The Gaza Strip has not only become, as humanitarian organizations have denounced, a "mass grave for Palestinians and those who come to their assistance," or even, according to French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, "a place to die, not to say a cemetery." Gaza has also been transformed into a laboratory where, before the eyes of a world that is powerless or complicit, an alternative reality that is sadly all too real is taking shape – stripped of all the standards of international law.

Seven years ago, a Le Monde correspondent reporting from Gaza described a "unique experiment" aimed at "testing the resilience of two million guinea pigs living under a hermetic dome." After 16 years of the Israeli blockade, followed by 21 months of all-out war, the Palestinian enclave has truly become the scene of experiments in inhumanity, carried out with impunity, despite their now staggering scale.

A world without the UN

The State of Israel may have been established in 1948 on the basis of a United Nations decision, but it has consistently sought to undermine the multilateral system whose resolutions limited Israeli arbitrariness, especially after the occupation in 1967 of the Palestinian territory of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This simmering hostility gave way to a systematic campaign to denigrate the UN after Benjamin Netanyahu's rise to power.

This campaign was long encouraged by the US, which preferred to substitute its own terms of reference for the UN's binding resolutions. The joint hostility of Israel and the US toward the UN reached new heights during Donald Trump's first term, from 2017 to 2021. It was only put on hold under Joe Biden, before flaring up as never before after Trump returned to the White House in January.

The primary target of this campaign is the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which provided, among other things, basic education and health services to the Palestinian population. But the campaign quickly extended to the World Health Organization, the World Food Programme and UNICEF, responsible for child protection.

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