Gaza: the world’s shame

By Rami Mahdawi
What is happening in the Gaza Strip today can only be described as a major tragedy in world history, as the Irish president said. The famine declared by the United Nations is not an unforeseen event but a direct result of war crimes being committed in full view of everyone, while the rhetoric of human rights and sustainable development collapses appallingly.
The severity of what is taking place is not confined to the humanitarian catastrophe experienced by the Palestinians alone, but extends to the entire international system. When an entire people are starved and besieged, the message sent to the world is that international law has become worthless. Any violation of international law reverberates across global security in all its dimensions: economic, social and political.
It is enough to recall how the repercussions of the Russia–Ukraine war led to higher grain and energy prices and strained the budgets of many countries. Today, Gaza’s tragedy carries even greater risks, because it ignites a flashpoint in the heart of the Middle East — a region of strategic and economic significance to the world. The famine there is not only Palestinian suffering, but a boomerang bomb threatening everyone’s stability.
The UN’s declaration that Gaza has entered a stage of famine raises a serious question: what has the organization done to prevent it? Its role is not to be a news agency, but a safeguard for international security and law. What credibility remains for the Security Council as it watches Gaza’s children die of hunger, women and the elderly fall to disease and deprivation, and people with disabilities left to their fate? Is issuing a press statement sufficient while images of emaciated children have filled screens for weeks?
Gaza has exposed the failure of the global conscience. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is leading an all-out war: bombing, starving and displacing, in a clear project to eliminate everything alive in the Strip. The result is that the world stands by as a spectator, content with repeating expressions of concern while the crime proceeds without accountability.
It is true that the wave of recognitions of a Palestinian state — which has reached 147 countries — represents an important symbolic signal, but it remains far smaller than the scale of the tragedy. It is closer to an expression of moral outrage in the face of scenes of blood and rubble than to an effective instrument of pressure to stop the assault. Israel has not budged an inch; it has become harsher, effectively declaring it will not accept a Palestinian state on any part of the land.
Since the start of the war, the objective has been clear: displacement. When the US president called on Egypt and Jordan to host Palestinians, the proposal met global rejection and was replaced by a harsher method: systematic starvation, blocking aid, and targeting women and children to eliminate the next generation. This is not just a war, but a fully fledged demographic uprooting.
Today, the greatest loss is not only in the thousands dead and missing, but in the collapse of any political approach to the Palestinian cause. The Israeli project — backed by the United States — rests on a fixed premise: that a Palestinian state will never be established. We are therefore living through the most dangerous phase since the October War, as the Palestinian landscape is being redrawn on the basis of expulsion and famine.
Gaza’s famine is not a local tragedy but a moral and legal test for the entire international order. If the United Nations is incapable of protecting more than two million people from dying of hunger, what is its value and what is the use of its charters? The whole world is concerned with this catastrophe, not only because it is a bleeding human wound, but because it threatens to undermine what remains of stability in the Middle East and the world.