Impunity unbound: Gaza genocide a launching pad for new world disorder
On Jan. 7, 2026, four days after the US invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president and his wife, President Trump – who styled himself the “Acting President of Venezuela” - statedthat “I don’t need international law” and said he can only be constrained by “my own morality, my own mind.”
On the same day, Craig Mokhiber, former director of the New York Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights who had strongly criticized the UN for not doing more to prevent genocide in Gaza, described in Mondoweiss the depredations of the “US-Israel Axis” and “the dawning of the age of impunity.”
His piece deserves being quoted at length:
“A new world is being birthed…. A world wholly unconstrained by international law, or even by the most basic and universal moral principles.…the guardrails established since 1945 offered some hope of a world governed, at least in part, by the rule of law, rather than by force alone. And a global consensus had been established whereby the worst crimes –– aggression and genocide –– were agreed to be beyond the pale. The U.S.-Israel Axis, so often indicted for violating international law, has lost patience with the entire project, and, with genocide in Palestine, the raining down of Axis bombs in countries across the globe, and now aggression in Venezuela, it has declared to the world that a new order is born. One in which all must bow to the empire or perish.”
Putting the UN and international law in the crosshairs
The failure of the international community to utilize embargoes, sanctions and other concrete actions to stop the Gaza genocide has produced what the Palestinian group Badil calls “a new colonialist strategy” in which “violations of international law are rendered acceptable, provided the perpetrator is strong enough.” Simultaneously, the UN is being weakened, with the White House withdrawing from 31 UN entities and 35 non-UN organizations that, according to a Presidential Memorandum, “operate contrary to US national interests, security, economic prosperity or sovereignty.” The lengthy list of “International Organizations, Conventions and Treaties that are Contrary to the Interest of the United States” is here.
The US has leveled sanctions against Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese and eight judges and three senior prosecutors on the international Criminal Court that issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu and the former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Their access to American funds has been blocked and US-based individuals and businesses are barred from working with them. On Jan. 14, the House passed H.R. 7006, the State Department’s annual funding bill which has now moved to the Senate. It gives Israel its annual $3.3 billion in military aid (in addition to $500 million provided by a separate defense funding bill) and bars funds to UNRWA, the ICC and the ICJ, as well as the International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
Israel’s weapons pipeline
With Israel reportedly being given a green light by the US to mount a new offensive against Hezbollah and potentially joining the US in a new attack on Iran, its supply of weapons and military infrastructure are being refreshed by the US. One document obtained by Haaretz reveals that the US may earmark $2 billion to subsidize Israel’s ‘Armored Vehicle Acceleration Project’ even as it funds new infrastructure in Israel for its aircraft and a naval commando unit. Since its founding Israel has received more than $300 billion (adjusted for inflation) from US taxpayers.
But US public opinion on aid to Israel has been changing dramatically even among Republican voters, with 42% against renewing the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that gives Israel $3.8 per year and is due to expire in 2028. The YouGov/IMEU poll found that 53% of Republican voters under 44 years old want to end aid to Israel altogether. In an effort to head off opposition as a new MOU is being debated, Netanyahu has predicted that within a decade Israel could build up its defense sector to such a degree that it would be able to “taper off”military aid from the US. The Heritage Foundation, which authored Project 2025, favors a gradual shift from giving Israel funds so it can purchase US weapons to ‘cooperative programs’ like the Iron Dome in which the US would invest billions. Here is a explanation why such a plan would “further enmesh” the US in the oppression of Palestinians.
Gaza: no end to the bombardments
But for now, the US will be supplying a good deal of the firepower if Netanyahu gets a nod from Trump to embark on the reportedly planned all-out offensive in March to disarm Hamas.
For the population in Gaza –– which has dropped by 10.6 % in two years according to the Palestinian Central Board of Statistics –– Israel’s onslaught may have become less lethal, but it never ended. More than 450 Palestinians have been killed by the military and over 1,200 wounded since the ‘ceasefire’ was declared on Oct. 10, 2025. With Israel relieved of international pressure and world attention turned elsewhere, five Palestinians were killed on Jan. 5 and on Jan. 8, airstrikes on densely-packed tents and refugee camps murdered 13 more, including several children.
