More than twenty months into the genocide, Israel has rendered Gaza a hellscape on earth. This hellscape is not an act of God, or a natural disaster, or some force majeure — it’s human-made, orchestrated by Israel, funded and armed by the United States, and cheered on by Western political elites.

For five hellish months, Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza, blocking all food deliveries to the starving population of two million Palestinians, almost half of them children, and condemning hundreds to a slow and agonizing death. Unsatisfied with forced mass starvation, Israeli forces carried out the equivalent of their previous flour massacre in Gaza almost daily, slaughtering over one thousand Palestinians seeking food. On Wednesday, more than one hundred international aid and rights groups appealed to governments to take immediate action in Gaza, where over one hundred thousand children are facing imminent mass death if this barbarity continues.

The humanitarian calamity is so horrific that top UN officials have abandoned their customarily restrained tone for outraged and emotionally charged condemnations. UN secretary-general António Guterres has berated the international community for ignoring the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, which he said presents a “moral crisis that challenges the global conscience.”

“I cannot explain the level of indifference and inaction we see by too many in the international community — the lack of compassion, the lack of truth, the lack of humanity,” Guterres told participants at the global assembly of the rights group Amnesty International.

Meanwhile, genocidal rhetoric continues to pour out of the upper echelons of Israeli leadership, with one minister pledging that Israel is “racing to wipe out Gaza.” The genocidal mania also includes an Israeli version of Donald Trump’s Gaza video, featuring a dystopian AI-generated scenario of an ethnically cleansed Gaza, with Trump Tower glimmering over the depopulated landscape.

US president Trump has once again cheered for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. In a recent interview, Trump openly called on Israel to cleanse Gaza, while virtually blaming Palestinians for their own death. He told Israel to “finish the job” in Gaza.

US complicity in the Gaza genocide goes beyond funding and arming Israel to the hilt with bipartisan blessing. Recent media reports have revealed that Israel and the Trump administration are coordinating a scheme to drive Palestinians out of Gaza, which could include countries like Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Libya — a revived Zionist dream as old as Israel itself, hatched originally by Zionist leaders like Moshe Dayan and Levi Eshkol, to transfer Palestinian refugees in Gaza to countries in North Africa (the Libyan Operation), or even to Latin America by air (the Moshe Dayan plan). “All of Gaza will be Jewish,” as one Israeli minister recently vowed.

Europe is faring hardly better. For over twenty months, the Western political class has refused to rein in Israel’s genocidal spree in Gaza. France’s recent recognition of a Palestinian state, while refusing to take immediate and concrete actions to stop the genocide and the forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, is a largely empty gesture, especially in the face of what the UN’s former aid chief describes as “the worst crime of the century.”

UK leaders seem to believe that Israel can always act with impunity and without consequences against Palestinians, while Germany has no qualms about making Palestinians pay for its past crimes against the Jews, with a horrifying repeat of past atrocities. Or as Hans Frank, a Nazi governor in occupied Poland, put it in his diary: “That we sentence 1.2 million Jews to die of hunger should be noted only marginally.”

For decades, Western leaders have winked at Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people, refusing to take a stand against the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the siege of Gaza, and the apartheid in the West Bank, marked by the constant dispossession and erasure of Palestinian existence, daily dehumanization and forced displacement, unhinged settler violence, systematic torture, and other unspeakable injustices, which together have culminated in the Gaza genocide.

According to international law, siege starvation is a war crime, a crime against humanity, and an act of genocide. The global consensus has been that sieges are “barbaric and medieval” and belong to a darker period in human history. And yet, for nearly two decades, Israel has imposed its devastating and suffocating blockade of Gaza without consequences.

This brutal and inhumane blockade, the longest in modern history, has been sustained and naturalized with Western support and blessing, whose leaders have become accustomed to seeing Palestinians ghettoed in concentration camps swollen by refugees, caged in a tiny enclave like sheep penned for slaughter, under constant bombardment and invasions, displaced time and again. If Gaza was already unlivable before the genocide, it’s now “worse than hell on earth,” to cite the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The Gaza genocide is the most documented genocide in human history. Future historians contemplating it will scratch their heads over how this unimaginable horror was allowed to happen in this enlightened century — how the civilized world watched it unfold in real time, broadcast by the victims themselves, and did nothing to stop it. As UNICEF spokesperson James Elder put it: “Gaza has shattered humanity’s records for its darkest chapters. Humanity must now urgently write a different chapter.”

For the horror of the Gaza genocide is not merely the fact that it was allowed to happen, but that it was allowed to happen for this long and for far longer than most genocides in recent memory — with the persistent backing of Western powers. The Srebrenica genocide, which marks thirty years this month, unfolded in a few horrific days in July 1995, prompting swift Western intervention. While Israel’s genocide in Gaza has reaped so far at least ten times as many victims as the Srebrenica genocide in Bosnia, no other genocide has garnered the same level of complicity and apathy from Western elites. Not to mention Arab complicity, whose leaders largely see Palestinian resistance and struggle for freedom as an existential threat.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, American writer Kurt Vonnegut describes the bombing of Dresden, which unfolded eighty years ago and lasted for two nights, as the “greatest massacre in European history.” One wonders what he would say about Israel’s unending slaughter of Gaza, which has been unfolding before our eyes for nearly two years, with no end in sight. Gone are the days when a Palestinian prisoner’s hunger strike would cause a global outrage. The new threshold, established in Gaza by Israel and its Western allies, is that a pariah state can starve to death an entire people and still be a member of the United Nations.

For twenty-one months, Western powers, led by the United States, have allowed Israel to plumb new depths of barbarity in Gaza almost daily without offering Palestinians even the dignity of humanitarian sympathy. They continue to do so even when the Western-backed destruction of Palestinians has brought the whole global order and postwar moral legacy to the brink of collapse. And they remain unfazed by Israel’s absolute contempt for the basic tenets of international justice, thus rendering Gaza, in the words of a prominent Palestinian human rights lawyer, “the graveyard of international law.”

This holocaust must stop now. Humanity itself is at stake. As Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), has put it: “Make ‘never again’ a reality. If we fail the Palestinians in Gaza, others are likely to be failed too in the future.”