ON 8 JUNE, an Israeli attack on the Nuseirat refugee camp killed nearly three hundred Palestinians. The previous month, Israel had bombed other refugee camps, including a displacement tent camp in a designated safe zone in Rafah, which killed at least forty-five, mostly women and children. It has killed at least thirty-seven thousand Palestinians over the course of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Over five percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been killed or injured, while more than half of its residential buildings have been destroyed.
May also brought about several developments in international positions towards the conflict. The International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan requested international warrants against the Israeli prime minister and defence minister, as well as against senior Hamas leaders. The International Court of Justice ordered Israel to halt its military offensive in Rafah, which it chose to ignore. Meanwhile, Ireland, Norway and Spain announced that they would recognise the state of Palestine, after which Israel recalled its ambassadors from these countries. This is something of a symbolic and political breakthrough. Israel’s war on Gaza has been so brutal that Zionism has been undermined as never before, while the Palestinian struggle for justice has received a new and much higher level of global public support.
Several journalists have argued India’s actions during this conflict underscore a demonstrable break with past foreign policy. Hours after the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, Modi was among the first world leaders to express solidarity with Israel, which he reiterated on a call with Netanyahu two days later. Soon after, the ministry of external affairs mentioned its longstanding support for “direct negotiations towards establishing a sovereign, independent, and viable state of Palestine, living within secure and recognized borders side by side at peace with Israel.” In late October, India abstained from a United Nations General Assembly resolution for a humanitarian truce—significantly, it was the only country in South Asia to do so. Although it subsequently supported other resolutions and provided aid to Gaza, it again abstained, in April, from a vote in the UN Human Rights Council that issued a call for an arms embargo for Israel and condemned starvation as an alleged warfare tool in Gaza.
Modi’s India, while claiming to be a vishwaguru—teacher of the world—and a leader of the Global South, did not officially support or welcome South Africa’s petition at the ICJ that accuses Israel of genocide. The government decried the events of 7 October as “terrorism,” but at no point since has it criticised, in similar phrasing, the sustained Israeli bombing and military actions that have killed and injured tens of thousands of civilians, let alone calling it genocidal behaviour. Instead, Modi boasted, in an India TV interview, that, although people had recommended he visit Israel and Palestine together, he had rejected such precedents in foreign policy when he became the first Indian prime minister to visit Israel, in 2017, and Palestine the following year. He added a snide comparison to how such “secular” balancing acts would suggest that a visit to a Hanuman temple should be followed by an iftar party.