Three years after the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, the conflict that followed has altered not only Israel and Gaza but the wider world, Guardian columnist Steve Bloomfield writes. Bloomfield, a former international editor of the Observer, argues the date marked a clear hinge in history, and that the scale of its consequences is now impossible to overlook. His piece is published precisely one year after what he describes as a supposed ceasefire was agreed.
On Gaza, Bloomfield points to an update to Google Maps released last week. Satellite imagery, he writes, shows entire towns reduced to rubble, with mosques and hospitals that were standing three years ago no longer visible. The territory’s once-empty shoreline, he adds, is now crowded with tents. In his assessment, the images document an attempt to destroy a people.
Israel has also been transformed, according to the columnist. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he writes, had cultivated a sense of security and even impregnability, and that belief was destroyed for ever by the ease with which Hamas carried out its attack — an assault that killed 1,200 Israelis, among them hundreds of young people at a music festival.
The Palestinian death toll from Israel’s response has passed 73,000, including 21,000 children, Bloomfield states. He argues the consequences have reached far beyond Gaza. Under the pretext of protecting its own borders, he writes, Israel has launched wars and military offensives across the region — sending troops into Syria, effectively annexing parts of southern Lebanon and applying the same tactics there that it used in Gaza, and joining the United States in an unwinnable war with Iran that has spiralled into a regional conflict touching all six Gulf states.
That Iran war, Bloomfield continues, has set off a fresh conflict between the Houthis in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, which this week triggered a mutual defence pact with Pakistan and Turkey, pulling two more countries into the maelstrom. Across the Red Sea, some of the same combatants are involved in the war in Sudan and in a new conflict inside Ethiopia. More than a dozen countries spanning two continents, he notes, are now entangled in a growing number of wars with overlapping participants and competing interests.
Something more insidious has changed as well, in his account: the rule of international law, however tenuous it already was, has been openly supplanted by military might. In 2022, he recalls, western leaders built a coalition rightly opposed to Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and made moral appeals grounded in violations of international law. In Gaza, by contrast, they encouraged and supported Israel even when it was clear the rules were being broken. That hypocrisy, he writes, has been noticed not only in the global south but among millions of citizens in the west.
The world watched in real time, Bloomfield says. Despite a ban on international journalists, anyone with a phone could see what was happening in Gaza from the early days of Israel’s response, and hundreds of Palestinian journalists reported on the bombing of hospitals, schools, cafes and wells, the killings at food distribution points, and the deaths of children and babies. War crimes, he argues, had never before been broadcast relentlessly, hour by hour, around the globe.
Gaza has also changed how wars are fought, according to the columnist, with Israel pioneering the use of AI to select targets and accelerating a descent into a future for which the world is unprepared.
All of this unfolded while the west could still claim an “international rules-based order” existed, he writes. While acknowledging that Donald Trump destroyed it, he insists the dismantling began under Joe Biden — who kept weapons flowing to Israel without interruption, whose administration ensured every United Nations security council resolution calling for a ceasefire was vetoed, and who attacked the international criminal court when it sought to indict Netanyahu for war crimes.
US backing for Israel has long been strong and largely unquestioned, Bloomfield notes, yet even Republican presidents understood they held influence over Israeli actions and were willing to use it. Ronald Reagan suspended an arms deal in 1981 after Israel annexed the Golan Heights, and a year later his administration halted cluster weapon supplies after Menachem Begin’s government used them in populated areas during its invasion of Lebanon. In 2002, the killing of 15 Palestinians in Gaza was enough for then secretary of state Colin Powell to announce a review of Israel’s use of American arms.
Israel was given a free pass by every other G7 member too, he writes, including those led by centrists or centre-left politicians. French president Emmanuel Macron, German chancellor Olaf Scholz, Justin Trudeau in Canada and Australia’s Anthony Albanese all initially gave Israel their backing. Only António Guterres, the much-maligned UN secretary general, emerges with a modicum of credit in his account: less than three weeks after 7 October, he called Israel’s response “collective punishment of the Palestinian people” and demanded an immediate ceasefire.
The one ray of hope, Bloomfield suggests, is that a shared understanding of what has happened has shifted the political winds in many countries. Before entering Number 10, Andy Burnham apologised for how Labour had handled the early days of the conflict, and the UK now has a prime minister who was among the few western politicians to call for a ceasefire just weeks after 7 October, he writes. Ed Miliband’s willingness to describe Israel’s actions in the West Bank as “ethnic cleansing”, he adds, indicates a change in attitude that could lead to more concerted international action.
In the US, support for Israel has fallen sharply, and Bloomfield argues no Democrat hoping to win the presidency in 2028 has a credible path to the White House without supporting the Palestinian cause. Even so, he warns against assuming an American change of direction would restore the world to how it was on 6 October 2023 — or pretending that earlier era was worth returning to. He points out that in the three years before the Hamas attack, the wars in Tigray and Sudan displayed many of the same trends: in Tigray, a conflict between Ethiopia’s central government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front killed 600,000 people, with massacres, forced starvation and widespread drone use, and no accountability. In Sudan, hospitals have been hit by drones, women raped and children shot dead, again without consequences.
Gaza has nonetheless accelerated the trend and normalised the immoral, he writes. Wars already begun have spiralled beyond easy control and keep pulling in more countries and actors, with each new outrage hardening positions and inviting response. Where there is impunity and no price to pay, he argues, there are terrifyingly few levers left to pull, and unpunished war crimes only escalate.
He closes by describing the consequences in human terms: a family in Addis Ababa fearing a drone crashing into their home; a Lebanese village evacuated and destroyed and its land made uninhabitable; a mundane job at Riyadh airport turned into a daily deadly gamble; a crew of badly paid seafarers praying as they cross the strait of Hormuz; and the dreams of millions of children shrinking from university, fame or fortune to bare survival. In Gaza, he writes, two million Palestinians remain crammed into tents, deprived of enough food and water, living under Hamas rule and the daily threat of death from a military force that fears no consequences. This is the world now, he concludes, and it has to be recognised before anything can change.
COMMENTS