Gaza and the collapse of the world moral compass

A calculated famine: the icy arithmetic of the Gaza seat

In Gaza, one of the most shameful chapters in contemporary history takes place: planned famine, imposed with method by military power, under the passive gaze of a allegedly civilized world. For more than two months, more than two million Palestinians have been deprived of food, water, electricity, fuel and care. Gaza has become a cruelty laboratory, where hunger is dosed with administrative rigor – literally to calorie – while the great powers observe in silence or feed fire by providing bombs and diplomatic support.

Calorie is now the unity of cruelty, alongside the ball and the bomb. Israel no longer even hides its cynical calculation: how many calories per person? How many grams of protein before collapse? How many days before the full famine? Human suffering is reduced to Excel tables. This is not a natural disaster, or even a side effect of the conflict. It is a voluntary act: deprivation as an instrument of war. Gaza is intentionally hungry.

Since March 2, 2025, the total blockade imposed on humanitarian aid has exceeded all the previous ones in severity. Until May 16, he became the longest seat ever recorded in the history of the enclave. According to UNICEF and the UN Humanitarian Affairs Coordination Office (OCHA), Gaza’s survival capacities have been destroyed: bombed agricultural land, prohibited fishing areas, bakeries paralyzed by the absence of flour, fuel, security.

The most vulnerable – children under the age of two and breastfeeding mothers – are the first victims: 92 % of them no longer have access to adequate food. And yet, more than 3,000 aid trucks and 116,000 tonnes of food remain blocked at the borders, prohibited from entry by Israel, in violation of the International Court of Justice in the case South Africa c. Israel. This refusal to comply clearly shows that famine is not a consequence of war-it has become war itself.

The crime is neither hidden nor silent – it is broadcast live

It is not a question of ignorance. We are not in the 1940s. No one will be able to say, this time: “We did not know”. Everything is visible. Each day, on each screen, we see the children starving, the hospitals collapse, the common pits dug with bare hands. The weapon used here is food, or rather its absence, in manifest violation of international law, humanitarian conventions, and the most elementary human dignity.

UNICEF, UNRWA, the World Food Program, the OCHA: all these institutions have sounded the alarm. The UN officially recognized that Gaza has entered the famine. And yet the trucks remain blocked. It is not a simple seat: it is a slow and public execution of an entire people. A war crime committed in full light, under the neutral eye of cameras and diplomacy.

Silence is complicated

The scandal is not only that these horrors take place, but that they are tolerated, even excused, by the very people who claim to embody the values ​​of international law and human rights. When it comes to other conflicts, certain powers are quick to condemn, to sanction. But here? Silence. Not even an official reprimand. Even less a concrete measure.

For what ? Because the culprit is an ally, a strategic partner, sacred by the European trauma of the Shoah, to the point of being considered above all criticism. Result: hollow words, calibrated sentences to spare the aggressor, and a shameful choreography of diplomatic cowardice.

Can we still be “negationist of the genocide in Gaza” today?

More and more authorized voices denounce what is playing in Gaza. Omer Bartov, a worldwide specialist in genocides and professor at Brown University, qualifies the situation as “genocidal policy”:

“A systematic attempt to make Gaza unlivable, and to destroy the vital structures to the physical and cultural survival of a group. »»

It also points to the moral bankruptcy of Western countries, which nevertheless poses in human rights champions. He is not alone. Raz Segal (Stockton University) speaks of a “case of genocide school”, based on the declarations of Israeli officials explicitly calling for the annihilation of Gaza. Dirk Moses (University of Sydney) and Israeli historian Ilan Pappé evoke a logic of progressive erasure, a slow and structural extermination mechanism.

Some still avoid the word “genocide” because of its political charge, preferring to speak of “genocidal acts”. But the criteria are there, clear, posed by the Geneva Convention of 1948:

• Mass murder (more than 60,000 dead)

• Intentional deprivation of food and care

• Dehumanization in public speech

• Destruction of vital institutions in collective survival

The diagram is clear. And yet, as in Rwanda in 1994, as in Srebrenica in 1995, we claim “irrefutable evidence”, while the corpses stack. Archives, satellite images, Israeli parliamentary recordings will one day compose an overwhelming file. That day, the world will look back-and it will judge.

“Never again”: a betrayed promise

The formula, once sacred, has been emptied of its meaning. If “never again” does not apply to Gaza – where civilians are hungry, bombed, displaced – then it no longer applies nowhere. The West moral base, forged in the post-Auschwitz, collapses. What remains is only a selective indignation, tinged with geopolitical opportunism.

The failure of moral and religious institutions

The major religious institutions have not been up to par. From the Vatican to ecumenical organizations, the reactions have summed up with lukewarm calls, as if we were witnessing a simple diplomatic litigation, and not a campaign of mass destruction. The International Court of Justice has been ignored; Its provisional measurements stride to the feet, without the slightest consequence.

In Israel itself, public speech has changed in indecency. Knesset deputies are now daring to rejoice in the famine inflicted on children. When a humanitarian doctor expresses the hope that no child will be deprived of painkiller, he is replied by laughter. What yesterday whispered – starving a people as a military strategy – is now claimed with cynicism.

Abdication of the Arab world

Arab regimes are no exception to conviction. Their inaction, hidden behind symbolic gestures, reveals their political weakness and their moral bankruptcy. Prisoners of their alliances, paralyzed by the fear of losing their power, they abandoned their own people, even in the most unbearable pain.

The story looks

This moment will be judged. Silence will be retained. The refusal to act will be recorded, not as a prudent neutrality, but as an active complicity. When Gaza, one day, will raise her head and write her own story, what will we remember? What will our governments do, our institutions? With what principles will they have pactized? Because it is no longer only a question of Gaza. It is the international order, his soul. And this soul goes out … Slowly … to calorie.