When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the United Nations amid the Gaza war, the scene itself was telling. As he took the podium, delegates from dozens of countries stood up and filed out in protest. The vast hall, normally full for a world leader’s speech, fell nearly empty – except for one section where the Israeli delegation and their guests sat, offering periodic applause.
It was in this near-vacuum of international disapproval that Netanyahu delivered a defiant, unsettling address. He insisted that Israel’s onslaught in Gaza must continue unabated, framing it as a righteous mission to “finish the job” of eradicating Hamas. But it was not his resolve against militants that sent chills down the spines of those listening – it was how he justified the relentless bombardment and what he signalled about the fate of over two million Palestinian civilians trapped in Gaza.
Netanyahu scoffed at growing accusations that Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to genocide. How could anyone use that word, he argued, when Israel has been “giving them the chance to leave”? In his telling, the Israeli military’s practice of warning Gazans to evacuate certain areas before attacks is proof of humanitarian intent – something, he pointed out, the Nazis never did for Europe’s Jews. The implication was clear: Israel is doing “the exact opposite of genocide,” as he put it in a media interview, because it ostensibly tries to spare civilians by urging them to flee; therefore, any devastation that befalls those who remain is on the heads of Hamas or even the civilians themselves, not Israel.
In reality, Gaza’s civilians have no practical way out. Israel controls all Gaza’s crossings and, aside from the rare evacuation of a few foreign passport-holders or critical medical cases, has kept them firmly shut. The Rafah crossing into Egypt – the only exit not directly through Israel – is mostly closed, and Egypt has made clear it will not accept a mass influx of refugees from this war. Neighbouring countries have explicitly refused to resettle large numbers of Palestinians from Gaza, partly because they see such a “transfer” as abetting the uprooting of a people from their land. In fact, Egyptian officials have flatly dismissed the notion of any “voluntary” exodus as “nonsense”, recognising that Gazans under a rain of bombs aren’t choosing to leave so much as being coerced . Netanyahu’s supposed humanitarian gesture – urging Gazans to flee – is thus a cruel mirage. It’s as if he’s saying, “We’re not killing them, we’re letting them run somewhere else,” knowing full well there is nowhere safe for them to run.
By that twisted logic, some of history’s worst crimes wouldn’t count as genocide so long as a theoretical escape route was offered. But forcing a population out under threat of annihilation is itself a heinous act – one of the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing. Indeed, even the Nazi regime, before it embarked on the industrialised mass murder of the Holocaust, spent years aggressively pressuring and forcing Jews to emigrate. Hitler’s government infamously stripped German Jews of rights and pushed many to flee abroad; at one point, Nazi policy even endorsed deporting Europe’s Jews to far-flung territories. These were seen as “solutions” to what the Nazis poisonously termed the “Jewish question” – until, under cover of world war, that evolved into the “Final Solution” of systematic extermination. The parallel is sobering: offering an unwanted people the “chance” to be banished from their homeland has often been a prelude to something even darker when that offer is refused or proves impossible. Netanyahu’s self-exonerating claim – we warn them to leave, so we aren’t like the Nazis – thus rings with a chilling historical echo.
It is, intentionally or not, an invocation of a genocidal logic: define a population as undesirable and drive them out, then blame them for their own fate if they dare stay. No amount of euphemisms can conceal the brutality of such a program. Telling an entire population to “get out” as the bombs fall is not an act of mercy; it is an ultimatum born of arrogance and contempt for that people’s very existence on their land.
The Falsehood of a “Humane” War
In his UN speech, Netanyahu painted Israel’s war on Gaza as uniquely humane and restrained – “the opposite of genocide”, as he put it. He claimed that the Israeli military takes unprecedented precautions to avoid civilian harm, such as advance warnings and “roof-knocking” techniques. But these self-congratulatory words are belied by the magnitude of destruction and death that Gazans have actually experienced. Since Hamas’s heinous attack on Israel of October 7th, 2023 – an attack that killed some 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians – Israel’s response in Gaza has been unrelenting and catastrophic. Neighbourhood after neighbourhood in Gaza City and beyond has been reduced to rubble. Vital infrastructure – from residential towers and schools to hospitals, ambulances and refugee camps – has been hit by thousands of airstrikes. Casualty estimates run staggeringly high: by late 2025, well over 60,000 Palestinians had been confirmed killed, with some estimates significantly higher. In truth, no one knows the full count, as entire families have been obliterated and tens of thousands remain missing under the ruins. Over half of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are now internally displaced, fleeing from one bombed-out zone to whatever shelter they can still find elsewhere. Clean water, electricity, fuel, and medical supplies have been largely cut off for months, orchestrating a humanitarian catastrophe in real time.
