On April 16, 2025, Fatima Hassouna, a 26-year-old Palestinian photojournalist, was killed with ten family members, among them her pregnant sister, when an Israeli airstrike targeted their home in Gaza City. The day before, Fatima had been overjoyed that Cannes selected her documentary. Just a day later, her life and creative voice were extinguished. "If I die, I want a loud death," she wrote shortly before she was gone. Her photography captured the human face of war, her art bearing witness to lives under siege. Her sudden erasure is not just a tragedy, it is a testimony to what happens when the world fails to protect those who document truth.
That story was heavy on my mind the other day when I saw a TikTok from The Economist. It asked a stark question I’ve been turning over for more than a year: How is Israel getting away with its actions in Gaza?
Ever since the October 2023 attacks, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has led a campaign of staggering devastation. Entire neighborhoods in Gaza have been reduced to rubble. Hospitals, schools, homes—all demolished. Tens of thousands of civilians are dead. So many more have been displaced, injured, or reduced to survival by sheer will.
The International Court of Justice has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu on charges of crimes against humanity. Ordinarily, that would cripple a leader. Yet the war persists. Netanyahu remains in office. His continued tenure isn’t due to overwhelming domestic support; quite the opposite. Massive protests have filled Israeli streets for months, demanding both an end to the war and his removal. But in this case, domestic opposition simply isn’t enough.
Why? Because Netanyahu is shielded by powerful allies abroad.
That shield comprises weapons, money, and unflinching diplomatic cover. Since October, the U.S. has dispatched nearly $18 billion in military aid to Israel—bombs, artillery, tank rounds—that flow faster than any previous year. Germany, Israel’s longtime second-largest arms supplier, has delivered hundreds of millions of euros’ worth of weaponry, only recently signaling a partial halt to those that could be used in Gaza. And in the U.K., despite the rhetoric of restraint, arms licenses surged to record levels at the height of the conflict.
This is neither random nor bureaucratic oversight; it’s calculated sustenance. Journalist Matt Kennard, in The Racket, dissects how wars grow legs not because of battlefield necessity but through the interests of governments, defense corporations, and political elites. Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about the “military-industrial complex” wasn’t history; it was prophecy. Today, it is Gaza’s reality.
This is why the question posed by The Economist matters so much. It is not simply about Israel. It is about the credibility of the so-called “rules-based international order.” Right now, the order looks selective, rigorously enforced against some countries, quietly ignored for others.
If Western leaders truly believe in the universality of international law, they must dismantle the shield they have built. That means halting arms sales, enforcing court rulings, and refusing to block resolutions at the United Nations that call for a ceasefire and humanitarian relief. Until then, Gaza will stand as evidence that the global order is not founded on justice, but on the priorities of the powerful.
When history is written, this will not be remembered as Netanyahu’s war alone. It will also be Joe Biden’s war, for sending the bombs and blocking UN resolutions. It will be Olaf Scholz’s war, for keeping the weapons flowing while the destruction mounted. It will be Rishi Sunak’s war, for approving the licenses that armed the jets and tanks.
They can wrap their choices in the language of “shared values” and “security,” but in Gaza, those values are measured in rubble and graves. And the shield protecting Netanyahu is as much theirs as it is his.
Fatima Hassouna lived and died under that shield. Her photographs showed the world what survival in Gaza looked like: fragile moments of joy, stubborn acts of normalcy, resilience in the face of despair. Now she is gone, her voice silenced by the same machinery that her art sought to expose. If we allow her story to fade, history will remember not only her death, but the complicity that made it possible.
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