The decision by Western powers to defund the aid agency in Gaza further imperils civilians, while undermining the credibility of key global institutions.

The liberal order, memorialized in founding documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and upheld in institutions such as the United Nations, has been on life support for some time now. A key collateral casualty of its ailing condition has been the doctrine of humanitarianism, which seeks to curb the most callous and unaccountable forms of state impunity against the fundamental rights of civilian noncombatants in the modern age. The entire course of the Israeli invasion of Gaza has underlined this grim truth, but the concerted effort to hamstring the UNRWA, which has been providing critical aid and assistance to dispossessed Palestinians for decades, has definitively stripped away the last remaining conceits that Western powers are acting in the higher interests of humanity.