UK, Japan and 26 other countries say the war in Gaza 'must end now'
The foreign ministers of countries also including Australia and Canada said "the suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths." They condemned "the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food."
The statement described as "horrifying" the recent deaths of over 800 Palestinians who were seeking aid, according to the figures released by Gaza's Health Ministry and the U.N. human rights office.
"The Israeli government's aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity," the countries said. "The Israeli government's denial of essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population is unacceptable. Israel must comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law."
Israel and U.S. reject the criticism
Israel's Foreign Ministry rejected the statement, saying it was "disconnected from reality and sends the wrong message to Hamas." It accused Hamas of prolonging the war by refusing to accept an Israeli-backed proposal for a temporary ceasefire and hostage release.
"Hamas is the sole party responsible for the continuation of the war and the suffering on both sides," Foreign Ministry spokesperson Oren Marmorstein posted on X.
U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee also rejected the statement from many of America's closest allies, calling it "disgusting" in a post on X and saying they should instead pressure the "savages of Hamas."
Germany was also notably absent from the statement.
German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul wrote on X that he spoke with Israeli counterpart Gideon Saar on Monday and expressed the "greatest concern about the catastrophic humanitarian situation" in Gaza as Israel's offensive widens. He called on Israel to implement agreements with the EU to enable more humanitarian aid.
A worsening humanitarian crisis
Gaza's population of more than 2 million Palestinians is in a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, now relying largely on the limited aid allowed into the territory. Israel's offensive has displaced some 90% of the population, with many forced to flee multiple times.
Most of the food supplies Israel has allowed into Gaza go to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an American group backed by Israel. Since its operations began in May, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in shootings by Israeli soldiers while heading to the sites, according to witnesses and health officials. The Israeli military says it has only fired warning shots at those who approach its forces.
Israel's 21 months of war with Hamas have pushed Gaza to the brink of famine, sparked worldwide protests and led to an International Criminal Court arrest warrant against Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Israel has brushed off previous criticism
Allies' criticism about Israel's actions has had little clear effect. In May, Britain, France and Canada issued a joint statement urging Netanyahu's government to stop its military operations in Gaza and threatening "concrete actions" if it didn't.
Israel rejects criticism of its wartime conduct, saying its forces have acted lawfully and blaming civilian deaths on Hamas because the militants operate in populated areas. It says it has allowed enough food in to sustain Gaza and accuses Hamas of siphoning off much of it. The United Nations says there is no evidence for widespread diversion of humanitarian aid.
The new joint statement called for an immediate ceasefire, saying countries are prepared to take action to support a political pathway to peace in the region.
Israel and Hamas have been engaged in ceasefire talks but there appears to be no breakthrough, and it's not clear whether any truce would bring the war to a lasting halt. Netanyahu has vowed to continue the war until all the hostages are returned and Hamas is defeated or disarmed.
Speaking to Parliament, British Foreign Secretary David Lammy thanked the U.S., Qatar and Egypt for their diplomatic efforts to try to end the war.
"There is no military solution," Lammy said. "The next ceasefire must be the last ceasefire."
Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Tuesday the hostages needed to be released and the war must end, but the images of destruction and killing coming out of Gaza were "indefensible."
"We're all hoping that there'll be something that will break this," Burke told Australian Broadcasting Corp.
Hamas triggered the war when militants stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing around 1,200 people and taking 251 others hostage. Fifty hostages remain in Gaza, but fewer than half are thought to be alive.
Israel's military offensive has killed more than 59,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza's Health Ministry. Its count doesn't distinguish between militants and civilians, but the ministry says more than half of the dead are women and children. The ministry is part of the Hamas government, but the U.N. and other international organizations see it as the most reliable source of data on casualties.
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Unlike other Southeast Asian countries implementing strict data localization, Singapore emphasizes flexible cross-border data flows while maintaining oversight. As Diganta Das and Berwyn Kwek showed in a December 2024 paper, Singapore's Smart Nation initiative provided digital infrastructure for comprehensive urban governance, encompassing real-time data collection and AI-driven public services. The city-state attracted massive foreign investment, hosting 'approximately 87 data centers' by 2024 (60 percent of Southeast Asia's total capacity) with Google, Microsoft, and Meta establishing major facilities. However, these data centers remain foreign-owned and operated. Singapore's AI Singapore initiative, despite substantial funding, still requires Google Cloud partnerships to access cutting-edge AI capabilities. While Singapore's digital governance demonstrates greater flexibility than its neighbors, the fundamental computational architecture remains under foreign control. Even the most successful data center hub in the region cannot escape the structural dependency on foreign-owned AI development tools and infrastructure that defines the contemporary global technological hierarchy. The Path to True Technological Independence Data localization policies in Southeast Asia have only achieved the political simulacrum of 'technological sovereignty.' The aim of these policies is to keep the data at home and regulate extraction, while the entire process, infrastructure, and material framework remains structurally controlled by foreign corporations. What we are witnessing is something a tad more sophisticated than just 'digital colonialism,' as many scholars have pointed out. There is a deeper form of structural relation that maintains unequal control of power and value production. Like gravity, which invisibly shapes physical phenomena while remaining imperceptible to direct observation, the material structural relations governing computational infrastructure operate beneath policy debates about data flows and control. In other words, beneath talk of 'data flows' and 'data localization' lies a spectrum of material transactions and relations that moves downward to computational infrastructure and concrete global market relations. This spectrum encompasses Amazon extracting over 50 percent of sellers' revenue and Apple demanding 30 percent tribute on app purchases, while Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud control 67 percent of global cloud computing. Data compiled by Oxford revealed that only 32 countries possess AI-specialized data centers, with over 150 countries having no computational infrastructure whatsoever. The specialized GPU manufacturing, advanced semiconductor fabrication, and cloud computing architectures enabling AI development remain concentrated in core economies like the United States and Europe, creating technological and economic checkpoints that transcend basic policy. The world-system is not only socio-economically configured. There are also deep structural patterns that stratify, divide, and rank the technological development of societies. The old dynamic of 'development of underdevelopment' fundamentally covers the structured international division of labor and technological capacity and ownership. As such, if developed societies are capital-intensive, modernized, industrialized, and digitalized, it is precisely because the periphery persists as an extractive economy, exporting agro-mineral products and providing 'super-exploited' cheap non-skilled labor. AI will only deepen this divide, intensifying the international division of humanity through computational dependencies that determine technological sovereignty. Unless fundamental transformations challenge the structural foundations of this technological hierarchy, the concentration of AI infrastructure will further entrench Global South dependency in the digital age.
