UN report confirms Israel’s genocide in Gaza; still the world does nothing

The evidence is overwhelming, but enforcement mechanisms don’t exist, and world leaders still don’t care enough to act to prevent the most horrific atrocity of our times.

My new article on my website, UN Report Confirms Genocide in Gaza, But the World Still Shrugs, Even As Israel Erases Gaza City, is my analysis of the devastating new report by the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, establishing that Israel is engaged in a genocide in the Gaza Strip, and has been for the last 23 months.

Although the report is significant, and a worthy product of the human rights mechanisms that are at the heart of one of the UN’s key founding purposes, to “maintain international peace and security”, I explain how, sadly, the lack of any enforcement mechanisms, coupled with the permanent veto that the alleged victors of the Second World War — the US, the UK, France, Russia and China — granted themselves when the UN Security Council was established, has meant that Israel, protected in particular by the US, has evaded responsibility for its actions since the blood-soaked founding of the state in 1948, which I describe as “a dark shadow of impunity haunting the UN throughout almost the whole of its existence.”

As I discuss, the lack of any enforcement mechanism to compel countries to act is particularly dispiriting right now, as Israel, “ever more unhinged and genocidally belligerent”, is “engaged in the planned erasure of Gaza City, the last great population centre of the Gaza Strip, where around half of the estimated two million survivors of the genocide to date were still living until Israel issued mass evacuation orders and began systematically destroying entire neighbourhoods, home after home, apartment block after apartment block, with barely any pretence anymore of military necessity.”

I examine the latest horrendous statements from Israel Katz, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, all of whom should have had arrest warrants issued against them by the International Criminal Court, and, on accountability, I add my voice to those calling for the UN General Assembly to implement the Uniting for Peace resolution, first passed in 1950, which stipulates that, “if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with a view to making appropriate recommendations to Members for collective measures, including in the case of a breach of the peace or act of aggression the use of armed force when necessary, to maintain or restore international peace and security.”

Just two weeks ago, apparently unnoticed by most of the world’s leaders and by the mainstream media, a group of 45 UN human rights experts, comprising Special Rapporteurs, independent experts and Working Group members, called on the UN General Assembly to invoke the Uniting for Peace resolution in order to respond to the escalating famine and genocidal conditions in Gaza.

The experts urged the Assembly to (i) recommend a peace operation, (ii) demand that all crossings into Gaza be opened under UN supervision, (iii) suspend humanitarian mechanisms that had proved dangerous or ineffective, (iv) call upon Mediterranean states to deploy humanitarian naval missions, (v) authorize UN-led humanitarian convoys to supervise all crossings, and (vi) demand a permanent ceasefire alongside the release of detainees and hostages.

Something has to change as the unthinkable second anniversary of the start of Israel’s genocide looms ever closer.

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