“We did not stop the Holocaust. We did not stop the genocide in Rwanda. We did not stop the genocide in Srebrenica. We must stop the genocide in Gaza. There are no excuses anymore. None.” Slovenia’s president, Nataša Pirc Musar, has said aloud what too many leaders prefer to whisper.
The calamity in Gaza is not simply another regional tragedy. It is the clearest demonstration yet of the structural collapse of the international order. More than two million people remain trapped under blockade, bombarded from the air, starved of food and medicine, and denied humanitarian corridors. Children are dying not only from missiles but from dehydration and disease. This is not the fog of war. It is the deliberate weaponization of famine and suffering, an assault on the survival of a population.
The system built to prevent precisely such catastrophes has failed. The United Nations Security Council, created at San Francisco in 1945, was designed on the assumption that peace could be preserved if the great powers restrained themselves in moments of crisis. That mechanism has now collapsed. The veto, once a tool to ensure stability, has become a license for paralysis. It renders the Council incapable of enforcing even the most basic prohibitions on collective punishment, mass starvation, and indiscriminate warfare.
History teaches that genocide is rarely hidden. The world saw the deportations and ghettos under Hitler. It heard the machetes in Rwanda. It watched the fall of Srebrenica under the supposed protection of the United Nations. In each case, knowledge was not lacking. What failed was enforcement. Today, in Gaza, veto paralysis has transformed “never again” into a fatal diplomatic platitude.
And Gaza is not alone. When the Council fails, conflicts metastasize. Kashmir remains unresolved, locked in cycles of repression. Myanmar’s Rohingya remain stateless and exposed. Sudan teeters on disintegration, its civilians caught in wars the world has all but forgotten. Each illustrates the same truth: when the Security Council is paralyzed, regional powers intervene unchecked, civilians pay the price, and global stability erodes.
Gaza thus represents more than a humanitarian failure. It is a strategic one. Every democracy that claims to uphold international law is weakened when institutions collapse in the face of atrocities. Western influence in the Global South, already fraying, is now openly questioned as populations witness not universal principles, but selective outrage. The credibility of the international order is hemorrhaging, and with it, the West’s ability to shape outcomes beyond its borders.
The urgent step is clear. To maintain even the pretense of functionality, the permanent members of the Security Council must bind themselves to suspend the veto in all cases involving mass atrocities, famine prevention, and humanitarian access. This is not utopian idealism. It is a geopolitical necessity.
France and Mexico have already championed a framework for voluntary veto restraint, and more than 100 member states support it. The Gaza crisis demands that this principle be made binding. Without it, the Council will continue as little more than a stage for geopolitical theater while real conflicts escalate unchecked. The alternative to reform is not stasis but collapse: the rise of ad hoc coalitions, the erosion of humanitarian law, and the fragmentation of the international system into rival spheres of influence.
The defense of Gaza’s civilians, then, is not only a moral imperative but a structural one. If the Security Council cannot adapt, new mechanisms will inevitably emerge outside of it, designed by regional powers with narrower ambitions. The result will not be stability but a world of fractured authority, where norms collapse and famine, siege, and extermination once again become acceptable instruments of war.
Future historians will not measure this moment by the number of Security Council sessions convened or the speeches delivered in New York. They will ask whether the global system created in 1945 proved capable of adaptation. They will ask whether we recognized that veto paralysis had become a greater danger to the order than the conflicts it sought to contain.
The test is immediate, and the stakes are not only humanitarian but civilizational. Failure will not merely condemn a people. It will guarantee the acceleration of the unraveling of the international order itself.
To remain silent now is to be complicit. Every hour wasted is another grave dug. The world will not be forgiven if it looks away again. Neutrality in the face of slaughter is nothing but surrender. If Gaza is abandoned, so too is the promise of civilization itself. The age of indifference must end, NOW. History will not absolve hesitation.
