Sanitizing Genocide: How The UN Is Disappearing Gaza In The Name of Peace

With the blessing of regional powers, the UN is laundering genocide through resolutions and calling it diplomacy.

Palestinians run for cover during a Sept. 5 Israeli airstrike on a high-rise building in Gaza City after the Israeli army issued a warning. Yousef Al Zanoun/AP

Not War, Not Peace — Genocide

What is unfolding in Gaza is not a war, and there has been no peace. It is a genocide — slow, deliberate, and obscured by the language of legality. Diplomatic terms like “pause” and “self-defense” serve as smokescreens for a campaign of extermination. The killing has not stopped. The siege has not lifted.

From mass killing and starvation to psychological torture and displacement, Israeli actions in Gaza align with every pillar of the Genocide Convention. Over 69,400 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 19,000 children. The deliberate targeting of hospitals, weaponization of famine, destruction of homes, and criminalization of humanitarian aid represent not breakdowns in policy — but execution of it.

Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur, was unequivocal: “I call it genocide because it is a genocide.” This is not an opinion, she stressed — it is a legal reality. Her report, Gaza Genocide: A Collective Crime, details how the Israeli assault is part of a long-term structure of settler-colonial domination, weaponized displacement, and impunity.

Legalizing Genocide: The UN’s Role

What should be the most powerful tool to stop genocide — international law — is being rewritten to accommodate it. In October 2025, the United States unveiled a UN Security Council draft resolution proposing the creation of a so-called “Board of Peace.” Ostensibly tasked with Gaza’s stabilization, the board would be led by the U.S. and backed by Israel and allied Arab states, effectively outsourcing Palestinian governance to the very actors who supplied, endorsed, or carried out the destruction.

The US is planning for the long-term division of Gaza into a “green zone” under Israeli and international military control, where reconstruction would start, and a “red zone” to be left in ruins. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. green zones stood as monuments to a lie — massive blast walls separating American officials from the devastation they authored outside. Inside: air conditioning, press briefings, and talk of “progress.” Outside: graves, hunger, and fire.

Gaza must not become the third green zone. The world has already watched this nightmare twice. We cannot permit the United States to script it a third time.

The UN resolution’s promises of statehood are riddled with conditions: the Palestinian Authority must reform, Gaza must be rebuilt, and Israel must not object — all before talks can begin. This non-binding roadmap, stripped of timelines or guarantees, creates the illusion of diplomacy while entrenching colonial management.

For two weeks, the United States has been working behind closed doors to push a UN Security Council resolution that almost nobody supports. They revised it twice in ten days because diplomats said what the world already knows: it’s vague, it’s dangerous, and it protects the occupier, not the occupied.

Russia and China have expressed “deep reservations.” They might veto it, or they might abstain — not because the resolution is legitimate, but because Washington has left them no good option. Meanwhile, the U.S. has been pressuring Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, and every regional power using the same leverage it always uses: military basing rights, aid, and dependence. This isn’t diplomacy. This is coercion scaled up to empire.

Russia even submitted its own counter-draft simply to demonstrate how the American version keeps Gaza under occupation — just under a different manager. Their message was clear: if you want the Security Council’s blessing, the plan must have legitimate authority. Instead, the U.S. hands that authority to Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace” — a body funded by the Adelsons, the same donors who have backed Netanyahu through every stage of this genocide.

According to leaked Centcom documents reported by The Guardian, the United States is now drafting the architectural blueprint of a permanently partitioned Gaza — an apartheid map masquerading as a “stabilization plan.” In this vision, Gaza is carved into two worlds: a “green zone” under Israeli and foreign military control, and a “red zone”, left in ruins — the place where nearly every Palestinian has already been displaced and where no reconstruction is planned. It is the bureaucratic vocabulary of warlords: color-coded human disposability.

We have seen this architecture before.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. green zones stood as monuments to a lie — massive blast walls separating American officials from the devastation they created outside. Inside: air-conditioning, press briefings, and talk of “progress.” Outside: graves, hunger, and fire.

Gaza must not become the third green zone. The world has already watched this nightmare twice. We cannot permit the United States to script it a third time.

The documents reveal that Washington expects foreign soldiers to deploy alongside Israeli forces, east of Israel’s self-declared “yellow line.” International troops would man crossings only after “integrating” with the Israeli army — a euphemism for serving as an auxiliary to an occupying power. Israel, in return, offers nothing. It will only “consider conditions” for withdrawal later — language designed to ensure “later” never arrives.

The U.S. hopes to secure a UN mandate authorizing a 20,000-strong International Stabilization Force, effectively turning the United Nations into the administrative wing of the occupation. But European states — still scarred by Iraq and Afghanistan, and aware they would be seen as enforcers of Israeli rule — have signaled they will not send major deployments. Only Italy has shown interest. Even NATO’s other stalwarts want no part of this.