These are not the outcomes of a campaign miraculously sparing civilians. They are the hallmarks of total war waged upon a defenceless population in one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Warnings or not, indiscriminate bombardment of civilian areas – especially after severing those areas from food, water and electricity – cannot be sanitized as benevolence. International legal experts have pointed out that issuing evacuation orders does not absolve an attacking army of responsibility, particularly when civilians have nowhere to actually go. The Geneva Conventions and laws of war were established precisely to outlaw collective punishment and deliberate attacks on civilians, even in pursuit of an enemy who hides among them. By any sober assessment, what is happening in Gaza has long passed the threshold of legitimate self-defence and entered the realm of atrocity. For Netanyahu to stand on the world stage and claim moral high ground while entire families are being buried alive under the rubble from Israeli bombs is a grotesque mockery of justice and truth.
One cannot avoid the harrowing question: what is the ultimate intent behind Israel’s Gaza operation as championed by Netanyahu? Ostensibly it is to destroy Hamas – a militant group guilty of its own appalling crimes against Israeli civilians. But Hamas’s fighters number in the tens of thousands at most, while the population of Gaza is over two million, the majority of them children. In practice, the war has looked less like a precise counter-terrorism effort than a bludgeoning of Gaza as a whole. Netanyahu’s rhetoric and policies increasingly treat civilians as acceptable collateral – or worse, as enemy complicit by virtue of their mere presence in Gaza.
Members of his cabinet have made even more explicit statements, some outright calling for “no mercy” and for Gaza to be “returned to the stone age.” Such dehumanising language and maximalist aims betray a desire not just to neutralise a militant threat, but to expunge a people. Indeed, Netanyahu’s own UN speech scoffed at the idea of Palestinian statehood or rights; he cast Gaza’s agony as necessary and even good, part of a wider war against “the forces of barbarism,” as he labels them. By drawing this binary of civilisation versus barbarism – with Israel and its allies on one side, and Palestinians (lumped indistinguishably with Hamas) on the other – he sets the stage for unending conflict and justifies any cruelty as salvation. It is the language of existential warfare, in which the enemy is not just a combatant but a cancer to be excised at any cost.
A Descent into Barbarism
At this juncture, many observers have begun to draw unsettling historical parallels. The most provocative of these is the comparison between Netanyahu and Adolf Hitler. On the surface, such a comparison seems hyperbolic: Hitler engineered the Holocaust and World War II, events of almost unparalleled evil and scale. To place any contemporary figure in that company is a grave charge. Yet, as the Prime Minister of Israel stood before the UN effectively proclaiming his right to decimate an entire population (so long as he issues evacuation orders first), the echoes of 20th-century fascism were impossible to ignore. The comparison is not made lightly, least of all by those who understand the weight of Holocaust history. In fact, it is precisely because of the Holocaust’s lessons – “Never again” – that such alarm is now being sounded.
Consider the elements: a leader drunk on power, messianically convinced of his people’s unique destiny and entitlement; a leader stoking fears and rage among his populace by demonising an Other (in this case, Palestinians in Gaza) as sub-human “animals” or “barbarians”; a leader incensed at any dissent, who dismisses global criticism as anti-Semitism or support for terror, much as fascists of old dismissed their critics as traitors or degenerates. Under Netanyahu’s tenure, Israeli politics and society have indeed drifted into an ethos of ultra-nationalism and dehumanisation, especially regarding Arabs and Palestinians. His decades-long grip on power, maintained through fear-based rhetoric and occasional alliance with the most extremist elements of Israeli politics, has some eerie similarities to how destructive regimes of the past consolidated their rule.
Most pertinently, Netanyahu’s war in Gaza increasingly fits the mould of a genocidal campaign in both intent and effect. The objective appears not simply to neutralise a militant group, but to break the will and remove the presence of an entire population seen as the enemy. When high-ranking officials in Netanyahu’s coalition talk of pushing Gazans into the Sinai desert of Egypt, or when Netanyahu himself now frames the war as a clash against the very existence of Palestinian nationalism (rejecting any future Palestinian state outright), the goal becomes unmistakable.
