The Rules No Longer Apply: This Is Not War, This Is Slaughter

War is not new. But in recent years, something feels broken beyond repair. On October 7, 2023, Hamas militants launched a brutal attack inside Israel, killing and abducting civilians in an act of terror that shocked the world. Thousands of families were shattered in a single morning, their grief echoing across borders.

Yet what followed was a response of such disproportionate devastation that it blurred the line between defence and destruction. The crosshairs are no longer on armies but on civilians — on innocent men, women, and children. Once upon a time, there were rules of engagement, at least on paper. You fought soldiers with soldiers. You met an army with an army. When did civilians become legitimate targets? When did schools, homes, churches, and hospitals become battlefields?

The foundations of international law were built on the principle of protecting those who could not defend themselves. After the carnage of the twentieth century — two world wars, the Holocaust, the firebombing of cities — nations signed treaties to ensure such atrocities would never be repeated. The Geneva Conventions, the Hague Regulations, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were drafted to enshrine dignity and protect human life, especially civilian life, in the face of war. And yet, in Gaza today — in Ukraine — in so many places torn apart by modern conflict, those principles are not just ignored; they are mocked.

In Myanmar, the military junta has unleashed airstrikes and scorched-earth campaigns against entire villages since its 2021 coup, deliberately displacing and targeting civilians. In Sudan, civilians are massacred in a war between the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Armed Forces, with humanitarian workers themselves under fire. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, militias continue to devastate communities, where women and children often bear the brunt of the violence. Civilians are no longer incidental victims of conflict; they are its strategy.

There is no distinction anymore. In Gaza, there is no army to meet on the battlefield, no uniformed soldiers marching toward the front. There are only people — ordinary people — whose lives have been reduced to statistics. Yet the narrative is carefully spun: “We’re fighting Hamas,” as though that absolves the bombs that bury families under rubble — as though it makes Western nations nod in understanding. It is an excuse — an excuse to kill civilians while cloaking the act in the language of counterterrorism. Under international law, Israel is responsible for the welfare of those living under occupation. Gaza is not merely a piece of disputed land; it is home to over two million human beings whose lives are bound by international obligations that should never be optional.

Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, has been clear: what is happening is illegal. Collective punishment — through bombing neighbourhoods, cutting off food and water, or blockading medical aid — is explicitly prohibited under international law. Starving civilians as a method of warfare is not a strategy; it is a war crime. Yet politicians across the world remain silent, or worse, provide the political and military cover that allows these violations to continue.

Albanese has paid a price for speaking the truth. For her reports describing the occupation as a form of “genocide” and exposing corporate complicity, she has faced threats, smears, and even sanctions. The United States sanctioned her directly in 2025, in what many human rights experts called an attempt to intimidate and silence independent UN investigators. Her treatment reveals the hostility faced by those who dare to name violations for what they are. It is not just civilians who are targeted, but also those who defend them.

Why? Because acknowledging illegality would mean acknowledging moral failure. It would mean confronting the hypocrisy built into the so-called “rules-based order.” It would mean admitting that the laws created after World War II to protect civilians are applied selectively — used against adversaries, ignored when allies are the perpetrators. The silence is deliberate.

Meanwhile, the world watches. Protests fill the streets from London to Jakarta, from New York to Sydney. Millions of ordinary people know in their gut how wrong this is, yet their voices seem to vanish. Historically, wars have ended when public outrage became impossible for politicians to ignore. The Vietnam War ended not only through military exhaustion but because people in the U.S. refused to remain complicit. Apartheid South Africa collapsed under the weight of global condemnation and boycott. Why not now?

Part of the answer lies in the hypocrisy of international response. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the world mobilised with unprecedented speed: sanctions were imposed, assets frozen, leaders shunned, and solidarity pledged in parliaments and public squares. Yet when Israel’s military campaign devastates Gaza, the same international system stalls, hedges, or looks away. Why is the law applied with such force in one case and such passivity in another? Is it because of money, arms deals, entrenched alliances? Because Western capitals see Ukraine as “like us” and Gaza as “other”? Or because some allies are deemed too powerful, too strategic, too profitable to hold accountable? Preferential treatment is not an accident; it is policy.

Perhaps the answer lies in the cynical alignment of political power. Superpowers guard their alliances, their arms deals, their trade agreements more fiercely than they guard human life. Perhaps it is because some leaders — Donald Trump among them — have openly supported these campaigns, reducing matters of life and death to political theatre. If a man who spends his mornings spray-tanning can casually dismiss the suffering of millions, does that give others permission to follow suit? It shouldn’t. But in today’s world, spectacle often outweighs substance.

And then there are the stories that cut deeper than any statistic: the six-year-old girl, Hind Rajab, trapped in a car in Gaza as bullets tore through the metal around her. Over the phone, she begged rescuers to come for her, her voice carrying the terror of a child watching her world collapse. The vehicle she sat in was already riddled with gunfire, and her family lay lifeless beside her. She was the only one left alive.

Two paramedics from the Palestine Red Crescent Society were dispatched that night, trying to reach her through the chaos of bombardment. They never returned. For nearly two weeks there was silence — just the hope that maybe, somehow, they had made it. When their ambulance was finally found, it sat only metres from the car where Hind’s body lay, alongside her family. Both rescuers had been killed before they could reach her.

How does one process such a detail? How do you explain that a child’s final hours were spent pleading for help that never arrived — not for lack of compassion, but because those who tried to save her were also cut down? How do you explain that a child’s body was turned into a symbol of cruelty so profound it defies language? This is not the accidental tragedy of war. This is intentional. Deliberate. A signal that no one — no man, no woman, no child, no innocent — can be considered safe.

Worldwide condemnation has ended wars before. Boycotts, sanctions, uprisings, and voices that refused to be silenced have toppled regimes and forced change. But today, those same tools feel blunted, unable to pierce the armour of power that protects governments which no longer even pretend to follow the rules.

So, we must ask: what will it take? If the rules no longer apply, if the treaties no longer hold, if the words “never again” mean nothing, then perhaps the question is not what we can do, but what they — the governments, the power brokers, the institutions built to protect — have chosen to ignore.

People have marched. They have filled streets, signed petitions, flooded timelines, and raised their voices until they were hoarse. And yet the bombs still fall. The genocide continues. The silence from those in power is louder than the cries of the people. This is what powerlessness looks like — not apathy, but the terrifying realisation that even the loudest collective outrage can be swallowed by political indifference.

It exposes the limits of democracy, the limits of international law, and the illusion that morality alone can steer the world toward justice. And yet, even powerless, we owe it to humanity not to let this go — never to allow this to become normal or acceptable. We must keep speaking, keep naming these vile actions for what they are, however futile it feels.

Because perhaps our defiance — our insistence on remembering, on witnessing — is the last act of humanity we have left.