HUMANITY has died in Gaza, says Türkiye's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. We could not have put it better. For seven months, the massacres there have been live streamed to homes around the world, yet countries with the mandate to end them aren't doing it.
The Israelis have killed more than 37,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, say media reports. On June 6, the Israelis bombed a United Nations school in central Gaza, killing 33 of the thousands of Palestinians seeking refuge there.
On Saturday, the Israeli military, backed by air strikes, killed 274 Palestinians to rescue four Israeli hostages. The civilian dead had nothing to do with the Israeli captives. Here is the Erdogan question to the UN, a world body purportedly set up to stop the scourge of genocide: what are the numerous buildings and staff around the world for? Good question.
Sadly, the answer is: just to help it to bark, at the most. The dismal truth is that the United Nations has left it to five nations in the UN Security Council to run the world. And they run it as they please. This is a formula for disaster.
And disasters there are plenty. Little wonder, the atrocities in Ukraine are into the third year and those in Palestine are into the 76th year.
The world is in desperate need of a reformed UN, one which is not tyrannised by a few. But this is for the morning after a permanent peace returns to Gaza. For now, the cause of the massacres must be removed.
This can be done in two ways. First, by denying Israel weapons. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, three nations top the list of weapons suppliers to Israel: the United States, Germany and Italy. Britain is not one of Israel's big weapons suppliers, but it is on the list.
Without bombs and bullets from the West, the massacre will stop. Realising this — though a very late realisation it is — 28 nations joined the UN Human Rights Council on April 12 to back a weapons ban.
Because the UNSC is holding the UN hostage, arms keep flowing into Tel Aviv despite the call for the weapons ban. Israel's ceaseless massacres, the weapons suppliers must know, are dragging them to the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court (ICC) for being complicit in Tel Aviv's genocidal campaign.
The second way to put an end to the massacres is to allow international law to take its course. Nations that claim that they are all for a rules-based world are standing in the way.
The ICC itself has gone public on this, saying a threat to the ICC is itself an international crime. The five permanent members of the UNSC — the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China — must lead by showing the world that their conduct is consistent with the requirements of a rules-based world order.
They can prove this by referring Benjamin Netanyahu and other war criminals to the ICC, a legal right that the Rome Statute grants the UNSC. This it must do.
Or, at the very least, allow the ICC to do its job in Gaza, Ukraine, Myanmar or anywhere where war crimes are being committed.