How to Erase a Witness: The UN Gets Muted While Gaza Starves
People walk past the damaged headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in Gaza City on Feb. 15. AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
In 2025, legality has a different connotation from what it used to mean. The U.S. and Israel now consider the UN to be "ineffective", "biased" and, in many way, "unnecessary". Their latest move was surreptitiously cutting out UNRWA from Gaza, labelling it a "Hamas front".
The effect is simple, fewer observers, fewer questions.What remains looks less like shared international responsibility and "cooperation", and more like management. An aboriginal "civil-military, coordination center", led by U.S. officers, has limited the flow of aid and ensured the transfer of information.
The UN, which has been the primary observer of what happens inside Gaza, has been politely asked to remain uninvolved. In the absence of the UN, no one is tracking the flow of food and medicine, how food moves, or does not. At the same time, Washington and Tel Aviv have frozen funding and withdrawn from funding UN agencies that had previously been supportive of and funded. Diplomacy has been replaced with public relations soundbites about security and stability. The hunger is a weapon, legality comes up in conversation and we have silence as policy.What is disturbing is how normal it all seems. The world continues to scroll past the headlines about "coordination" and "reconstruction" and the system continues on, cleaner, quieter, with fewer questions about why.
This is how dystopias are organized and animated; not through explosion, but through a process of rule changes and enforcement until the changes are invisible.
References :
https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1oi6bgn/how_to_erase_a_witness_the_un_gets_muted_while/
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