The Next Test: Gaza, Law, and the Weight of Inaction
The Hague Group meets this week "in response to Israel’s ongoing and escalating violations of international law."
On the morning of July 15th, in a world that pretends not to hear the sirens of the dying and the wails of the dispossessed, the next test will arrive. A gathering of ministers, diplomats, and voices from what we still insist on calling the “international community.” They will convene in Bogotá, summoned by The Hague Group, under the co-chairmanship of South Africa and Colombia. The agenda: Gaza. The dream: justice. The demand: that international law be more than an empty vessel, a rusted colander through which blood trickles unimpeded. (More on the Hague Group at the end of this post.)
This conference, clothed in the somber language of diplomacy, is nothing short of a belated, urgent, fragile cry. It comes not as the first attempt, but as one that follows decades of broken resolutions and betrayed promises. It arrives as the walls of Gaza, already broken and bleeding, bear witness to a genocidal siege so public, so prolonged, and so grotesquely rationalized that to call it a “conflict” feels like complicity.
But the world is watching, we are told. The world is watching as Israel’s warplanes dance over hospitals, as children are pulled from rubble in pieces too small to bury by name. The world is watching and, too often, nodding along. Or worse; sending weapons and calling it aid.
What this emergency conference offers is not a fix, but a line in the sand. It is an attempt, perhaps a final one, to assert that international law still lives, however faint its pulse. That the very idea of a rules-based order is not simply code for Western impunity. That a Palestinian child’s life is not worth less than an Israeli state’s ambition. That apartheid, annexation, occupation, and the weaponization of starvation are not just “policy choices,” but crimes.
South Africa’s leadership in this effort is no accident. It comes from a nation with memory in its bones; a nation that knows what it means to be dehumanized by law and then redeemed by the courage to confront it. Their role in The Hague Group is a signal flare to the rest of us: If we could not stop what has already happened, can we at least summon the decency to stop what is coming?
But the test here is not just for Israel. It is not just for the United States, whose vetoes and vetoes and vetoes have turned the UN Security Council into a mausoleum of dead resolutions. It is for every government that once swore “never again,” that attended Holocaust memorials and wept over the bones of genocides past and now says nothing, or worse, finds ways to justify the obliteration of a trapped population in real time.
To talk about law while children are dying may sound obscene. But it is precisely law that can stand between the living and their annihilators. And law, unlike charity or sentiment, can be enforced. What the Bogotá conference seeks is not poetry. It seeks action: diplomatic recognition of the ICC’s warrants, trade sanctions, arms embargoes, the severing of political ties until the bombing stops and the blockade ends. This is not about mediation. It is about accountability.
For too long, the “international community” has functioned like a theatre troupe, performing rituals of condemnation with no consequences. It issued statements while bulldozers flattened homes. It commissioned fact-finding missions that no one read. It sent envoys with cameras, not solutions. The Hague Group is trying to change the script. Not just to say something, but to do something.
If this effort fails it will not be because the cause was unclear. It will be because too many governments have decided that some people are ungrievable. That Gaza is a place where law goes to die. That justice, like water, does not flow uphill.
So yes, the next test is coming. But it is not only a test of Israel’s impunity. It is a test of whether the rest of us can live with the weight of our inaction. Whether the moral infrastructure of this planet is strong enough to hold even one more corpse. Whether we are, in the end, anything more than spectators to our own collapse.
The people of Gaza do not need our pity. They need the missiles to stop falling, the borders to open, the future to be possible. And for that, the law must be defended; not in books, but in Bogotá, in Brussels, in every capital where silence has been louder than bombs.
History will not ask whether the ministers wore suits or whether the speeches were eloquent. It will ask whether they acted when they still could.
The following is from the Hague Group website:
The Hague Group convenes states from across the world to an Emergency Conference to halt the genocide in Gaza
The Republic of Colombia, as co-chair of The Hague Group, will host an emergency ministerial meeting on Palestine at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bogotá on 15–16 July 2025.
The emergency meeting has been convened in response to Israel’s ongoing and escalating violations of international law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including the crime of genocide, and will focus on coordinated legal and diplomatic measures to bring them to an end.
Convening states from both across and beyond the founding membership of the Hague Group, the emergency meeting will centre the legal obligations of states, as determined by the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) of July 2024, to stop all actions “that assist in the maintenance of the illegal situation created by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” and to support the full realisation of the Palestinian people's inalienable right to self-determination.
In Bogotá, states will announce concrete actions to enforce international law through coordinated state action — to end the genocide and ensure justice and accountability.
The Hague Group was established in The Hague on 31 January 2025 — by the Plurinational State of Bolivia, the Republic of Colombia, the Republic of Cuba, the Republic of Honduras, Malaysia, the Republic of Namibia, the Republic of Senegal, and the Republic of South Africa — in response to the grave violations of international law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
For more information, email the Secretariat of the Hague Group here.
"Governments like mine have a duty to stand up to Israel. Far too many have failed,"
Gustavo Petro, President of Colombia. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/08/governments-stand-up-to-israel-colombia?blm_aid=3124819968