Some wars brutalise, and others erase. Gaza has been erased for the past 3 years. In the crowded, coastal strip of just 140 square kilometres, the detonation of a 2,000-pound MK-84 bomb does more than level concrete, leaving no trace of nearly 3,000 Palestinians. It creates a fireball reaching roughly 3,500 degrees Celsius — about 6,300 degrees Fahrenheit — hot enough to vaporise flesh, liquefy bone and reduce homes to particulate memory. Each bomb costs between US$16,000 and US$25,000. Each weighs nearly a tonne.

Each carries not merely explosive force but a moral question that should trouble the international order.

Investigations have documented the repeated use of US-made MK-84 ‘Hammer’ bombs and other thermobaric munitions in Gaza since October 2023. According to reporting and field analysis cited by regional observers, civil defence teams have identified 2,842 Palestinians who simply disappeared — not buried, not recoverable, but ‘evaporated’ in strikes so intense that only fragments or traces of blood remained. The forensic method was chillingly simple: if four people were registered in a dwelling and only three bodies could be accounted for, the fourth was listed among the vanished.

The scale of destruction defies modern precedent. By early 2026, more than 72,000 Palestinians had reportedly been killed, the majority civilians, including tens of thousands of women and children. Independent assessments suggest the tonnage of explosives dropped on Gaza is comparable to multiple atomic detonations in cumulative effect. The United Nations and humanitarian agencies have described a landscape in which 61 million tonnes of rubble now blanket the territory, its water tables polluted, farmland razed and 97 per cent of trees damaged or destroyed.

Thermobaric weapons, sometimes described as fuel-air explosives, are not prohibited per se under international law. Yet their effects — dispersing a fuel cloud that ignites into a high-temperature vacuum blast — sit uneasily with the core principles of distinction and proportionality embedded in the Geneva Conventions. The International Committee of the Red Cross has cautioned that such weapons should be avoided in populated areas because of their wide-area impact and capacity to cause superfluous suffering. Gaza is among the most densely populated places on earth.

The economic arithmetic is stark. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that the United States approved at least US$21.7 billion in military aid and arms transfers to Israel between October 2023 and September 2025. An MK-84 costs roughly the price of a modest car in Sydney. Yet when deployed in Jabalia or Khan Younis, its blast radius does not discriminate between combatant and child. Arms manufacturers profit; strategic alliances are reinforced; political costs are deferred. The human ledger, however, is written in ash.

A June 2024 report by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights examined several emblematic strikes involving 2,000-pound and 1,000-pound bombs on residential buildings, schools and camps, documenting at least 218 fatalities in just six incidents. The High Commissioner warned that the extensive use of explosive weapons with wide-area effects in densely populated areas raised serious concerns of violations of international humanitarian law and could amount to crimes against humanity if found to be part of a widespread or systematic policy.

In January 2024, the International Court of Justice ordered provisional measures requiring Israel to prevent acts of genocide and allow humanitarian assistance into Gaza. The Court noted that many Palestinians lacked access to basic necessities such as food, potable water, electricity, and medical care. Subsequent reporting by Human Rights Watch and others alleged deliberate deprivation of water and essential services. Whether these acts meet the high legal threshold of genocide will ultimately be determined by courts.

What is already clear is that the siege and bombardment have produced conditions of life incompatible with human dignity.

Strategically, the consequences now reach far beyond any single battlefield. The Geneva Academy has warned that global conflicts are straining international humanitarian law to its limits. When powerful states continue arms transfers amid credible allegations of grave breaches, the damage becomes systemic. The rules-based order depends on consistency, not convenience. When standards are applied selectively, faith in legal protection erodes — especially for smaller or vulnerable states. What weakens in one conflict does not stay contained; it echoes outward, normalising impunity and quietly reshaping the global balance toward raw power over principle.

There is also the question of precedent. Urban warfare is not new. From Grozny to Mosul, from Fallujah to Mariupol, cities have been turned into theatres of annihilation. Yet Gaza’s enclosure — sealed borders, limited escape, concentrated population — renders its civilian exposure acute. Military analysts have observed that risk appears to have been shifted away from attacking forces and onto civilians, a choice that may deliver short-term tactical gains while inflicting profound strategic damage.

The Middle East’s economic future cannot be built atop mass graves and pulverised infrastructure. Gaza’s environmental degradation — contaminated aquifers, destroyed sewage systems, toxic dust — will impede reconstruction for years. The United Nations Environment Programme has warned of long-term harm to food and water security. A generation of children has been traumatised. Educational institutions lie in ruins. The social fabric frays under hunger and grief.

For the international community, the challenge is not rhetorical but profoundly moral and structural. A commitment to a rules-based order cannot flicker according to alliances, trade flows or strategic convenience; it must endure precisely when it is most uncomfortable. Arms export controls, end-use monitoring regimes, sanctions frameworks and domestic human rights legislation — whether in Washington, Brussels, London, Ankara, Pretoria or elsewhere — are not sterile bureaucratic instruments. They were built for moments when the heat of war threatens to melt the guardrails of civilisation.

When high-yield munitions worth tens of thousands of dollars are transferred into densely populated territories amid credible allegations of mass civilian harm, the question is no longer technical compliance but collective conscience. Selective enforcement fractures legitimacy. Silence becomes complicity. If powerful states invoke international law in one theatre yet dilute it in another, the architecture of global governance begins to hollow from within.

In an era of rising multipolar tension, climate fragility and proliferating conflicts, the erosion of consistent standards does not remain localised; it radiates outward, emboldening impunity in other capitals and other wars. The credibility of the international system rests not on eloquent speeches at multilateral forums, but on whether states are prepared to suspend arms, condition assistance, and uphold accountability even when doing so carries diplomatic cost. Humanity cannot be defended by exception.

Diplomacy must also re-centre the human. The language of “collateral damage” anaesthetises. When temperatures reach 6,300 degrees Fahrenheit, bodies do not merely perish; they disintegrate. Families are left without remains to bury, without graves to visit, without the elemental rituals that anchor mourning. In such circumstances, reconciliation becomes more elusive, radicalisation more likely, and regional stability more fragile.

No violence justifies the collective punishment of a people. International law exists to shield civilians, not excuse their destruction. When overwhelming force consumes homes and refugee camps, defence dissolves into devastation, and humanity demands protection for the besieged.

History offers sobering lessons. The failure to enforce norms in one theatre often reverberates in another. If the evaporation of nearly 3,000 civilians can be absorbed into diplomatic routine, what restraint remains elsewhere? If siege and starvation become normalised instruments of war, what protection endures for smaller states and vulnerable populations?

Gaza today is more than a battlefield. It is a test — of law, of conscience, of the resilience of a global system that professes to value human life equally. The cost of a single MK-84 may be modest in defence budgets. The cost to the moral architecture of the international order is immeasurable.

The smoke over Gaza is not only the residue of explosives. It is the signal of a world at a crossroads. Whether that signal prompts recalibration or further descent will shape not only the future of Palestinians and Israelis, but the credibility of international law and the stability of regions far beyond the Mediterranean’s edge.

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