The sound of war is impossible to blot out, as the Israeli army has systematically destroyed some 2,500 buildings since the ‘ceasefire’ began, according to The New York Times which stated on Jan. 12: “The scale of the destruction is stark. Across eastern Gaza, areas under Israeli control, satellite imagery reveals that entire blocks have been erased since the cease-fire, as well as swaths of farmland and agricultural greenhouses.” Israel appears determined to ensure that Palestinians have nothing to return to, even as it steadily moves its ‘yellow line’ westward to encompass more than 60% of the land of the Gaza Strip.
The harsh winter has provided Israel with another weapon in its battle to erase Palestinians. For the displaced, forced to inhabit fragile tents or bombed out buildings on the verge of collapse, the heavy winter rains and floods have been catastrophic, causing the deaths of at least 40 people. By Jan.17, eight children, including newborns, had died of hypothermia during the ‘ceasefire’.
According to one report, some 35,000 children have lost their hearing during the more than two years of bombardments. Although many malnourished children are described as “too hungry and too traumatized to learn” and often collapse from exhaustion, as many as 268,000 – out of a school-age population of 625,000 - now gather in hundreds of temporary spaces for schooling. Many of them have to do without pencils and paper which have, according to OCHA, been blocked by Israel “on the grounds that education is not a critical activity during the first phase of the ceasefire.”
Limping into Phase Two of Trump’s ‘peace plan’
On January 14, Trump envoy Steve Witkoff announced the beginning of the second phase with the formation of the 15-member Palestinian technocratic committee that is supposed to be an administrative government for Gaza.
The members of the technocratic committee, which will be led by Dr. Nabil Ali Shaath, a former PA deputy minister, are originally from Gaza and unaffiliated with any Palestinian faction. No budget has been specified for their work and their mandate is unclear. Dr. Ali Shaath wants to push the rubble into the sea to build new islands and prepare the ground for reconstruction, but Israel may prevent the entry of construction equipment. Hamas is reportedly ready to hand over governance to the committee while Netanyahu has said that Witkoff’s announcement was simply a “declarative move.”
During the second phase, Hamas is supposed to disarm, Israel to withdraw from parts of Gaza, open the Rafah Crossing to two-way traffic and allow reconstruction to begin. But there is widespread skepticism that Palestinians will receive any solid relief and that Israel will be prepared to abandon its ‘yellow line’ as Israel’s new border, which stakes its control to more than half of the Gaza Strip. On Jan. 16, Trump warned Hamas to disarm immediately (”they can do this the easy way, or the hard way”) but said nothing about Israel, which reportedly killed at least 10 Palestinians in Gaza that same day.
The “Greatest and Most Prestigious Board ever assembled at any time, any place”
This is what Trump called the Board of Peace as he proclaimed its creation on Jan. 16. The heads of state who will form the Board have not been named, but members of the Executive Board include Marco Rubio, Tony Blair, Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, Apollo Global Management’s CEO Marc Rowan, US deputy security advisor Robert Gabriel, and World Bank Group president Ajay Banga. Bulgarian diplomat Nicolay Mladenov will oversee the Office of the High Representative coordinating the Board with the Palestinian technocratic committee. He will be supported by the Gaza Executive Board, which to date includes Blair, Witkoff, Kushner, Rowan, Cypriot-Israeli businessman Yakir Gabay, Egyptian intelligence head Hassan Rashad, Emirati Minister Ebrahim al-Hashimy and former UN envoy Sigrid Kaag. Despite Netanyahu’s opposition, Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan and Qatari official Ali al-Thawadi will also be on the Gaza Executive Board.
On Jan. 17, Haaretz revealed the gist of the Board of Peace charter that had been sent to some 60 heads of state, who are called to fill the need for “a more nimble and effective international peace-building body” (a new UN?) with the mission to “restore dependable and lawful governance and secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict” (not just Gaza). Trump in his personal capacity is named as Board chair, a role that does not end when he is no longer president. He is given sweepingly broad powers and could only be replaced if he decides to step down or “as a result of incapacity” determined by a unanimous vote of the Board.