The plan’s most chilling element is not the military footprint, but the social engineering beneath it. Reconstruction — already strangled by Israel’s ban on “dual-use” materials like cement, pipes, and even tent poles — is explicitly envisioned as a lure. By rebuilding only in the Israeli-controlled “green zone,” planners hope Palestinians, desperate after two years of mass destruction, will be drawn across the yellow line into an area under Israel’s thumb.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has explicitly rejected a two-state solution and any return of the PA to Gaza. Yet the resolution proceeds as if diplomacy alone can manifest sovereignty. Meanwhile, the real governance plan is military: an international stabilization force embedded with Israeli troops, with U.S., German, and French command — and zero Palestinian mandate.

– It attempts to force the entire Trump plan “in its entirety,” despite Palestinians repeatedly insisting that any political arrangement must emerge from Palestinian consensus — not be imposed from Washington.

– It mentions “aid,” but does not require it; instead it warns it must not reach “armed groups,” the same pretext Israel uses to starve civilians.

– It refuses to reference international law — not past UN resolutions, not ICJ orders, not even the Geneva Conventions — because invoking the law would require confronting Israeli war crimes.

– It creates an “International Stabilization Force,” accountable directly to Trump, granted legal immunity, and authorized to operate through 2027.

– It brings in the World Bank — because nothing says colonial management like accountants tasked with measuring rubble.

– And it pretends Palestinian statehood is still an open question, despite more than 150 countries already recognizing Palestine. Why the endless, humiliating “process” to maybe discuss what already exists?

Contrast this with the competing Russian draft: it rejects the “Board of Peace,” demands a UN-led transition, and calls for compliance with the ICJ’s genocide ruling. Its very existence exposes the fiction of consensus in the U.S.-sponsored version. That the original drafters of the Genocide Convention are now retooling it for political cover is the gravest betrayal.

Albanese, reflecting on the system’s complicity, warned: “It’s the end of an era of innocence when I really believed the United Nations was a place where things could still be advanced in the pursuit of peace.” She added, “I don’t trust any promise made to the Palestinians, either by Israel or the United States… What I’ve seen over the past two years shows me that they don’t care at all about the Palestinians.”

This is not a failure of multilateralism. It is the success of a doctrine where Palestinians are criminalized for existing, where genocide is procedurally managed, and where international bodies act not as arbiters of justice but as brokers of disappearance.

The Mysterious Exodus: Deportation as Displacement

In November 2025, a disturbing incident unfolded at Johannesburg’s OR Tambo airport: a chartered flight carrying 153 Palestinians from Gaza, routed through Nairobi, landed without notice. The passengers — families fleeing war — had no Israeli exit stamps, no proper documentation, and were detained on the tarmac for over 10 hours.

President Cyril Ramaphosa described it as “mysterious” and launched an investigation into who coordinated the covert flight. The Palestinian embassy accused an “unregistered and misleading organization” of collecting money from refugees, arranging the journey through Israeli-controlled military facilities, and then abandoning them. Some passengers said they had no idea where they were going — just that they had paid $1,500 to leave.

One humanitarian leader, Imtiaz Sooliman of Gift of the Givers, was blunt: “This looks like ethnic cleansing.” He alleged that this was part of a deliberate strategy by Israel to empty Gaza under the guise of evacuation — bypassing legal accountability by offloading refugees in Africa without exit stamps or asylum guarantees.

This was not the first flight. Another had quietly landed weeks earlier with 176 Palestinians. In both cases, passengers arrived stripped of legal protections, their identities reduced to logistical problems. The forced removal of civilians without transparency or consent constitutes a violation of international law — and again, the international response has been mute.

What the World Is Choosing

If genocide is being committed in Gaza, it is not only Israel that must be held responsible. The United Nations is no longer merely failing to stop the crime — it is repackaging it as peace. A resolution that makes statehood conditional, ignores settler expansion, embeds foreign troops, and empowers the aggressor state cannot be called a peace plan. It is a blueprint for permanent submission.

Put plainly, the resolution asks the UN Security Council to sideline the UN Security Council — to hand the U.S. full control over how Gaza is managed, how reconstruction is defined, and who gets to decide anything at all. It is an attempt to bury international law, bury the ICJ’s genocide case, and bury the last restraints on an empire desperate to protect Israel at any cost.

If this passes, it won’t just mark the death of the UN’s credibility. It could expose BRICS as powerless — too unwilling or too afraid to confront the very empire they claim to oppose.

Francesca Albanese puts the stakes clearly: “The Palestinians are the last frontier of resistance — not just physically, but in the imagination. They don’t want to be tamed, they don’t want to be dominated.” That defiance is what global governance is now designed to extinguish — not through overt military conquest alone, but through legal architecture, humanitarian cover, and multilateral betrayal.

This is not just about Gaza. It is about whether the Genocide Convention still has meaning. Whether international law protects the colonized or rationalizes their removal. Whether institutions built in the wake of Auschwitz are now being used to erase another people — this time, on livestream.

If we are to reject this future, we must name it. Refuse the language that cloaks atrocity in diplomacy. Refuse the resolutions that turn genocide into governance. And above all, refuse to let law become the accomplice to erasure.

There is no peace process — there is only a process. And Gaza is being disappeared inside it.

Still, here’s the part they can’t draft away:

People see this. People understand this. And people will not accept a genocidal empire staging a coup against international law — and calling it peace.