Each week brings new calamities for people in the countries neighboring Israel, as its leaders try to bomb their way to the promised land of an ever-expanding Greater Israel.

In Gaza, Israel appears to be launching its “Generals’ Plan” to drive the most devastated and traumatized 2.2 million people in the world into the southern half of their open-air prison. Under this plan, Israel would hand the northern half over to greedy developers and settlers who, after decades of encouragement from the United States, have become a dominant force in Israeli politics and society. The redoubled slaughter of those who cannot or refuse to move south has already begun.

In Lebanon, millions are fleeing for their lives. Israel is blowing thousands to pieces in a repeat of the first phase of the genocide in Gaza. Every person it kills or forces out and every building in a neighboring country it demolishes opens the way for future Israeli settlements. The people of Iran, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia ask which of them will be next.

Israel attacks UNIFIL

Israel is not only attacking its neighbors — it is at war with the entire world. The nation is especially threatened when the world’s governments convene at the United Nations and in international courts to try to enforce the rule of international law. Like every other country, Israel is legally bound by the rules of the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions and other multilateral treaties.

In July, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967 is illegal, and that it must withdraw its military forces and settlers from all those territories. In September, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution giving Israel one year to complete that withdrawal. If Israel fails to comply, as expected, the UN Security Council or the General Assembly may take stronger measures. These could include an international arms embargo, economic sanctions or even the use of force.

Now, amid the escalating violence of Israel’s latest bombing and invasion of Lebanon, Israel is attacking the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). This peacekeeping force’s thankless job is to monitor and mitigate the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shiite militia and political party in Lebanon.

On October 10 and 11, Israeli forces fired on three UNIFIL positions in Lebanon. At least five peacekeepers were injured. UNIFIL also accused Israeli soldiers of deliberately firing at and disabling the monitoring cameras at its headquarters, before two Israeli tanks later crashed into its gates, destroying them. On October 15, an Israeli tank fired at a watchtower in what UNIFIL described as “direct and apparently deliberate fire on a UNIFIL position.” Deliberately targeting UN missions is a war crime.

This is far from the first time Israel has attacked the soldiers of UNIFIL. The force has the worst death toll of any of the UN’s 52 peacekeeping missions since 1948. Since UNIFIL took up its positions in southern Lebanon in 1978, Israel has killed UN peacekeepers from Ireland, Norway, Nepal, France, Finland, Austria and China. The South Lebanon Army, Israel’s Christian militia proxy in Lebanon from 1984 to 2000, killed many more, as have other Palestinian and Lebanese groups. In fact, 337 UN peacekeepers from all over the world have perished trying to keep the peace in southern Lebanon, which is sovereign Lebanese territory and should not face repeated Israeli invasions. 

A full 50 countries contribute to the 10,000-strong UNIFIL peacekeeping mission, anchored by battalions from France, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Italy, Nepal and Spain. All those governments have strongly and unanimously condemned Israel’s latest attacks, and insisted that “such actions must stop immediately and should be adequately investigated.”

Israel works to dismantle UNRWA

Israel’s assault on UN agencies is not confined to attacking its peacekeepers in Lebanon. The vulnerable United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), staffed by unarmed civilians, is under an even more vicious assault by Israel in Gaza. In the past year alone, Israel has bombed and fired on UNRWA schools, warehouses, aid convoys and UN personnel, killing nearly 230 workers.

UNRWA was created in 1949 by the UN General Assembly to provide relief to Palestinian refugees after the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe). The Zionist militias that later became the Israeli army violently expelled over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and homeland, ignoring the UN partition plan. They forcibly seized much of the land the UN plan had allocated to form a Palestinian state.

In 1949, the UN recognized all that Zionist-occupied territory as the new state of Israel. The state’s most aggressive, racist leaders concluded that they could get away with making and remaking their own borders by force — the world would not lift a finger to stop them. Emboldened by its growing military and diplomatic alliance with the US, Israel has only expanded its territorial ambitions.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now brazenly stands before the whole world and displays maps of “Greater Israel” that include all the land it illegally occupies. Meanwhile Israelis openly talk of annexing parts of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Israel has long desired to dismantle UNRWA. In 2017, Netanyahu accused the agency of inciting anti-Israeli sentiment. He blamed UNRWA for “perpetuating the Palestinian refugee problem” and called for its elimination.

After Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, Israel accused 12 of UNRWA’s 13,000 staff of involvement. The agency immediately suspended those workers, and many countries pulled their UNRWA funding. However, a UN report later found that Israeli authorities did not provide “any supporting evidence” to back up their allegations. Since this revelation, every country that previously supported UNRWA except the US has restored its funding.

Israel’s assault on the refugee agency has only continued. There are now three anti-UNRWA bills in the Israeli Knesset. One aims to ban the organization from operating in Israel, another to strip UNRWA’s staff of legal protections afforded to UN workers under Israeli law and a third to brand the agency as a terrorist organization. Israeli members of parliament are also proposing legislation to confiscate UNRWA’s headquarters in Jerusalem and use the land for new settlements.

UN Secretary General Guterres warned that if these bills become law and UNRWA is unable to aid the people of Gaza, “it would be a catastrophe in what is already an unmitigated disaster.”

The US obstructs resolution

Israel’s relationship with the UN and the rest of the world is at a breaking point. When Netanyahu addressed the General Assembly in New York in September, he called the UN a “swamp of antisemitic bile.” But the UN is not an alien body from another planet. It is simply the world’s nations coming together to try to solve our most serious common problems. One of these problems is the endless crisis that Israel’s actions are causing for its neighbors and, increasingly, the whole planet.

Now Israel wants to ban UN Secretary General António Guterres from even entering the country. AsIsrael invaded Lebanon on October 1, Iran responded to a series of Israeli attacks and assassinations by launching 180 missiles at Israel. Guterres put out a statement deploring the “broadening conflict in the Middle East,” but did not specifically mention Iran. Israel responded by declaring him persona non grata in Israel, a new low in relations between Israel and UN officials.

Over the years, the US has partnered with Israel in its attacks on the UN. It has used its veto in the Security Council 40 times to obstruct the world’s efforts to force Israel to comply with international law.

US obstruction offers no solution. As chaos grows and spreads and the US’s unconditional support gradually pulls it deeper into the conflict, this policy can only fuel the crisis.

The rest of the world is looking on in horror. Many world leaders are making sincere efforts to activate the collective mechanisms of the UN system. US leadership helped build these mechanisms in 1945 so that the world would never again be consumed by global conflict and genocide after World War II.

A US arms embargo against Israel and an end to US obstruction in the UN Security Council could tip the political power balance in favor of the world’s collective efforts to resolve the crisis.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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