It is a vision of erasure: Gaza emptied of its people or reduced to submissive ruins, its inhabitants dead, scattered, or permanently subjugated. This is why the Hitler comparison, outrageous as it sounds, is being invoked – not as cheap provocation but out of genuine horror at witnessing the beginnings of what could become a modern genocide. Hitler, too, advocated the removal of a despised people (the Jews) from “his” land and eventually from existence. He, too, couched his rhetoric in terms of self-defence and national purity, claiming Germany had to do what it did or face annihilation by the “other”. Netanyahu’s narrative about Israel facing an existential threat from the Palestinians of Gaza – one of the poorest, most imprisoned populations on earth – has that same hallucinatory quality of a strong nation convincing itself of a mortal danger from the very people it oppresses.
To be clear, drawing this parallel is not a form of historical relativism – the Holocaust has no equal, and Israel’s actions, however brutal, have not (yet) reached that ghastly scale of industrial extermination. But history does not repeat verbatim; it echoes in pattern. What matters is the teleological direction of travel. And the direction here is unmistakeable: towards ethnic cleansing, with genocidal rhetoric paving the way. Netanyahu’s dismissive question at the UN – “did the Nazis give Jews a chance to leave?” – was meant to differentiate his actions from Hitler’s. Instead, it inadvertently underscored a lethal similarity: the notion that a people one wishes to be rid of should just go away, and that their refusal or inability to leave somehow justifies what comes next.
If Benjamin Netanyahu is becoming a figure of Hitlerian infamy, it is because he appears to lack any restraint or “off-switch” in his pursuit of an absolutist vision. He presides over the most powerful military in the Middle East, armed not only with conventional bombs but purportedly with nuclear weapons. He displays a growing contempt for international law and norms, even as global outrage mounts. Like leaders of dark eras past, he seems convinced that might will make right and that history will absolve him – or that history simply won’t matter if enemies are eliminated. This hubris is pushing the region, and perhaps the world, toward a precipice. One need only recall how a regional conflict in 1939 exploded into a world war by 1941 to realise how fast events can spiral beyond control when a power-drunk leader presses forward unchecked.
The Precipice of Global Catastrophe
Under Netanyahu’s current course, the Israel–Palestine conflict is no longer a distant tragedy one can ignore; it’s fast becoming a fuse that could ignite a broader conflagration. Tensions in the Middle East are at boiling point. Neighbouring countries like Lebanon, Syria, and Iran – all aligned or sympathetic with the Palestinians – are being drawn dangerously close to the fray. Already, there have been countless border skirmishes with Hezbollah in Lebanon; stray shells and bombs have landed in Syria; US warships and Iranian proxies eye each other warily in the surrounding waters. The more ferocious Israel’s assault on Gaza becomes, the greater the pressure on other actors to intervene. There is a palpable sense that one miscalculation could spark a regional war – one that would be catastrophic for all involved, Israelis included.
On the global stage, fault lines are emerging too. While Western governments have largely backed Israel’s “right to self-defence” (some even supplying the bombs falling on Gaza), the peoples of the world are increasingly mobilising in opposition. In dozens of countries, from the Arab world and Europe to North America and Asia, hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens have marched in solidarity with Gaza, demanding an end to the carnage. This groundswell of human conscience is not driven by politics as usual; it’s an elemental cry of empathy and outrage at seeing hospitals blown apart, refugee camps cratered, and children pulled lifeless from debris day after day. Within Western nations – including the United States and Britain, staunch Israel allies – there is unprecedented public dissent pressuring those in power to rein Israel in. Yet, Netanyahu remains obstinate, and leaders who might influence him hesitate, caught between geopolitical alliances and the unmistakable evidence of war crimes unfolding live on our screens.
The situation has set up a perilous dynamic: a headstrong regime, insulated by past impunity and blinkered by a narrative of absolute righteousness, versus a global public opinion that sees a humanitarian nightmare and demands that it stop. If the governments of the world do not respond to this moral outcry and if Netanyahu does not alter course, the legitimacy of the international order itself – the United Nations, the Geneva Conventions, the very idea of a rules-based system (at least as an architecture of the West) – will be dealt a heavy blow. We risk entering an age of open cynicism where might truly makes right, and where any atrocity can be justified by invoking “security” or “anti-terrorism.” Such an age would not only doom the Palestinians; it would erode the safety and rights of people everywhere. After all, if one powerful state can get away with obliterating a civilian population under its control, what is to stop others from doing the same to whatever scapegoated group lies in their own path?
