The ceasefire track is broken. Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump have both declared that talks with Hamas are futile, claiming the latter “do(es) not want a deal.” Their statements arrive as Gaza suffers one of the worst humanitarian collapses in living memory. Nearly 60,000 Palestinians are dead, 1.9 million displaced, and most of the enclave has been reduced to rubble.
Food and medical supplies are systematically blocked: last week, 23 percent of aid convoys were denied entry and another 21 percent delayed. Civilians queueing for flour are shot at; hospitals are overwhelmed or closed.
The figures are harrowing, but they only tell part of the story. Child malnutrition has tripled in some districts while infants are dying of dehydration. The UN has warned that starvation is being deployed as a weapon of war, a violation of international law. This policy of attrition aims to dismantle the basic conditions of civilian life, and the world is failing to stop it.
France has, thankfully, broken the silence. President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to recognise a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly in September is a rare act of political will. Paris has linked recognition to the urgency of Gaza’s suffering, refusing to wait for an illusory “perfect” peace deal. Meanwhile, pressure is mounting in Britain where more than 220 MPs, including members of the governing Labour Party, have urged Prime Minister Keir Starmer to follow France’s lead.
That Netanyahu’s war serves his own political calculus cannot be stressed enough. Ceasefire proposals are undermined by last-minute demands, and post-war governance for Gaza is deliberately left unresolved. His coalition thrives on confrontation, while international condemnation has yet to impose any cost. The Vatican has denounced the use of hunger as a weapon, while leading Western newspapers have warned that words will not halt what many now call genocide.
The United States, however, remains the pivotal actor. Its repeated vetoes at the UN and refusal to enforce conditions on military aid embolden the siege. Washington’s moral language is meaningless unless matched with concrete steps: an immediate, enforceable ceasefire and unrestricted humanitarian access. European governments, too, must convert rhetoric into leverage-suspending arms exports, conditioning trade, and recognising Palestine to shift the diplomatic equation.
At the end of the day, history will not judge leaders by how carefully they balanced alliances while Gaza starved. It will ask why, amid mass displacement and deliberate famine, the world’s most powerful states could not muster the courage to stop a catastrophe unfolding in plain view.
