The Guardian view on Gaza's engineered famine: stop arming the slaughter – or lose the rule of law

The Guardian

3 hours ago

Gaza's cries have been drowned out by Israel's strikes on Iran, and the diplomatic pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu over the suffering has ebbed. Yet as the industrialised world urges de-escalation in the Middle East, the devastation continues. On Tuesday morning, witnesses described Israeli forces firing towards a crowd waiting for trucks loaded with flour, leaving more than 50 dead. These are not stray bullets in wartime chaos, they are the outcome of a system that makes relief deadly.
As Médecins Sans Frontières declared this week, what is unfolding in Gaza is 'the calculated evisceration of the very systems that sustain life'. That includes homes, markets, water networks and hospitals – with healthcare continually under attack. Last week, a UN commission found that more than 90% of the Gaza Strip's schools and universities have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli forces using airstrikes, burning, shelling and controlled demolitions. What's happening is not the collateral damage of military necessity, it is a programme of civic annihilation.
In such circumstances, words without action are worse than meaningless. Western powers cannot decry war crimes and genocide while supplying the arms that cause them elsewhere. If they believe in international law, countries such as the UK should act to uphold it. The law is not law if no one enforces it. Israel is the occupying power in Gaza and has a clear duty under the fourth Geneva convention to ensure the population's access to food, water and medical care.
Instead, it has imposed a blockade and driven out UN humanitarian operations. In their place, it has backed the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a private aid scheme coordinated with its military and guarded by US mercenaries. Citing unproven claims of Hamas infiltration, Israel scrapped 400 UN-backed aid sites for just four GHF-run, militarised hubs. In a few weeks, around 300 Palestinians have reportedly died trying to access these food sites. UN officials are right to say the GHF scheme is 'engineered scarcity' that has made aid distribution 'a death trap'. The US-based Center for Constitutional Rights has also warned that the GHF may be prosecuted for aiding 'war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide'. Yet Donald Trump's state department is mulling a $500m grant.
In the UK, ministers say allegations of genocide are for courts to decide upon, while government lawyers in court assert that there is no genocide. This is not just moral evasiveness but tactical contradiction, designed to sustain arms sales and diplomatic cover. This hypocrisy has consequences. By shielding Israel from accountability in Gaza, and now endorsing its illegal strike on Iran, western governments are not merely complicit – they are dismantling the legal order they claim to defend. They are falling in line with Mr Trump's attempts to undermine institutions designed to hold powerful actors accountable, replacing legal norms with political cover.
As the former USAID official Jeremy Konyndyk has said, if GHF were a genuine humanitarian project it would have halted a model that produces daily massacres. According to the Carnegie Endowment's Katherine Wilkens, GHF imposes severe limits on food, subjects civilians to invasive biometric vetting and hands out aid at gunpoint under Israeli control – in clear breach of international law. What is collapsing in Gaza is not just infrastructure. It is the principle that even war has rules. When those rules are waived for allies, no one is safe.
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