Israel’s genocide in Gaza is the “most profound crisis” globally since World War II, UN experts have warned, adding that impunity for Israel as it has killed tens of thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of Palestinians endangers the very structure of international humanitarian rights.
On Friday, the group of 37 UN experts, including UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese, said that Israel’s openly “genocidal offensive” has destroyed Gaza in just one year as the world has looked on and failed to intervene.
“The world faces the most profound crisis since the end of World War II. The atrocities which the world witnessed in World War II resulted in a collective determination to say ‘Never Again’ and to create the United Nations to achieve that goal,” the experts said in a statement marking the anniversary of the start of the genocide.
“However, one year since the 7 October attack by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups against Israel, the world has seen a brutal escalation of violence, resulting in genocidal attacks, ethnic cleansing and collective punishment of Palestinians, which risks breaking down the international multilateral system,” they went on.
The experts noted the “genocidal statements” made by Israeli leaders shortly after the October 7 attack that served, in essence, as a warning of the massacres to come. They also condemned world leaders for failing to uphold international humanitarian law and stop the slaughter, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now threatening to inflict upon civilians in Lebanon.
“One year later, the promise by Israeli leaders to destroy Gaza has been fulfilled. The Strip is now a wasteland of rubble and human remains, where survivors — men and women, children and the elderly — struggle to hold on to life amid deprivation and disease,” they said. “Nearly all those surviving are displaced, trapped in ever-shrinking parts of the tiny territory, corralled into crowded camps and shelters with nowhere to flee. Constant bombing has turned humanitarian zones into killing fields.”
In recent days, Israeli forces have been carrying out a brutal campaign that appears to be aimed at achieving the total ethnic cleansing of north Gaza. This week, Israeli forces ordered the evacuation of roughly 400,000 people left in the region, which has faced some of the harshest conditions throughout the past year.
Despite ordering evacuations, the Israeli military is preventing many Palestinians from leaving the area, and has been bombing shelters and targeting families trying to flee south. At the same time, Israeli forces are enforcing an aid blockade on north Gaza so intense that the World Food Programme has said that it no longer has food “in any form” to distribute to those in need.
“As many states continue to ignore their international obligations and Palestinians continue to be slaughtered, the international order is breaking down,” said Albanese on social media. “We will miss it when it is no longer there, not even as a veneer of the world we could have had, and the global community we could have been.”
Other global figures have warned about the breakdown of international order spurred by the U.S. and Israel’s flouting of humanitarian law. Last month, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres cautioned the General Assembly that the world has entered a frightening “age of impunity” in which governments can “lay waste to whole societies” without consequence.
“The level of impunity in the world is politically indefensible and morally intolerable,” Guterres said.