Burying the mirage of a ‘two state solution’
Some members of the Security Council had agreed to sign onto Resolution 2903 handing responsibility for Gaza to the US after a vague clause was added stating that following the “reform” of the PA “the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.”
Phase Two is being embarked upon just as Israel is dispensing tenders for the construction of 3401 residential units and building an ‘apartheid’ road in the vital E1 area (some 3% of the West Bank) which will cut the West Bank in two and sever the West Bank from East Jerusalem, ensuring that a contiguous Palestinian state can never be created. For over two decades Israel’s E1 plans had been put on hold because of international pressure, but the recent complaints of 21 countries have now fallen on deaf ears.
Israel’s land grab gathers momentum
Settler violence rose 25% in 2025, when there were at least 845 instances of (unpunished) crimes committed by settlers. An “Army of Israeli Youths is Being Deployed to Expel Palestinians in the West Bank” is the headline of a Jan.9 article in Haaretz that describes the actions of Israeli teenagers, many from ‘illegal’ outposts, who “seem to have been taught in special classes” how to forcibly displace farming and shepherd communities. On Jan. 16, after settlers protected by soldiers fired live ammunition at worshippers leaving a mosque near the village of al-Mughayyir, soldiers gunned down 14-year-old Mohammed Naasan, who, they said, was “running towards them carrying a rock.” They didn’t explain why he was killed with a shot to his back.
After a two-year campaign, by mid Jan. 2026 settlers succeeded in expelling the residents of Ras Ain al-Auja, the last remaining Bedouin community between Ramallah and Jericho in the Jordan Valley. In addition to the use of violence, the seizure of water resources has been prime weapon in the displacement drive. According to a settlement monitoring group, settlers now control 100 square miles of territory “where a decade ago only Bedouin herds grazed.” Israeli sheep and goat farms have meanwhile taken over 198,000 acres (some 300 square miles) throughout the West Bank, denying Palestinians access to land they have been farming for generations.
Meanwhile, the Israeli army continues its war on refugee camps, with the demolition of more houses in the Nur Shams camp in Tulkarem. As well as expelling some 40,000 Palestinians from the camps in the north of the West Bank, Israel has been “re-engineering” them by carving broad new roads and adding fortifications and electronic walls. According to local analyst Mahmoud Khlouf, the goal is to make what had been refugee camps appear as extensions of nearby cities in order to undermine the claims of refugees. “It is a prelude to putting an end to the right of return and then expanding settlement construction,” he said.
Nothing in the West Bank is off limits. On Jan. 6, Israeli troops raided Beir Zeit University campus as students were demonstrating in support of Palestinian political prisoners, injuring many. Israel is taking over ancient West Bank archaeological sites like Sebastia and has just transferred administrative authority over Hebron’s revered Ibrahimi Mosque from the Hebron Municipality to the religious council of the settlement of Kiiryat Arba where the grave of American-born settler Baruch Goldstein has long been a pilgrimage site. In Feb. 1994, Goldstein gunned down 29 people who were praying in the Ibrahimi Mosque. Kiryat Arba is now home to the national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who had once accused Palestinians of practicing ‘apartheid’ against Kiryat Arba’s residents. In the ‘age of impunity’ will the takeover of Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem’s Old City be next?
Some good news
In response to readers of these Briefs who may feel overwhelmed by the relentlessly bad news, here are two positive developments. The first is a flourishing student-led initiative at MIT called SPOCS (Small Private Online Courses) that connects volunteers from 30 different academic institutions with hundreds of students in the Gaza Strip, who are offered MIT and non MIT courses as well as material aid. See their website here.
The second is the news that after reaching a civil rights settlement with New York Attorney General Letitia James, the violence-embracing ‘Greater Israel’ group Betar-US is dissolving its New York operations. Betar-US has celebrated the killings in Gaza, physically attacked critics of Israel, and handed over the names of solidarity activists to ICE, which has an office in Tel Aviv and reportedly trains with the Israeli army. Although Betar may still be active in the US and worldwide, this is a step in the right direction.
Nancy Murray, Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
To read previous briefs, go here.