For months, many warned that Israel’s unrestrained assault on Gaza was not merely a crime against Palestinians, but a fatal blow to the very idea of international law.

What was being tested was not only the scale of Israeli violence, but whether rules still applied at all; whether power would remain constrained by law, or whether law would give way to brute force.

Those warnings were dismissed as exaggeration. They were not.

Few articulated the stakes more clearly than Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, who cautioned that the choice before the world was “stark and unforgiving”: either defend the legal principles designed to prevent war, or watch the international system collapse under the weight of unchecked power politics.

For billions of people in the Global South, Petro warned, international law is not an abstraction, but a shield. Remove it, and only predators remain. ….more