Netanyahu’s course thus threatens more than a single city or people – it threatens to unravel the fragile fabric of civility that (barely) holds our world together. It beckons a return to the law of the jungle in international affairs, something humanity sought to banish for good after the bloodbaths of the 20th century. And in a 21st century world armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and advanced killing technology, a breakdown of international norms could be cataclysmic.
We simply cannot afford a repeat of history’s worst chapters, neither morally nor practically. For in the nuclear age, a slide into barbaric warfare and genocidal thinking could quite literally mean annihilation on a global scale. If a war in one tiny enclave can polarise nations and incite talk of World War III (as many now fear), imagine what a failure to stop this could signal to other volatile conflicts elsewhere. The domino effect of inaction in the face of clear atrocity is real: it whispers to every despot and fanatic that the world will stand idly by. It is not alarmism, but realism, to say that civilisation itself hangs in the balance when basic humane values are so flagrantly trampled.
The Moral Line
Amid all the rhetoric and recriminations, one principle must stand inviolable: there can never be a justification for the deliberate slaughter of innocent civilians. Not by one side, not by the other, not ever. This principle is a bedrock of our common humanity. It was brutally violated on October 7th, 2023, when Hamas militants stormed into Israeli towns, massacring around 1,200 people and taking others hostage. The images of that day – terrified families, burnt homes, murdered festival-goers – shocked the world. No cause, however legitimate it purports to be, can excuse such wanton savagery against civilians. Those attacks were crimes against humanity, and the grief and anger of Israelis in their aftermath were entirely justified.
Yet, that same horror and righteous anger cannot justify what has been done in response to two million Palestinians in Gaza, half of them children, who bear no responsibility for Hamas’s crimes. There is no excuse for slaughtering innocents now in Gaza either – not for vengeance, not for “security,” not for anything. If it was barbaric for Hamas to butcher Israeli families (and it was), then it is barbaric for Israeli forces to carpet-bomb neighbourhoods, knowing full well that countless Palestinian families lie beneath the bombs. One does not honour the dead of October 7th by creating more grieving mothers and fathers in Gaza; one profanes their memory by allowing the cycle of killing to widen. True justice for the victims of Hamas’s terror would target the perpetrators and seek to uphold the rule of law and value of life – it would not recurse to collective punishment that inflicts equal or greater horror on other blameless lives.
This is the moral line in the sand that Netanyahu’s regime has crossed, and that too many so-called “world leaders” are shamefully blurring with talk of “ Israel’s right to defend itself.” A massacre of children is not self-defence. Pulverising entire city blocks because a few militants might be hiding there is not counter-terrorism – it is terrorism, perpetrated by a state. We must be able to say this without equivocation: murder is murder, whether the perpetrator wears a uniform or not, whether they claim God is on their side or wave a national flag or chant a resistance slogan. When innocent people are killed en masse, humanity is diminished. And when we begin to allow excuses for it – it was necessary, it was their own leaders’ fault, it’s a price to pay for security – we inch toward a moral abyss.
The philosopher and intellectual Albert Camus, confronted with the ethical crises of World War II, wrote that one must never start explaining away the murder of a child with expedient rationales, for once you do, you begin justifying anything. In Gaza today, over 10,000 children are reported dead in less than two months of bombing – a number so large it defies comprehension. Each of those children had a name, a favourite toy, a face bright with dreams. To speak of these lives as “collateral damage” or as unfortunate but necessary sacrifices is an intolerable affront to the very idea of civilisation. If we permit ourselves to find rationales for this, what barbarity will we not accept? The line must hold: the deliberate or foreseeable killing of civilians is unequivocally wrong, whether done in a terror attack or under the aegis of a military campaign. Our empathy cannot be selective; our outrage cannot be conditional. Either it is wrong to slaughter the innocent, or we have obliterated the foundation of human morality altogether.
