(LifeSiteNews) — The talk in the West has changed on Israel’s Gaza genocide – but will this lead to action?
On May 6 the London-based Financial Times published an editorial condemning the shameful silence of the West on Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Gift link, because important statements like this should not be paywalled @FT https://t.co/rHxhrpzqDS
— Natalie Holme Elsberg (@NatalieElsberg) May 6, 2025
Once the silence was broken, many media outlets followed suit – and so did the politicians.
Media denounce ‘genocide’
The Economist warned of Netanyahu’s plan to “empty Gaza,” saying the war “must end.” On May 10 the UK’s Independent said, “It is time to speak up” because “the Israeli government’s shameful aim is to starve and deprive the entire population of Gaza.”
The next day The Guardian asked of Israel’s actions, “What is this, if not genocidal? When will the US and its allies act to stop the horror, if not now?”
On May 14 the BBC aired in full the speech of the United Nation’s humanitarian affairs chief, Tom Fletcher, who told the UN Security Council:
“For those killed and those whose voices are silenced: what more evidence do you need now? Will you act – decisively – to prevent genocide and to ensure respect for international humanitarian law?”
Jonathan Cook, a Jewish independent journalist who lived for 20 years in Israel, said this was remarkable.
“We had gone in less than a week from the word ‘genocide’ being taboo in relation to Gaza to it becoming almost mainstream.”
READ: Trump sanctions on ICC judge halt war crime investigations into Israeli leaders
UK politicians speak out
UK politicians then spoke up. As Cook reported:
“Mark Pritchard, a Conservative MP and life-long Israel supporter, stood up from the back benches to admit he had been wrong about Israel, and condemned it ‘for what it is doing to the Palestinian people.’”
Cook added that “more than a dozen” Tory MPs Lords, “all formerly staunch defenders of Israel,” then urged the Prime Minister Keir Starmer “to immediately recognise a Palestinian state.”
Forty MPs have written to the foreign secretary over allegations he “misled” Parliament and the public over the UK’s continued transfer of arms to Israel.
“The public deserves to know … the full scale of the UK’s complicity in crimes against humanity,” said a former Foreign Office adviser – Mark Smith – who resigned in August 2024 “over the UK government’s refusal to halt arms sales to Israel amid the bombardment of Gaza.”
On May 19 a joint statement was issued by the UK, France and Canada, which said, “If Israel does not cease the renewed military offensive and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid, we will take further concrete actions in response.”
Trump ‘ultimatum’ to Israel
On the same day the Washington Post reported the Trump administration had issued an ultimatum to the Israelis.
“Trump’s people are letting Israel know, ‘We will abandon you if you do not end this war.’”
What took them so long? As Cook notes, “these grave crimes by Israel have been evidently true not only since Hamas’ violent, single-day breakout from Gaza on 7 October 2023, but for decades.”
He added “much of the world woke up many, many months ago. It has been the western press corps and western politicians slumbering through the past 19 months of genocide.”
His point is proven by warnings from Jewish people themselves, both in Israel and in the U.S.
Jewish warnings of genocide
On October 23, 2023, Jewish Currents published a report naming Israel’s operation in Gaza “A Textbook Case of Genocide.” Its author, Raz Segal, is an Israeli-Jewish professor of the study of modern genocide.
“I have written about settler colonialism and Jewish supremacy in Israel,” Segal says, “the distortion of the Holocaust to boost the Israeli arms industry, the weaponization of antisemitism accusations to justify Israeli violence against Palestinians, and the racist regime of Israeli apartheid.”
Written days after “Hamas’s attack on Saturday and the mass murder of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians,” Segal concluded that “the worst of the worst is happening.” What is more, it is happening in the open – he said.
“Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed.”
The alarm raised by Segal has been echoed by U.S.-based Jewish groups.
IfNotNow organizes American Jews “to end US support for Israel” – describing it as an “apartheid system.” Jewish Voice for Peace says its members are “Jews organizing toward Palestinian liberation and Judaism beyond Zionism.”
