As the war in Gaza continues to divide global opinion, a new United Nations report accusing Israel of grave violations against Palestinian children has reignited questions not only about accountability, but also about the credibility and consistency of international institutions

Two developments this week show how readily the great powers and multilateral institutions will settle the fate of another conflict in the Middle East. At Lake Lucerne, the United States and Iran agreed a roadmap to wind down the war in Lebanon and built a mechanism to govern the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, while Israel itself was given no seat at the table.

In Geneva, the UN Human Rights Council received a report accusing Israel of the gravest crimes in international law over its conduct towards the children of Gaza. India holds no stake in either battlefield, yet has reason to watch how this second judgment was reached.

The death of a child is the heaviest sorrow a society can carry, and that it is no lighter for the nationality the child happened to hold. A child killed in Gaza is an irreplaceable world ended; so is a child in Tel Aviv, or on a road in the Kashmir Valley. To ask how a child died, and at whose hand, is the seriousness that might protect the next one.

There is another moral question that deserves reflection in India. The massacres of October 7, in which Israeli civilians, including children, were murdered, kidnapped and brutalised, marked the beginning of this war. Yet many voices that now speak with certainty about Israel’s conduct had little or nothing to say when those atrocities occurred. Moral concern cannot be selective. A standard that condemns civilian suffering only........

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