United States envoy Morgan Ortagus casts the lone veto against a UN Security Council draft resolution calling for a Gaza ceasefire, aid access, and hostage release. The measure, supported by 14 members, failed due to the US veto. Photo by Laura Jarriel/United Nations.

It will soon be two years since Hamas launched its “Al-Aqsa Flood” attack on southern Israel. Israel’s retaliatory “war” has since reduced Gaza to an uninhabitable wasteland and caused—at a very conservative minimum—more than 66,000 Palestinian deaths, with some 83 percent of them, according to Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) data, being civilians. Since Israel broke its January ceasefire agreement and resumed its offensive in March, 15 of every 16 out of the 16,000 Palestinians the IDF has killed have been civilians.

In the aftermath of October 7 there was enormous support for Israel, especially in the West. But as the “war” ground on, with no apparent end in sight and ever-mounting civilian casualties, the tide of Western public opinion turned. Recent pressure led several Western governments to reluctantly berate Israel for its “intolerable and unacceptable” and “utterly reckless and appalling” actions—while doing precious little to stop them.

Despite the chorus of condemnation, we have seen nothing approaching the battery of sanctions that played such a large part in bringing down the apartheid regime in South Africa, not to mention the swingeing economic, political, and cultural sanctions imposed on Vladimir Putin’s Russia immediately following its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

This paralysis on the part of the “international community” is remarkable, given that what is at issue is increasingly being recognized as a genocide—the worst of all crimes under international humanitarian law. But it is not, perhaps, surprising. Given their previous support for Israel, not to mention their vulnerability to economic bullying by Trump’s US, Western leaders found themselves tossed on the horns of an impossible dilemma.

As far back as January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that there was a “plausible risk” of genocide in Gaza and ordered Israel to take several measures to avert this outcome. At that point the official death toll stood at 27,500—less than half of what it is now. Israel ignored these and further ICJ orders of March and May 2024.

It will likely be years before the ICJ reaches a final verdict on whether or not Israel is guilty of genocide. The world’s highest court on war crimes, the International Criminal Court (ICC), has however already issued arrest warrants in November 2024 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for using “starvation as a method of warfare” and other war crimes and crimes against humanity.

On September 16, 2025, an authoritative new report by a UN Independent Commission of Inquiry, based on two years of investigation, concluded that:

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Federation for Human Rights, the University Network for Human Rights, Médecins Sans Frontières, the Israeli groups B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security, as well as some of the world’s leading genocide and Holocaust historians like Israeli scholars Raz Segal and Omer Bartov, have all come to the same conclusion.

It takes some chutzpah to contend that all of these are part of some global antisemitic conspiracy to discredit Israel. Denying the genocide—the US position—is becoming less and less credible, while refusing to take a stance until the final ICJ verdict is in, which the British and Canadian governments are doing, simply looks evasive.

The problem for Western politicians is that the

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