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For nearly eight decades, the global community has been lectured on the sanctity of the “international rules-based order.” We were told that the post-World War Two framework—built upon the wreckage of the Holocaust and codified through the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Genocide Conventions—was a shield for the vulnerable and a leash for the powerful. This order was founded on the promise of “Never Again,” a solemn vow that the industrial-scale extermination of a people would never be permitted to recur.
However, as we enter the 31st month of Israel’s genocide on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip—with a so-called ceasefire proving illusory and the slaughter continuing unabated—that shield has been revealed as a sieve, and the vow as a hollow ethno-specific mantra. Compounding this betrayal is the US-Israeli illegal war of aggression launched against Iran on February 28, 2026. In both instances, the two nations have flagrantly violated the aforementioned treaties and conventions, and the fundamental norms of international law. Together, these atrocities signal the effective collapse of the international rules-based order and the myth of universal human rights.
The discrepancy between the “official” reality and the truth on the ground in Gaza is the first indication of this collapse. As of January 2026, mainstream Western outlets cautiously cite a Palestinian death toll topping 75,000. Yet rigorous academic and epidemiological analyses reveal a far more harrowing reality. Peer-reviewed studies and models, including those by Australian scholars Richard Hil and Gideon Polya, Israeli academic Yaakov Garb’s analysis published by Harvard, and The Lancet’s projections, demonstrate that when accounting for bodies buried under millions of tons of rubble, indirect deaths from the total collapse of healthcare, starvation, and untreated disease, the true toll exceeds 680,000 lives—primarily women and children—as of April 2025, with the figure climbing further into 2026 as the Israeli assault continues.
If we accept the figures from these studies—derived from the same scientific methodologies used in other global conflicts—the scale of the slaughter rivals or exceeds the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Yet unlike Rwanda, which the West later lamented as a failure of intervention, the Gaza genocide is a willful failure to intervene in the most transparent genocide in human history. The “rules-based order” is not failing because it’s weak. It is failing because its architects are the primary financiers of the carnage being inflicted on the Middle-East.
The United States has funnelled over $21 billion in military aid to Israel since October 2023, with billions more arriving from Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Canada. These nations, which frequently invoke international law to sanction adversaries, have simultaneously provided the diplomatic cover and the weapons required to systematically level 80% of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. By weaponizing international law against the powerless while suspending it for their allies, the Western alliance has exposed the “order” as a criminal cabal that prioritizes geopolitical hegemony over human life.
This betrayal is rooted in a profound, institutionalized anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia that permeates Western institutions and discourse. The systematic dehumanization of Palestinians—who have endured more than a century of occupation, dispossession, and Zionist settler-colonialism—has been crucial in sustaining Western silence and complicity amid the ongoing horrors in Gaza.
A stark illustration of this double standard emerged in the immediate aftermath of October 7, 2023. The killing of 1,195 people during the Hamas-led attacks triggered swift, intense moral outrage across the Western world, with leaders and media outlets universally condemning the violence as an atrocity. Yet as the Palestinian death toll in Gaza climbed to ten, fifty, and eventually hundreds of times that number—reaching catastrophic scales through relentless bombardment—the same Western leaders responded with only tepid, “measured” appeals for restraint, even as they continued supplying Israel with massive quantities of bombs, missiles and other munitions.
Investigations, including reports from Israeli sources like Ha’aretz and international bodies such as the UN Commission of Inquiry, have since revealed that the October 7 death toll included casualties from Israeli forces’ application of the controversial Hannibal Directive in multiple locations. This procedure, aimed at preventing captures of Israeli Jews at all costs (even if it risked or caused the deaths of Israelis), was invoked during the chaos, leading to incidents that killed hundreds of civilians and potentially endangered others. Despite these complexities and the acknowledgement in some accounts that not all deaths were solely attributable to Hamas, the Western reaction remained one-sided--unqualified horror at Palestinian-perpetrated violence contrasted sharply with muted or enabling responses to Israel’s far deadlier genocidal campaign.
This selective outrage underscores how deeply entrenched biases allow the West to rationalize or overlook massive Palestinian suffering while amplifying lesser-scale violence against Israelis, perpetuating a hierarchy of human worth that has enabled the ongoing catastrophe.
