How US and Israel dismantled international law by waging war on United Nations

By Roya Pour Bagher

According to a UN Relief and Works Agency report, the Israeli genocidal attacks have killed more than 300 UN staffers in Gaza—many alongside their families—and destroyed over 300 UN facilities, including 162 schools serving hundreds of thousands of children.

These attacks persisted despite the UN sharing coordinates with the Zionist regime to safeguard humanitarian sites. When the world body demanded independent investigations, Israel not only rejected scrutiny but escalated its brutal assaults.

Israel’s blockade has kept food, medicine, and fuel from entering the besieged and war-ravaged territory, leading to hundreds of thousands of children under the age of five malnourished and over a hundred dead from hunger. The regime has effectively weaponized aid against Palestinians in Gaza.

Palestinians, including doctors, nurses, journalists, and even UN staff, have been fainting due to hunger and exhaustion amid the illegal blockade. The UN exposed the regime for using starvation as a weapon of war—a strategy enabled by the US-backed ban on UNRWA, Gaza’s largest aid provider.

The ban was based on an unsubstantiated allegation that the agency has ties with the Gaza-based resistance movement, Hamas. Both the US and Israel insisted on their own distribution mechanism, the Gaza Humanitarian Fund, claiming that Hamas was stealing aid entering the besieged territory.

The GHF, instead of providing aid, became a new battleground for Zionists and Americans to kill Palestinians, rightly described as a “death trap” by the UN, human rights organizations, and Gazans.

The majority of the more than 1,000 Palestinians killed while seeking aid were near the US-and Israel-backed GHF sites, as was stated by the UN human rights office on July 22.

Furthermore, the GHF set up only four sites—nowhere near enough compared to the about 400 sites UNRWA operated across the besieged territory. Internal US reports later admitted there was no proof of Hamas stealing aid, exposing the GHF as a cynical façade for collective punishment.

To make matters even more bitterly comical, Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar recently accused the UN of not distributing aid after the regime came under blistering international criticism.

The smear campaigns against UNRWA were the tip of the iceberg. The US was once UNRWA’s largest donor, providing $300 to $400 million a year; however, it paused its funding in January 2024.

In response, over 100 refugee and human rights organizations called on the US Congress to reinstate funding to UNRWA to ensure civilian protection and humanitarian relief in Gaza.

Nevertheless, when President Trump returned to office in 2025, he not only extended the funding ban but also pulled the US out of the UN Human Rights Council, a move he had also pulled in his first term.

The battle against the international body only intensified with time. On July 9, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced sanctions against the UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese.

Earlier that day, Albanese had condemned three European countries, Italy, France, and Greece, as State Parties to the ICC, for disregarding their legal obligations of arresting and surrendering Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

They had granted Netanyahu permission to use their airspace when he travelled to the US despite him facing an ICC arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza.

Back in 2024, the Israeli regime had also banned Albanese from entering the occupied Palestinian territories, using its famous go-to “antisemitism” excuse. Denying special rapporteurs entry was not something new, as the regime has been doing it since 2008, according to Albanese herself.

The US and Israel’s contempt for international law reached its climax in their refusal to cooperate with the genocide case of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the principal judicial organ of the UN. The US has also vetoed multiple UNSC resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. In July 2025, both boycotted a conference at the UN that would urge the world to work towards a two-state solution.

The US State Department spokesperson described the conference as a “gift to Hamas” and“jeopardy” to a long-term, peaceful resolution—a conference aimed at a two-state solution.

Israel echoed the sentiment by claiming the conference “does not promote a solution.” The US veto of Palestine’s UN membership and all actions taken against international law reveal that Washington and Tel Aviv have never favored any step that might alleviate the suffering of Palestinians.

Both seek to ensure that Palestinians remain stateless, rightless, and voiceless. And both have gone out of their way in the past 662 days to exterminate them in a new Nakba.

The irony is that it was former US President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who envisioned a system of collective security for lasting “world peace,” and President Harry Truman turned this vision into reality by creating a charter for the United Nations.

Now, after a century of the UN serving the US and its allies, the international body is posing a threat to one of Washington's red lines by denouncing the annihilation of Gaza and demanding justice.

And the US hypocrisy is out in the open for everyone to witness. It always claims to uphold international law but has fervently striven to undermine it and destroy it.

These attacks against the UN are no aberration. The US is simply getting rid of an institution that no longer serves its empire.

Roya Pour Bagher is a Tehran-based writer.

(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV.)

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