For months, many warned that Israel’s unrestrained assault on Gaza was not merely a crime against Palestinians, but a fatal blow to the very idea of international law.

What was being tested was not only the scale of Israeli violence, but whether rules still applied at all; whether power would remain constrained by law, or whether law would give way to brute force.

Few articulated the stakes more clearly than Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, who cautioned that the choice before the world was “stark and unforgiving”: either defend the legal principles designed to prevent war, or watch the international system collapse under the weight of unchecked power politics.

For billions of people in the Global South, Petro warned, international law is not an abstraction, but a shield. Remove it, and only predators remain.

This was not done in secret, but in full view of the world. Germany armed it. Britain justified it. France equivocated. Others offered silence dressed up as “complexity”. The institutions meant to prevent such crimes stood aside or actively enabled them.

The world persuaded itself that the collapse of law and the devaluation of human life could be contained; that Gaza could be treated as an exception without consequence. It could not.