United Nation Paralysed by Veto System Allowing Israel Genocide in Gaza and Russia Ukraine War While Denying Veto Power to Other Countries

The world watches in total dismay as the United Nation paralysed by its own founding laws fails to protect millions of innocent civilians from ongoing slaughter and devastation. Across the globe, ordinary citizens see high ranking diplomats meet inside grand halls, deliver emotional speeches, and pass paper statements back and forth. Yet on the ground, deadly bombs continue to drop on innocent families without any pause. Two massive global catastrophes highlight this terrible breakdown. In the Middle East, military bombardment has created what human rights groups and international jurists call the Israel genocide in Gaza, turning refugee camps, hospitals, and residential areas into fields of dust. In Eastern Europe, the catastrophic Russia Ukraine war grinds forward, killing tens of thousands of people and displacing entire populations.

To understand how the world body lost its ability to bring peace, one must look directly at the structure of the United Nations Security Council. This elite fifteen member council is the only global committee with the legal authority to order mandatory ceasefires, impose economic punishments, and send soldiers to stop violence. However, supreme authority is held by only five countries: the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France. These permanent five nations hold the absolute power of the veto. This single rule means that if just one of these five countries votes against a peace plan, the entire decision is instantly killed, even if every other country in the entire world votes in favor of it.

This unfair setup makes ordinary people ask a very simple question: why was veto power given to the USA and these four allies, and why was veto power not given to all other countries? The answer lies in the messy politics of 1945, right after the end of World War Two. The allied nations who won the war gathered in San Francisco to build a replacement for the failed League of Nations. Under the old League of Nations, every single country had equal voting power, which meant decisions were constantly tied up in debate. The major victorious military superpowers made a strict demand: they would only join the new world body if they were given absolute power to block any action that harmed their national interests. If the creators did not grant them special veto rights, the United States and the Soviet Union would have walked away entirely.

At the same time, the founding powers flatly refused to give veto rights to other countries. The creators argued that if dozens of different nations could veto decisions, the United Nations would become totally stuck and unable to pass any law at all. More importantly, the dominant military powers simply refused to let smaller, developing, or newly independent nations tell them what to do. The founding framework treated countries from Asia, Africa, and Latin America as second tier members, giving the five winners of a past war permanent control over the future of the planet. This established a deeply unfair double standard, ensuring that international rules apply only to small and powerless nations, while the five permanent powers and their closest allies enjoy total immunity.

This broken power structure explains why international law remains completely helpless in the Russia Ukraine war. The roots of this bitter fight began long before the recent heavy fighting. Following political changes in Kyiv, Russian forces seized and occupied the Crimean peninsula in early 2014, while supporting armed uprisings across the eastern Donbas region. After years of political tension, Russian troops launched a full scale invasion in February 2022, sending tanks across the border and firing heavy missiles into Ukrainian cities. When the United Nations Security Council gathered urgently to vote on a binding resolution ordering Russian troops to stop fighting and return home, Russia simply raised its hand and cast its veto. In that single second, international law was completely blocked. Because Russia holds permanent veto power, the council could not send peacekeepers, could not enforce global embargoes, and could not stop the continuous destruction.

An equally devastating breakdown has taken place regarding the Israel genocide in Gaza. To understand how this tragedy reached such an extreme level, one must examine the long political history of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Over his decades leading the right wing Likud party, Netanyahu built his entire career around completely opposing a free and independent Palestinian state. During his repeated terms as prime minister, he oversaw the rapid expansion of illegal settlements across the West Bank, divided Palestinian communities, and maintained a suffocating naval, aerial, and land blockade around Gaza for nearly two decades. Following deadly cross border clashes in October 2023, Netanyahu launched a total military campaign against Gaza. Israeli forces cut off electricity, blocked clean drinking water, halted emergency food trucks, and dropped heavy bombs across densely populated neighborhoods, hospitals, schools, and refugee shelters.

The horrifying human toll inside the besieged territory reveals the staggering depth of this cruelty. Official health monitoring records and human rights documentation confirm that approximately 22000 kids and babies have been killed by Israel under collapsing concrete, heavy airstrikes, and severe shortages of newborn medical care. In addition to these infants and children, more than 50000 men, women, old, and young people have been killed, with thousands more remaining buried uncounted beneath endless mountains of rubble. Entire family bloodlines have been completely erased from the civil registry, as elderly grandparents, young college students, nursing mothers, and working fathers were wiped out in their own living rooms.

This scale of human destruction led world leaders, United Nations human rights investigators, and legal experts to declare that the ongoing slaughter represents the Israel genocide in Gaza. South Africa brought formal proceedings before the International Court of Justice, where international judges ordered immediate emergency steps to prevent genocidal destruction and allow critical life saving supplies into the strip. Furthermore, the International Criminal Court took the historic step of issuing official arrest warrants against Netanyahu for using starvation as a deliberate method of warfare and targeting innocent civilian populations. Yet on the ground, nothing stopped. Every single time the Security Council prepared binding legal documents to order an unconditional ceasefire to protect the remaining population, the USA cast its veto to protect Netanyahu and his government. A single negative vote from Washington threw out the cries of dozens of nations, allowing the horrific bombing to continue month after month.

This complete paralysis exposes another critical weakness of the United Nations: it does not possess an independent army. Millions of people assume the blue helmet peacekeepers seen on television are an independent global military force capable of stepping in to protect civilians. In reality, peacekeepers are soldiers borrowed from member nations, and they can only enter an area if the local government gives them full permission. They are trained only to stand along quiet borders to observe agreements, not to fight against advanced military forces. Neither the Russian army in Ukraine nor the Israeli military in Gaza would ever give permission for international troops to enter and stop their operations. Without any physical enforcement arm, the global body has no way to back up its words.

Whenever the Security Council remains locked in stalemate, countries turn to the wider United Nations General Assembly. In this room, all member countries hold one single, equal vote, and nobody holds any veto power. The General Assembly has voted by overwhelming majorities to condemn the military aggression in Ukraine and demand an immediate end to the violence and Israel genocide in Gaza. However, the global public is often shocked to find out that decisions made by the General Assembly are merely political recommendations. Under international treaties, they carry strong moral weight, but they have zero legal power to force armies to put down their weapons or face punishment.

Fixing this broken system is almost impossible because of the way the United Nations Charter was written. Under Article 108 of the charter, any attempt to reform the council, abolish the veto, or grant permanent voting seats to major nations across Asia, Africa, and South America requires the total approval of all five permanent members. None of the five major powers will ever agree to give up their veto shield. As long as the USA, Russia, and their fellow permanent members can unilaterally block the rest of the world, global justice will remain divided into two categories: harsh punishment for the weak, and complete immunity for the powerful.