Is the UN dying?

On-going genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine by Israel is a clear signal that the United Nations Organisation (UNO) is as good as dead. Founded in 1945 to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations and promote international cooperation to solve global problems, the UN is a failure on all fronts. It […]

On-going genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine by Israel is a clear signal that the United Nations Organisation (UNO) is as good as dead. Founded in 1945 to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations and promote international cooperation to solve global problems, the UN is a failure on all fronts. It is even possibly beyond redemption.

Shocking scenarios seen daily on live television are so sickening. Since May 27, 2025, at least 798 sick and starving Palestinians have been massacred by Israeli gunfire as they approached the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) aid site in southern Gaza. According to Medicine Sans Frontier (MSF), several thousand survivors bear the hallmarks of inhumanely intense strikes – brutal burns, dismemberment, open fractures, shrapnel wounds, starvation and severe trauma.

Starting from October 7, 2023, the Zionist regime supported largely by the US and the UK has slaughtered some 65,000 innocent individuals, most of them children and women, and maimed over a hundred thousand others in intense bombing and ground offensives across Palestine. As if these are not enough violations of International Humanitarian Law, even aid workers, medical personnel and journalists are not spared. Too, daily malnutrition deaths continue as Israeli forces push further into Gaza City, where over 80 per cent of homes, hospitals, humanitarian warehouses, schools and even refugee camps have been systematically shattered.

The double jeopardy is that even as the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) are accelerating their genocidal campaigns and ethnic cleansing day and night, Palestinians have no option but to stay in Gaza City despite the intensifying military offensives and famine because they lack the means to travel and no safe places to seek shelter. There are no red lines in the vicious violence. Veto power exercised by the Israeli-controlled American Empire has legitimised lawlessness on the global scene.

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Brice De Le Vingne, head of MSF’s Emergency Unit put it more poignantly: “How can the killing of 800 people in a single week, including new-borns, small children and the maiming of hundreds more be considered a military operation adhering to international law. Catch-phrases like ‘war is ugly’ act as blinders to the fact that children too young to walk are being dismembered, eviscerated and killed.” With the indictment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes by the International Court of Justice ignored, the UN is silently stating that might is now right, signalling a sharp descent into international anarchy.

This round of relentless mass killings of Palestinians makes the previous savage Israeli massacres seem humane in comparison. In addition, the scorched-earth destruction of over 80 per cent of infrastructure across Palestine has put millions into indefinite displacement and untold misery in form of hunger, deprivation, disease and disorientation. By most accounts, the world is helplessly witnessing the worst ever genocide in Gaza.

The history of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict traces back to the 19th Century when Zionists sought to establish a homeland for the Jewish people in Ottoman controlled Palestine. The 1917 Balfour Declaration supporting the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people” was the trigger. Both the British and other Europeans were excited with the prospect of settling the meddling and overbearing Zionists far beyond their borders. With hindsight, giving Palestine to the Jews has been a transfer and not a solution to the Jewish problem.

According to Wikipedia, An-Nakba or “The Catastrophe” is the Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs through violent displacement and dispossession of their land, property and belongings along with the destruction of their society and the suppression of their culture, identity, political rights and national aspirations. The term is used to describe the events of the 1948 Israeli war in Mandatory Palestine as well as Israel’s on-going persecution and displacement of Palestinians. As a whole, it covers the fracturing of Palestinian society and the long-standing rejection of the right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants.

During the foundational events of the Nakba in 1948, about half of Palestine’s predominantly Arab population – around 750,000 people – was expelled from their homes through violent means at first by Zionist para-militaries and after the establishment of the state of Israel, by its military.

Over time, 500 Arab-majority towns, villages and urban neighbourhoods were depopulated. Many of the settlements were either completely destroyed or repopulated by Jews and given new Hebrew names. Israel employed biological warfare against Palestinians by poisoning village wells, by the end of the war, Israel controlled 78 per cent of land area of the Mandatory Palestine.

According to historical accounts, recent events follow a pattern of blood-thirsty holocausts starting from Deir Yassin Massacre (April 1948), Abu Shusha Massacre (May 1948), Tantura Massacre (May 1948), Lydda Massacre (July 1948), Saliha Massacre (October 1948), Al-Dawayima Massacre (October, 1948), Qibya Massacre (October 1953) to the Kafr Qasim Massacre (October 1956) and the horrific massacre in the Al-Aqsa Mosque courtyards in August 1990. The average is one brutal bloodbath every five years.

The occupation of Palestinian lands itself is illegal by all international laws. On November 29, 1947 the United Nations adopted Resolution 181 (also known as the Partition Resolution) that would divide Great Britain’s former Palestinian mandate into Arab and Jewish states in May 1948 when the British mandate was scheduled to end. Jewish extremists seized the initiative in the same year and declared a state of Israel extending from Judea to Samaria.

The Zionists’ argument was that Jerusalem was the capital of the Land of Israel over 3000 years ago, in King David’s time. Also, that Christianity appeared only 2000 years past and Islam only came into being about 1400 years ago. This is why ultra-orthodox Jews curse and spit on Christians and desecrate their churches and cemeteries in contemporary times.

Since then, Palestine has been a permanent non-member observer state of the UN. Resolution to admit Palestine as 194th the member passed on October 31, 2002 but as at March 2025 Palestine is recognised as a sovereign state by just 147 of the 193 member-states or just over 76 per cent of all UN members. Prominent members of the international community who do not recognise Palestine include Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, UK and the US.

Mr Antonio Guterres, the ninth Secretary-General of the UN, who took office on  January 1, 2017 should use the UN General Assembly (UNGA), which will open from September 9 to 28 2025 to prompt recognition of the state of Palestine as Canada and France recently promised to do. Members of the UNGA also need to assert the UN as an international organization with real power. The alternative is to watch the body become a corpse as the Palestinians.

 

Hassan-Tom can be reached via [email protected]