From Srebrenica to Gaza: the unfulfilled promise of ‘never again’
The promise of ‘never again’, solemnly made in the wake of the Holocaust and reaffirmed after every episode of mass atrocity, has become one of the most tragically broken commitments in modern international history. Today, the images from Gaza force us to ask ourselves, once again, what that commitment means when the international community once more looks on and fails to act.
On 11 July 1995, Serbian forces under the command of General Ratko Mladić stormed Srebrenica, a town that the United Nations Security Council had declared a ‘safe area’ two years earlier. In the days that followed, between 8,000 and 10,000 people were systematically executed: Bosnian men and boys separated from their families, transported by bus to mass execution sites, and buried in mass graves which the Serbian authorities attempted to destroy and scatter in order to conceal the evidence. The contingent of 400 Dutch peacekeepers deployed in the area was unable – or unwilling – to offer any resistance. The safe area became the scene of the worst atrocity perpetrated on European soil since the Second World War.
What makes Srebrenica a wound that time cannot heal is not merely the brutality of the events. It is that it happened before the eyes of the world. It was foreseeable: the systematic repression, the prolonged siege, and the policy of ethnic cleansing that preceded it were no secret. It was preventable: the international community had troops on the ground and resolutions on paper. And yet it happened all the same. Not out of ignorance, but out of paralysis: the very same paralysis that arises when political interests take precedence over legal and moral obligations towards the victims.
The judicial response that followed, however, was a milestone. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), established by the Security Council in 1993, prosecuted those ultimately responsible for the genocide. In 2001, General Radislav Krstić became the first person to be convicted specifically for the Srebrenica genocide. Radovan Karadžić, the political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, was sentenced to forty years’ imprisonment. Ratko Mladić, the military commander, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2017. The Tribunal established a crucial point: the events in Srebrenica were not accidents of war or spontaneous excesses. They constituted a genocide that was planned, coordinated and carried out with the deliberate intention of destroying, in whole or in part, the Bosnian national, ethnic or religious group.
At the same time, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) was called upon to determine state responsibility. Bosnia and Herzegovina brought a case against Yugoslavia for violating the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In its 2007 judgment, the ICJ confirmed that Srebrenica constituted genocide, and although it did not attribute direct responsibility to Serbia for its perpetration, it did hold Serbia responsible for failing to prevent the genocide whilst being in a position to influence those who committed it, and for failing to cooperate in the arrest and surrender of Mladić to the ICTY. This judgment established a principle of universal scope: States are not only prohibited from committing genocide; they have an active obligation to prevent it, even beyond their borders, within the limits of their influence and capacity.
The safe area became the scene of the worst atrocity committed on European soil since the Second World War. Srebrenica was not a failure of the law: it was a failure of the political will to enforce it.
Thirty years on, the echoes of Srebrenica resound with disturbing force in Gaza.
Since 2015, Palestine has been a State Party to the Rome Statute, which grants the International Criminal Court (ICC) territorial jurisdiction over crimes committed in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem since June 2014. The Office of the Prosecutor has formally investigated the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. In the context of the military operations in Gaza in 2023 and 2024, the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber issued arrest warrants on 21 November 2024 against the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his then Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, on charges including the deliberate imposition of living conditions intended to destroy the civilian population and the use of starvation as a method of warfare — the first time in the Court’s history that such a charge has been brought against the head of government of a State — as well as crimes against humanity such as murder and persecution. In April 2025, the ICC itself rejected Israel’s attempts to have the arrest warrants quashed. These charges, if proven at trial, constitute serious violations of the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute.
At the same time, South Africa brought a case against Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in December 2023, invoking the Genocide Convention. This is the second time in history that the Court has been called upon to rule on state responsibility for genocide; the first was, in fact, the Srebrenica case. In January 2024, the ICJ issued urgent provisional measures, recognising the risk of irreparable harm to the Palestinian population and reiterating Israel’s obligation to respect the principles of proportionality and distinction. It also extended these measures in March and May of that year in light of the worsening humanitarian situation. At that preliminary stage—which assesses only the plausibility of the rights invoked, not the merits of the case—the Court did not determine the existence of genocidal intent, but the seriousness of its intervention speaks for itself.
In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory presented a legal analysis concluding that the State of Israel is responsible for committing acts of genocide in the Gaza Strip, in contravention of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This collective failure was summed up by Navi Pillay, who lamented that “the post-Second World War multilateral system has failed to prevent this genocide”. At that same session of the Third Committee of the General Assembly, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territories occupied since 1967, went further by highlighting the role of the states surrounding Israel. International diplomacy, designed to preserve peace, has once again been used to justify violence, dehumanising the Palestinians and legitimising the narrative of ‘self-defence’.
That conclusion of genocide has not been frozen in time: it has continued to be reinforced by new evidence. In June 2026, the same Independent International Commission of Inquiry presented a report focusing specifically on violations against Palestinian children between October 2023 and March 2026, which continues to substantiate what had already been reported in 2025. The figures are hard to read without shuddering: more than 20,000 Palestinian children killed and more than 44,000 injured between October 2023 and October 2025, accounting for around 30 per cent of all fatalities in the territory. The deliberate and systematic attack on children is not collateral damage, but one of the elements underpinning the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinian group as such.
The trajectory from Srebrenica to Gaza is therefore not merely a moral metaphor: it is a concrete legal line connecting the lessons of the ICTY with the case law of the ICJ, and this in turn with the current work of the ICC. International law has learnt, slowly and at an enormous human cost, to name crimes with precision, to establish individual and state responsibilities, and to establish mechanisms for accountability. The problem is no longer the absence of rules. It is the political will to apply them.
That will is being put to the test today in a way that should cause unease amongst all institutions committed to human rights. International norms – the 1948 Genocide Convention, the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Charter – establish clear obligations to protect the civilian population. But these standards do not apply themselves: they require states willing to enforce them, institutions with sufficient resources and a mandate to investigate and prosecute, and a civil society capable of documenting, denouncing and preserving the memory of the victims.
When any of these elements fails, when vetoes block action by the Security Council, when judicial mechanisms are obstructed or their officials sanctioned for doing their job, impunity is no accident: it is the predictable result of a system that has been left to its own devices.
By Alessia Schiavón, Director of Fibgar
