The UN at Breaking Point

Gaza’s fragile ceasefire has exposed the hollowness of the world’s peacekeeper-in-chief.

The war in Gaza has fallen, for now, into an uneasy silence. The ceasefire brokered by US President Donald Trump last month has paused large-scale hostilities, allowing hostage exchanges, partial Israeli withdrawals and the first tentative movements of humanitarian aid. Yet the atmosphere is anything but peaceful. Violations continue, and the political order inside Gaza is already shifting in unpredictable ways. Hamas is quietly reasserting control; Israel remains deeply suspicious; and the international proposals for a transition authority or a protected ‘green zone’ are trapped in diplomatic limbo.

The human cost that preceded this truce still hangs over the region. More than 69,000 Palestinians are estimated to have been killed since the conflict began - an extraordinary number for a territory so small. Israeli losses, though far lower, continue to shape the country’s political choices and its fearful, inward-looking mood. Across the strip, displacement remains widespread and reconstruction has scarcely begun.

The ceasefire’s fragility is a mirror held up to the world’s institutions. It was not forged in the chambers of the United Nations but the corridors of big-power diplomacy. The UN, once the forum through which global crises were mediated, today looks more like a spectator issuing appeals no one heeds.

The core of the problem is structural. The Security Council, born in the aftermath of the Second World War, continues to grant a veto to five states whose interests diverge sharply from one another’s and from the rest of the world. A resolution calling for a sustainable ceasefire can pass the General Assembly with overwhelming support, only to be neutered or blocked entirely by a single permanent member. In Gaza’s case, the paralysis was almost ritualistic.

The original logic was that the veto would prevent superpower conflict. Instead, it now prevents international action on conflicts in which superpowers are indirectly involved. America, China and Russia wield the veto not as custodians of world order but as custodians of their own strategic comfort. The UN’s credibility erodes each time they do so.

Meanwhile, the superpowers themselves increasingly act as though they exist above global norms. China courts resource-rich African states with predatory economic terms. Russia redraws borders by force. America, the loudest advocate of a rules-based system, has often skirted the very rules it helped write when politically convenient. If these actors are the guardians of multilateralism, one wonders who the saboteurs might be.

Gaza’s ceasefire, described by some diplomats as a “zombie truce,” perfectly illustrates the malaise. A halt in fighting was achieved, but nothing resembling a final settlement has come into view. The mechanisms for monitoring violations are weak, the political horizon undefined, and the reconstruction plans mired in disagreement. Into this vacuum, one can well expect Hamas to re-establish its grip on the strip even as foreign powers debate what a post-Hamas Gaza should look like.

The UN ought to be the arbiter of such transitions, but in practice, it has been almost disdainfully sidelined. In the 1930s, the League of Nations had withered into irrelevance under the onslaught of fascism. The UN today is edging towards the same fate.

Its reform is an urgent matter of necessity. A Security Council shaped by the geopolitics of 1945 cannot credibly govern the crises of 2025. A General Assembly that speaks loudly but acts weakly cannot stand at the centre of the world’s conscience. Likewise, a secretary-general who must tiptoe around the sensitivities of the big powers cannot provide moral clarity.

The Gaza ceasefire offers the world an interval in which to confront the hollowness of its peace-making machinery. If the UN cannot evolve, then the task will fall to new alignments: coalitions of middle powers, regional groupings or institutions yet to be designed. India and other nations of the Global South which less entangled in proxy conflicts and more invested in stability could anchor such efforts.

The UN needs a reconstruction every bit as ambitious as the one Gaza now awaits. Without it, the world will drift toward a future of ceasefires arranged outside the UN which are observed selectively and which will collapse as surely as night follows day.

(The writer is a foreign affairs expert. Views personal.)