We live in a world that is being victimized by more than just the misdeeds of its evildoers.

As we watch the shattering of buildings and humanity in Gaza, we cannot help but feel that we are also being done in by the willful do-nothingness of morally deficient leaders.

Today, we’ll be focusing on a full range of world leadership and peacemaking failures in Gaza. We’ll get to how Hamas leaders diabolically planned their Oct. 7, 2023 invasion of Israel – hoping to goad Israel into retaliation that would kill Gaza civilian masses and earn global condemnation. And Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did just that.

We’ll get to United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ failure to lead the world to demand that Hamas free Gaza’s Palestinians from being used as human shields, so their troops and leaders could hide underground beneath the civilians they are ostensibly protecting.

Meanwhile, Guterres’ UN made news by finally blacklisting Hamas for the sexual crimes including gang rapes inflicted on Israelis almost two years ago, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported. In an odd twist, Guterres seemed to have waited until he could also say in that same report that Israel could also be added to the sexual violence blacklist in the UN’s next report, which won’t come out until 2026.

But first, let’s catch up on the latest outrage. It began civilly enough in Gaza, at 3:54 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 10, when Al Jazeera television’s prominent journalist, Anas Al-Sharif posted on social media: “If this madness does not end, Gaza will be reduced to ruins, its people’s voices silenced, their faces erased – and history will remember you as silent witnesses to a genocide you chose not to stop…. Silence is complicity.”

Then, just before midnight, a precisely targeted Israeli missile hit a tent beside Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital, killing six journalists. Five were from Al-Jazeera, including the one who was Israel’s target – Al-Sharif.

Israel’s military had been contending for months that Al-Sharif was actually the leader of a “Hamas terrorist cell.” Israel showed captured documents as evidence, including purported Hamas salary documents. Al-Sharif and his Al Jazeera bosses repeatedly denied the accusations. The Committee to Protect Journalists and a United Nations expert said Israel’s evidence wasn’t credible. Importantly: those other journalists Israel killed – but never linked to Hamas – were protected by laws of war.

Israel had long claimed Al-Sharif’s news reports showing dead, wounded, starving Gaza children were fakes. Then again, Netanyahu still insists there is no starvation in Gaza. But because Netanyahu banned global journalists from Gaza, the world’s visual reports of Gaza’s plight came only from Arab journalists – and Hamas.

Imagine what Netanyahu could have done: As I suggested right after Hamas invaded on Oct. 7, he should have addressed the UN and urged Secretary-General Guterres to lead a worldwide effort to pressure Hamas to liberate not just one but two separate sets of civilian hostages it was holding:

One: The Israeli civilian hostages Hamas has held in underground chambers beneath Hamas apartments, since that Oct. 7 invasion;

Two: Gaza’s Palestinian civilians, who Hamas forced to live in peril above them as their human shields. They would be the first to be hit and killed by Israeli retaliators, while protecting Hamas leaders and troops living in safer underground chambers, hiding beneath the women and children they were supposed to be protecting. It is a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions’ Law of Armed Conflict – a fact Guterres and the UN have barely mentioned over the years.

Hamas’ military leader Yahya Sinwar (who was eventually killed by Israeli military) had called Palestinian civilian casualties “necessary sacrifices” for Hamas’ cause. He hoped to ignite a massive Israeli retaliation, so the world would see Israel’s military killing and crippling Palestinian civilians. He hoped Israel’s allies would turn away from Israel.

And lo, Netanyahu’s Israel wound up doing exactly what Sinwar’s Hamas schemed to get Israel to do. Then he did far more and made things far worse. Netanyahu halted shipments of food and medicine into Gaza. Soon the world’s news screens were wallpapered with sad images of children starving, suffering, dying.

This week, the foreign ministers of 27 nations – including 20 from Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan – warned that Israel must permit and expedite immediate and permanent access to Gaza for UN and other food and humanitarian shipments to enter Gaza and distribute aid to reverse Gaza’s “famine… unfolding before our eyes.”

Netanyahu could have won global support by announcing months ago that Israel would lead a movement to feed Gaza’s starving Palestinians. Maybe even a movement to safeguard Palestinians from their Hamas rulers who made them live in peril as human shield hostages. Life would be different – and safer – for the world’s Jews. But that’s not Bibi’s style.

The tragic Gaza visuals the world has been seeing have sparked a global ripple (maybe a wave) of anti-Israel, anti-Zionism and antisemitism. And that’s more than sad. It’s tragic.

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