The moral abyss is further deepened by the “visibility” of this genocide. Unlike the Holocaust, which the Nazi regime attempted to hide in isolated camps like Auschwitz, the annihilation of Gaza is the first live-streamed genocide in human history. We see the emaciated frames of starving children and the obliteration of entire families in high definition on our smartphones. We see Israeli soldiers filming their own war crimes for social media, mocking the ruins of schools and mosques. The world watches in real-time as a population of approximately 2 million is squeezed into “safe zones” that are then systematically bombarded.
The fact that this transparency has prompted no meaningful intervention from the powers that defeated the Nazis is a devastating indictment of those nations and our era. It suggests that the “international community” is not a collective of nations bound by law, but a hierarchy of human value where Palestinian blood is deemed “lesser” than that of those within the Western sphere of influence.
The invocation of “Never Again” has been particularly perverted. Originally intended as a universal promise to protect all of humanity from the “crime of crimes,” it has been narrowed into a tool of Jewish exceptionalism. Every year, Western leaders hypocritically stand at Holocaust memorials and pledge to uphold justice, even as they provide the white phosphorus and intelligence used to displace 99% of Gaza’s population. This victim-perpetrator inversion, where the state committing genocide is shielded from accountability by the memory of a previous genocide, is a moral perversity that the international legal system cannot survive.
We are witnessing a repeat of the 1930s, where the League of Nations collapsed because it could not—or would not—restrain the aggression of its powerful members. Today, the United Nations and the International Court of Justice are being rendered obsolete not by their own design, but by the brazen defiance of the United States and its allies. When the ICC seeks warrants for war crimes, it is threatened with sanctions by Washington. When the UN General Assembly votes for a ceasefire, it is ignored.
The betrayal extends directly to the US-Israeli war against Iran. On February 28, under President Donald Trump and in coordination with Israel, the United States launched unprovoked strikes targeting Iranian nuclear facilities, military infrastructure, and leadership—including the assassinating Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and members of his family. A girls’ elementary school in Minab was deliberately hit, killing at least 165 children, alongside strikes on hospitals and civilian areas with no military value. These actions constitute a blatant and criminal war of aggression with no UN Security Council authorization and no valid claim of imminent self-defence under the UN Charter. Additionally, diplomatic talks with Iran were making significant progress hours before the strikes, and leaks from within the US intelligence establishment confirmed no imminent Iranian threat or nuclear warhead capability.
Under the Geneva Conventions, the deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian objects qualifies as war crimes. Israeli and American hypocrisy is blatant and staggering in this regard when compared to the war in Ukraine. The same nations that imposed sanctions on Russia for its 2022 invasion of that nation and condemned it for bombing schools and hospitals, offered complicity, muted criticism, or outright endorsement for identical violations against Iran. This selective enforcement—condemning aggression when committed by adversaries but exempting allies—lays bare the double standards that have defined the international order from its inception in the late 1940s.
Both the Gaza genocide and the aggression against Iran directly contravene the foundational principles established by the Judgment at Nuremberg (1945-1946), the bedrock of all international law created after World War Two. The Nuremberg Tribunal declared that “to initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” It established individual accountability for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity—principles that directly birthed the UN Charter (prohibiting aggression), the 1948 Genocide Convention (acts with intent to destroy a group in whole or in part, as Israel’s systematic killings, starvation policies, and destruction of life conditions in Gaza fulfill), the Geneva Conventions (civilian protections violated in both Gaza’s bombardment and Iran’s school and hospital strikes), and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. By committing these crimes with impunity, the US and Israel have not merely violated these instruments, they have demolished the post-war legal order built explicitly on Nuremberg’s vow to prevent such atrocities from recurring.
In his special address at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 20, 2026, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney invoked Thucydides’ dictum that “the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.” He declared that the rules-based international order was “fading,” a “fiction,” an “illusion,” and no longer functioning “as advertised.” He acknowledged that nations like Canada had prospered under it for decades, but “we knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false—that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient.”
