have a viable ceasefire until they’re prepared to do that,” Mr Cheney told the CBS programme Face the Nation.

The diplomatic stand-off bought time for Israel, which is believed to be using controversial white phosphorus shells over civilian targets, to continue its operation in Gaza, with peace efforts making no progress. President Peres of Israel told ABC that his country intended “neither to occupy Gaza nor to crush Hamas, but to crush terror. And Hamas needs a real and serious lesson. They are now getting it.”

A delegation of Arab foreign ministers will hold talks today with members of the Security Council and the UN Secretary-General in New York. Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, is to address the Security Council tomorrow after meeting President Sarkozy of France today.

Libya has circulated a draft resolution that Arab nations want adopted at the Security Council. Negotiations are continuing and it faces resistance, from the US in particular.

At a closed-door meeting on Saturday night Washington blocked any effort by the Security Council to call for an immediate ceasefire, saying that Israel’s right to self-defence was nonnegotiable. Libya, the only Arab member of the council, wanted a formal statement repeating an earlier press statement by the president of the Security Council calling for an “immediate halt to all violence” and “all military activities”. Britain proposed another press statement calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire and setting out criteria for a durable truce.

But the US said it did not want any “product” at all from the Security Council. The council’s inaction provoked an outburst from the Nicaraguan president of the UN General Assembly. “Once again, the world is watching in dismay the dysfunctionality of the Security Council,” Miguel d’Escoto Brockman, said. Alejandro Wolff, the US envoy, retorted: “I would urge him to focus on the dysfunctionality elsewhere in the organisation.”

Mr Brown, speaking on the Andrew Marr Show yesterday, outlined a strategy to end the war, saying that a ceasefire should be accompanied by action to stem arms smuggling through tunnels under the Egyptian border and to reopen the crossings between Gaza and Israel: “I think the key is that the international powers are able to give guarantees about ending the tunnels, and that will require Egyptian action; about stopping the supply of arms, and that will require the Arab League to be united on that; and, about international monitoring of the crossings.”

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