The grief and trauma of our people are being weaponized to justify mass murder and war crimes.
This is a desecration. pic.twitter.com/neVIA6YOfJ
— IfNotNow🔥✡️ (@IfNotNowOrg) October 30, 2023
Israel-based human rights group B’Tselem has long warned that Israel’s war is creating a crisis of starvation.
1/5 The 2.2 million people of Gaza are going hungry. This is not a byproduct of war but a direct result of Israel’s declared policy, which denies them food. Gazans now depend entirely on supplies from outside, as they can no longer produce almost any food themselves. pic.twitter.com/MKbB19ruPX
— B’Tselem בצלם بتسيلم (@btselem) January 8, 2024
It warned of the beginning of a policy of “ethnic cleansing” a month before October 7, 2023.
Gideon Levy on the forcible transfer in the West Bank: “Never before, in all the years of the occupation, has there been a Palestinian abandonment of villages in such proportions… This is the beginning of a real ethnic cleansing. You’ve been warned.”https://t.co/lb2MHSu1E2
— B’Tselem בצלם بتسيلم (@btselem) September 7, 2023
This month, B’Tselem said Israel was “using starvation as a method of warfare.”
Israel has been blocking the entry of food and humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, deliberately starving over two million people, including more than one million children.
Israel is using starvation as a method of warfare. pic.twitter.com/9lOvyGVPqF
— B’Tselem בצלם بتسيلم (@btselem) May 5, 2025
Jonathan Cook has shown Israel’s strategy in Gaza presents Palestinians with a choice to leave or die – supporting the claim made by the UN that their options were “displacement and death.”
Former UK diplomat Ian Proud said this was now obvious to Western populations. He argued the joint statement by Britain, France and Canada was “a shameful and cynical exercise in praising Israel through faint damnation” – promising no action.
It was prompted in the UK, he said, by “the growing number of Britons enraged that the government has sat by and done nothing as children and civilians have been murdered and starved to death.”
“Beyond the grand gestures,” he said, “the statement was weakly worded and will have no impact,” adding that the threat of sanctions was paired with an insistence on “Israel’s right to defend itself.”
So why has the silence broken – if not yet by action – but at least in words?
Benjamin Netanyahu explained this himself in a video statement on May 19.
He said Israel’s “closest friends in the world,” such as U.S. senators, told him they were unwavering in their support but could not “handle pictures of mass starvation.” The Washington Post recorded that Netanyahu said, “We cannot reach a point of starvation, for practical and diplomatic reasons.”
Speaking in Hebrew, machine translated here, he explained to an Israeli audience his decision to allow “minimal” food aid into Gaza. It is because:
“They simply won’t support us; we won’t be able to complete the mission of victory” if the world sees starvation in Gaza. For the reason of optics alone, he explained:
“We are rapidly approaching the red line, a situation where we could lose control, and then everything falls apart.”
Netanyahu told his audience that images of mass starvation were causing the U.S. Senate to rescind its unconditional support of Israel.
“Our best friends in the world, senators I’ve known as ardent, unconditional supporters of Israel for decades, come to me and say this: We are giving you all the aid to complete the victory—weapons, support for your operations to eliminate Hamas, defense at the Security Council.”
Yet this unconditional support is now threatened.
“There’s one thing we cannot tolerate. We cannot accept images of starvation, mass starvation. We won’t stand for that. We won’t be able to support you.”
Netanyahu was arguing the case for permitting one meal per Gazan into the Strip, in order to produce images to silence the Western media. His minister Bezalel Smotrich openly admitted this on camera this week.
“Citizens in Gaza will get a pita [bread] and a plate of food, and that’s it,” he said.
Smotrich added that the Israeli government was only allowing the relief to produce a few “pictures” of people “waiting for a bowl of soup” – “so the world does not stop us and accuse us of war crimes.”
The world has not yet stopped Israel. Yet its leadership freely admits what it is doing now, which is only what it has planned to do, in the open, for years. Israel has not changed, but it has changed the world around itself.
The witness of the Western media and its political class is no longer silent.
