As Indonesia leads on human rights, Gaza defines the moment

There are moments in international affairs when statistics stop behaving like abstractions and begin to smell of reality. Gaza has reached that moment. According to the United Nations’ Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, more than 500,000 people in Gaza are already trapped in famine conditions, classified as the most extreme level of food insecurity. This is not a warning; it is a diagnosis. The number has continued to climb through 2025, with UN agencies confirming that the entire population of 2.1 million faces crisis-level hunger or worse. Famine has returned to the international vocabulary not because food is absent, but because access has been deliberately obstructed.

The figures are stark. UNICEF reports that acute malnutrition among children in Gaza City has quadrupled since February 2025, while more than one in three residents now go days without eating. The World Health Organization has confirmed deaths from dehydration and starvation, including infants whose bodies simply ran out of reserves. By mid-2025, more than 640,000 people were assessed as facing catastrophic food insecurity, with another million in emergency conditions. These figures place Gaza among the worst hunger crises recorded globally this decade, alongside Sudan and Yemen, yet Gaza stands apart for one reason: the famine is entirely man-made.

Humanitarian agencies are unusually blunt about this. UN officials have repeatedly stated that food exists in the region, warehouses are stocked, and supply chains are functional up to Gaza’s borders. What fails is permission—aid trucks queue while paperwork piles up. Relief organisations lose licences. Fishing boats remain idle. Agricultural land lies destroyed. In this context, hunger has become a tool rather than a byproduct of war. The World Food Programme’s executive director, Cindy McCain, warned that waiting for full famine confirmation before acting would mean “counting bodies instead of preventing deaths”. That warning has gone largely unheeded.

This catastrophe is not only humanitarian. It is strategic. Gaza has already been a mirror held up to the international system, reflecting a widening gap between proclaimed values and operational behaviour. The contrast with Ukraine is impossible to ignore. Russia’s invasion prompted swift sanctions, military assistance, and near-universal diplomatic condemnation. In Gaza, despite mounting evidence of collective punishment and starvation, the response has been hesitant, fragmented, and often paralysed by vetoes. Across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, this discrepancy is read not as nuance but as hierarchy.

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Legal scholars have begun to describe Gaza as a breaking point for international law itself. Commentaries in leading journals argue that the principle of equal application of humanitarian law has been exposed as aspirational rather than real. When accountability depends on alliances rather than actions, law ceases to function as law and becomes performance. European analysts, including those at the Carnegie Endowment, have already been openly conceding that the European Union’s credibility as an honest broker in the Middle East has been severely damaged. This loss of trust is not rhetorical; it is measurable in voting patterns at the United Nations and in the growing diplomatic distance between Western capitals and the Global South.

Food insecurity has long been recognised by security analysts as a threat multiplier. The Council on Strategic Risks has shown that conflict-driven hunger accelerates displacement, fuels radicalisation, and destabilises neighbouring regions. The World Food Programme’s Global Report on Food Crises recorded nearly 295 million people facing acute hunger worldwide in 2024, the highest number ever recorded. Gaza now sits at the centre of this global trend, its crisis amplifying regional pressures on Egypt, Jordan, and beyond. History suggests that starving populations do not remain contained; hunger travels.

Moreover, in late December 2025, Israel announced it would suspend or revoke the licences of scores of 37 international humanitarian organisations operating in Gaza, including major NGOs such as Médecins Sans Frontières, unless they complied with stringent new registration requirements — a move condemned by the EU, UN rights officials and aid experts as likely to further restrict critical humanitarian access in an already dire crisis.

The symbolism of this moment matters more than many policymakers appear willing to acknowledge. International politics is not shaped by treaties alone, but by images, narratives, and perceived hierarchies of human worth. Fireworks over global cities, broadcast in real time alongside images of starving children, have become a devastating visual metaphor for a divided international order.

That division is now translating into a profound crisis of trust.

Against this backdrop, Indonesia’s recent election to the presidency of the UN Human Rights Council carries unusual weight. Indonesia’s ambassador pledged to uphold universality and non-selectivity in human rights, language that resonates deeply in a moment defined by selective outrage. As the world’s largest Muslim-majority democracy and a nation shaped by anti-colonial struggle, Indonesia occupies a unique moral position. Its leadership arrives not as a procedural rotation but as a test of whether the Global South can inject consistency back into a fractured system.

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Indonesia’s challenge is formidable. The Human Rights Council is often criticised for impotence, yet moments of leadership can recalibrate norms. Jakarta’s historical support for Palestinian self-determination aligns with domestic sentiment, but its broader diplomatic ambition rests on something larger: restoring faith that international institutions can still function without double standards. In Canberra, Jakarta’s voice is watched carefully, not as opposition but as a barometer of where the international centre of gravity is shifting.

The deeper damage wrought by Gaza may ultimately be normative. International relations theory offers little comfort here. Liberal institutionalism assumes rules matter because they are followed; constructivism assumes norms survive because they are shared. Gaza undermines both assumptions. Even realist thinkers warn that credibility, once eroded, is expensive to recover. States remember who spoke, who stayed silent, and who justified the unjustifiable. Those memories shape future alignments more enduringly than speeches.

There are precedents. Bosnia in the 1990s exposed similar failures before tribunals arrived too late for the dead. Yemen revealed how blockades could starve millions with minimal consequence. Each episode weakened the claim that ‘never again’ had operational meaning. Gaza now joins this lineage, but with a difference: the world is watching in real time, fully informed, and still largely immobilised.

Policy solutions are neither mysterious nor radical. Unconditional humanitarian access, enforced ceasefires, independent investigations, and long-term reconstruction focused on food and water security are well-documented pathways. It has been reported that ceasefire negotiations in late 2025 promised hundreds of aid trucks per day, yet implementation remains fragile. Without monitoring and enforcement, pledges dissolve into press releases. Reconstruction, when it comes, must restore Gaza’s capacity to feed itself, not merely import calories under permanent siege.

Recognition of Palestinian statehood by several Western governments has been framed as progress, yet Palestinian writers and humanitarian organisations describe such gestures as symbolic paper against physical devastation. Recognition without protection does not stop hunger. Declarations without enforcement do not rebuild hospitals. The gap between rhetoric and reality has rarely been so stark.

From a strategic perspective, this erosion of trust carries consequences far beyond the Middle East.

What is at stake is not only Gaza’s survival but the integrity of the international system itself. Trust is a strategic asset. When it collapses, alliances fragment, institutions hollow out, and norms lose force. Hunger in Gaza is eroding that trust grain by grain. The question confronting global diplomacy is no longer whether Gaza constitutes a humanitarian disaster. That debate has ended. The question is whether the international community is willing to accept a world in which starvation is tolerated when politically inconvenient. 

The answer will define not only Gaza’s future, but the moral architecture of global order in the years ahead.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.