Carney urged middle powers to accept the reality—a system of intensifying great power rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic and military might as a weapon of coercion. This speech inadvertently confirms the core truth—that the order Carney described was never universal or impartial. It primarily benefitted the West and aligned powers—delivering prosperity and security to Canada, the US, and Europe—while adversaries and the Global South were its perpetual victims, subjected to occupation, sanctions, regime-change wars, economic colonialism, and now live-streamed genocide and unprovoked aggression.
Carney’s own actions and those of his government powerfully illustrate the selective nature of the rules-based order he described in Davos—one that privileges Western powers and their allies while leaving others to bear the consequences of the actions of the powerful. In the immediate aftermath of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28, Carney quickly voiced support for the actions, framing them as necessary to prevent Iran from completing construction of nuclear weapons and to curb threats to regional stability, even as the UN and international law experts condemned the illegality of the actions. He has similarly refused to issue any outright condemnation of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has been condemned as such by genocide and Holocaust experts, and respected human rights organizations.
This pattern of selective outrage extended further when Canada joined European allies in condemning Iran’s actions in blocking or threatening the Strait of Hormuz—actions that disrupted global oil shipments—while remaining conspicuously silent on the longstanding and intensified US economic measures against Cuba, including an effective oil blockade that has exacerbated humanitarian hardships on the island without comparable international push back. Such inconsistencies reveal the hypocrisy Carney himself stated in his Davos remarks.
Palestinians and Iranians, positioned as non-Western and comparatively “weak” actors in this hierarchy, were always intended to endure the system’s double standards. Exemptions granted to the powerful—through sustained US arms shipments to Israel, repeated vetoes of accountability at the UN, selective enforcement of international norms, and diplomatic or rhetorical endorsement of aggressive actions like the Iran strikes—have ensured that the order was intended to serve Western hegemony rather than universal principles of humanity or equity. The unfolding realities in Gaza and Iran stand as irrefutable evidence. What was once presented as a principled global framework was, in practice, a mechanism of power that the dominant nations of the world discard or bend whenever it suits their interests.
The evidence that the rules-based order is now non-existent is overwhelming. After 30 months of ongoing genocide in Gaza, the most powerful nations of the world (primarily the US and NATO nations) have done nothing to stop Israel’s slaughter, which continues despite a so-called ceasefire that came into effect in October 2025. Billions in military aid flowed uninterrupted, International Court of Justice orders were defied, and UN resolutions vetoed. The same superpower that frequently lectured the world on abiding by international law enabled the carnage in Gaza, and then pivoted to fresh aggression against Iran without justification and without consequence.
The Gaza genocide and the US-Israeli war against Iran have shattered the illusion of a global conscience and of the international “rules based order.” They have shown that “Western humanity” is a bedtime fable, a “sick joke” told to citizens who want to believe their governments are the “good guys.” In reality, the “rules” only apply when they serve the interests of the powerful. For the Palestinian and Iranian people, the international order has not been a protector, but a jailer, an executioner, and a propagator of narratives of hate.
As the ruins of Gaza continue to smoulder and the skies over Iran fill with the smoke of an illegal war of aggression, these scenes stand as stark monuments to the end of the post-World War II era. We can no longer speak of “universal human rights” with any credibility while the world’s most powerful nations actively underwrite the systematic erasure of entire peoples. The so-called international rules-based order did not fade away gradually or die of natural causes—it was deliberately murdered in the streets of Gaza and the cities of Iran, with the full knowledge, material support, and diplomatic cover provided by the very nations that once positioned themselves as its chief guardians and moral exemplars.
Any hope for a genuine future of global justice cannot be rebuilt on the shattered, hypocritical foundations of this broken system. The mass graves in Gaza and the fresh rubble across Iran hold far more than the hundreds of thousands of victims claimed by US- and Israeli-led crimes; they also entomb the long-standing pretenses of Western moral authority. The comforting fairy tale—that a system of international laws applies equally to all nations—has been exposed as a dangerous illusion. We now confront a harsh moral abyss, thrust upon the world by the very powers that long preached restraint and accountability. In this new reality, the United States and Israel operate like unchecked gunslingers in a lawless frontier, casting themselves as the corrupt sheriffs determined to “clean up” the Middle East on their own terms, regardless of the human cost or the wreckage left behind.
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