A Call to Unite or Perish
We now find ourselves at a fateful juncture. Either humanity unites to reject this descent into savagery, or we splinter and sink into “mutually assured” annihilation. The phrase “mutually assured destruction” was coined in the Cold War to describe how nuclear-armed superpowers holding each other at gunpoint prevented direct conflict – the logic being that starting a war would guarantee one’s own ruin. Today, a different kind of mutual destruction is on the table: a moral and societal collapse that will consume both the oppressor and the oppressed, the silent bystander and the activist alike, if it is not halted. In an age of instant global communication and empowered masses, the tragedy of Gaza is not a distant spectacle – it’s unfolding in the moral consciousness of millions of people. It is testing the very idea of a global community, of a human family. The outcome will set the tone for the future of our species: either a renewed commitment to universal values of life and justice, or an acceptance that brute force and tribal loyalties trump compassion and law.
“This is the line,” as many are now saying – a point of no return. To “stand for humanity” in this context means several concrete things: It means raising our voices, relentlessly, to speak truth to power – to counter the lies and propaganda that dehumanise Palestinians or any victims of injustice. It means demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza to halt the bloodshed, and the swift provision of lifesaving aid to a population in dire need. It means insisting on accountability: rulers who commit war crimes, be they heads of state or militia commanders, must be held responsible in courts of law, lest the cycle of impunity continue. Standing for humanity also means caring for all victims, Israeli and Palestinian, with equal compassion – supporting relief for stricken families in Gaza, but also healing for communities shattered by the October 7th massacre. It means understanding that our fates are intertwined: Israelis will never truly live in peace or security while Palestinians live in despair and subjugation, and vice versa. The only future is a shared one.
To “watch humanity evaporate,” by contrast, would be to do nothing – to let apathy or fear paralyse us while the powerful pursue their “final solutions.” It would be to let our leaders and media convince us that one side’s pain matters less than another’s, that some children are worth saving and others are not. It would be to shrug at the creation of an open-air graveyard in Gaza out of a misguided sense of helplessness or cynicism. That path – the path of indifference – leads to a dark place we have been before. In the 1930s and 1940s, much of the world’s silence and acquiescence enabled genocidal fascism to wreak its havoc until it was almost too late. We dare not repeat that fatal complacency.
The heartening news is that humanity is not remaining silent this time. Across continents, people of all backgrounds are coming together to condemn what is happening in Gaza and to declare: “Not in our name.” Jewish Americans and Europeans are marching alongside Muslims and Christians, saying “Never Again means never again for anyone.” Israeli human rights groups and brave dissenters are speaking out, even as their government tries to silence them, because they recognise that this cruelty betrays Jewish values and Israel’s own future. From South Africa to South America, nations once colonised or oppressed see in the Palestinians’ plight a reflection of their own past struggles, and they are urging an end to the madness. This is what standing for humanity looks like – a chorus of ordinary voices that, together, become something extraordinary: a moral force capable of shaking the halls of power.
Our task, then, is to amplify this force until it cannot be ignored. Netanyahu’s evil agenda must be repudiated in the court of global public opinion and diplomatically strangled by any leaders of conscience. The same rejection must meet any actor – state or non-state – who would target innocents to achieve political or religious aims. We must hold fast to the simple principle that every human life is precious, whether in an Israeli kibbutz or a Gazan refugee camp. There can be no double standards, no selective humanity. Either we defend the fundamental dignity and rights of all, or we witness a world where our own dignity and rights eventually perish.
In standing up now, we reclaim not only our compassion but our foresight. We signal that we have learned from history’s horrors and will not let them repeat on our watch. The road ahead towards a just peace in Israel-Palestine – where Israelis and Palestinians alike live with security and freedom – is undoubtedly long and fraught. But it begins with a single, urgent step: stop the slaughter. Reject the logic that says might can massacre right. Refuse to accept that today’s victims must be sacrificed for some utopian promise of “victory” tomorrow. Humanity’s moral compass is being tested. In Gaza’s agony, the very definition of who we are is at stake. Let it not be said by future generations that we knew the truth of an unfolding atrocity but chose the cowardice of silence. Let them not record that, faced with a new century’s aspiring tyrant, we lacked the will to call him out and halt his hand. Instead, let this moment be remembered as the time when people across the world, of every nation and creed, stood as one and shouted “no more!” – and were heard.
History is watching. The children of the future are watching, from whatever world we bequeath them. Now is the time to choose: to stand for our shared humanity, or to see it evaporate before our eyes. Let us choose wisely, and let us choose life.