Gaza is burning: UK NGOs must abandon failed diplomacy and fight back
Tens of thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, holding banners and Palestinian flags, gather in central London despite police restrictions and a banned route in London on 18 January 2025
Nick Dearden and Shaista Aziz write in Al Jazeera on 23 April 2025:
Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz declared last week that “no humanitarian aid will enter Gaza”, effectively announcing his government’s intention to continue the collective punishment of the Palestinian enclave’s battered and besieged civilian population in blatant violation of international humanitarian law.
“Blocking this aid is one of the main pressure levers preventing Hamas from using it as a tool with the population,” he went on to say, “No one is currently planning to allow any humanitarian aid into Gaza, and there are no preparations to enable such aid.”
Many leading NGOs and international institutions, such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, have long identified Israel’s weaponisation of aid in Gaza as an act of genocide. In response to Katz’s most recent comments, they once again condemned the Israeli government’s genocidal policies and called on Israel’s Western allies to take action to enforce international law.
Such condemnations and calls to action, however, are clearly failing to produce the desired results. After 18 devastating months, Israel is still bombing, shooting at, displacing and starving Palestinians, while openly declaring its intention to continue with these crimes for the foreseeable future. And it is still doing so with the full political, military and diplomatic backing of its Western allies, including Britain.
This is why we believe it is time for British NGOs to change tack.
For the past 18 months, many of us working in the human rights and aid sectors in Britain made repeated requests to our government to do the bare minimum and enforce the basic tenets of international law on its ally, Israel. We campaigned, we lobbied, we engaged, and we explained. We showed the evidence, pointed to the law, and asked our leaders to do the right thing. Our pleas fell on deaf ears. We’ve been met with nothing but indifference.