HE declaration on Monday by the UK and 28 international partners that the war in Gaza `must end now` is welcome and long overdue, but at the same time a wholly insufficient response to the scale of atrocities unfolding in the besieged territory. The statement cautious and diplomatic labels it a `war` but to call it that is to obscure the truth. This is not a conventional war between two sides.

It is genocide, conducted by one of the world`s most heavily armed militaries, against an imprisoned, starved and decimated civilian population that has nowhere left to run. In the 21 months of Israel`s relentless bombardment, the destruction in Gaza defies imagination. More than 59,000 Palestinians have been slaughtered. Homes, schools, hospitals, mosques everything that sustains civilian life have been razed. The UN reports that almost 900 people have been killed simply while seeking food, as hunger and famine spread across the enclave. In Deir al-Balah, where Israeli tanks pushed into new districts this week, already displaced residents once more face death and homelessness. This is not some war for `security`, it is the systematic destruction of a people.

The statement rightly condemns Israel`s `drip feeding of aid`, the inhumane killing of civilians seeking food and water, and the violation of international law through proposed forced displacement of Palestinians. It also expresses `strong opposition` to Israeli settlement expansions in the West Bank, including the El settlement plan that would sever Palestinian territories and sabotage the two-state solution. Settler violence, too, is called out. Yet for all this, the statement stops short of calling a spade a spade. Even the pledge by these nations to take `further action to support an immediate ceasefire` is inadequate in view of what the situation demands. The world does not need more ambiguous warnings or empty statements it needs accountability. Instead of shielding Israel with euphemisms, the West must demand an immediate halt to this bloodshed, coupled with sanctions, international investigations, and prosecutions for war crimes.

There is bitter irony in Israel`s role as the perpetrator of such violence. One would think that a state that came into being following the Holocaust history`s most harrowing genocide would internalise and live by the crucial lesson: never again, for anyone. And yet, instead of choosing peace, it has embraced perpetual violence, while much of the world watches in complicit silence. The world must reject this moral abdication before more lives are lost. If there is to be any hope of peace, the bloodshed must stop not with empty statements, but with decisive international action. A world that tiptoes around genocide is a world where no people, anywhere, can claim the protection of humanity.