Dozens of United Nations special rapporteurs warned in a grim statement Friday that the post-World War II international order is crumbling under the weight of Israel’s decimation of the Gaza Strip, an assault carried out with the complicity and active support of the United States and other world powers.
“The world faces the most profound crisis since the end of World War II,” reads the statement signed by 37 U.N. experts. “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. 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.”
Pointing to the genocidal rhetoric of Israeli leaders in the immediate aftermath of the October 7, 2023 attack, the experts said that “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. “Israeli bombs have spared no one—not journalists, students, scholars, doctors, nurses, babies, pregnant women, persons with disabilities, civil servants, people seeking food and safety, or humanitarian workers, including U.N. staff. Entire families have been exterminated and generations erased, with millions of lives torn apart.”
The people of Gaza, most of whom are displaced and at growing risk of starvation, “live in constant terror of impending annihilation” as much of the world looks on, the experts lamented, condemning “the international community’s failure to secure a cease-fire and hold accountable all those responsible for or complicit in heinous crimes.”
The experts specifically cited the absence of a “timely decision” on the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s May application for arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas leaders as well as Israel’s open dismissal of International Court of Justice decisions on genocide and occupation.
“Defiant in the face of overwhelming public sentiment across the international community, Israel continues to act with brazen disregard for international law and order,” the special rapporteurs continued. “This spiral of destruction must end. The international community must act with utmost urgency to change the trajectory of violence if we are to avert a full-scale conflagration with unthinkable consequences—most egregiously for the children.”
Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories and one of the signatories of the new statement, wrote on social media Friday that “U.N. independent experts have relentlessly urged member states to choose the rule of law over the law of force.”
“As many states continue to ignore their international obligations and Palestinians continue to be slaughtered, the international order is breaking down,” she added. “We will miss it when it is no longer there.”
‘The international order is breaking down in Gaza’:
— UN Special Procedures (@UN_SPExperts) October 11, 2024
UN experts mark one year of #Israel's genocidal attacks and ethnic cleansing on Palestinians, calling on all leaders to redouble their efforts to demand & achieve #CeasefireNOW.https://t.co/16K6ufZW06 pic.twitter.com/gWx9wztubw
The U.N. experts released their statement days after the one-year anniversary of the beginning of Israel’s Gaza assault, which has intensified in recent days as Israeli forces launched deadly new operations in famine-stricken northern Gaza. The World Health Organization said that Israel impeded two of the body’s missions to northern Gaza on Thursday, a disaster for people in desperate need of humanitarian assistance.
In Lebanon, meanwhile, Israel carried out its deadliest bombing of central Beirut in more than a year late Thursday, killing at least 22 people in an attack on two residential buildings full of displaced people.
The U.N. special rapporteurs said Friday that the failure of the international community to intervene and stop Israel’s massacre in Gaza “has not only enabled the continuation of unprecedented brutality but widened it to the broader region, setting Lebanon ablaze with violence and destruction.”
“We call on all leaders to move beyond dehumanizing and polarizing narratives, and actively work for an immediate cessation of all hostilities and crimes in Palestine/Israel and the region, for the immediate release of all persons arbitrarily detained, both Israelis held in Gaza and Palestinians held by Israel,” they said. “The world must swiftly reorient its moral compass toward justice and freedom for all and recommit to international peace, which will never be achieved until everyone, including Palestinians and Israelis, are afforded the chance to live in equal dignity and freedom.”
Jake Johnson is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
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