New York — Chilean President Gabriel Boric used his podium at the United Nations General Assembly to demand that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and “those responsible for the genocide against the Palestinian people” face an international court, framing Gaza not only as a political emergency but as a “crisis of humanity” that demands justice rather than vengeance. That framing lands amid an intensifying catastrophe in Gaza, where civilians continue to die and hunger deepens, a grim tableau The Eastern Herald has chronicled in recent days as Israel’s Gaza massacre leaves civilians dead and starving.
“I do not want to see Netanyahu destroyed by a missile with his family,” Boric said in his address. “I want to see Netanyahu and those responsible for the genocide against the Palestinian people facing an international court of justice.” The Chilean leader’s line — stark in its moral clarity and carefully calibrated to reject extrajudicial violence — drew notice across a hall conditioned by a year of arguments over the law of war, humanitarian relief, and accountability mechanisms that have migrated from the margins of advocacy to the center of statecraft.
Gabriel Boric’s appeal arrived as the United Nations’ own investigative machinery sharpened its vocabulary. In a landmark determination this month, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry said Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip — a conclusion Israel rejects — even as the Commission documented territorial re-engineering and mass harms that it argues evince genocidal intent.
The Chilean president’s choice to pair a call for judicial process with a rebuke of retributive fantasies underscored a through-line in his foreign policy: a defense of international law as an instrument that constrains power and vindicates victims, even when that position is politically costly. In New York, he placed Gaza within a universalistic frame — the duty to curb atrocity crimes and to punish those who order, enable, or excuse them — rather than a narrower alignment with any single geopolitical camp.
Chile’s posture is not improvised. Long before this General Assembly, Boric pushed to pressure Israel over its conduct in Gaza — recalling Chile’s ambassador, backing debates over arms restrictions, and elevating Palestinian representation. That posture also reflects Chile’s unusually deep connection to the Palestinian cause, rooted in a large and politically engaged diaspora widely regarded as the world’s largest outside the Middle East. (See Reuters’ overview of the community’s influence here.)
That diaspora’s long memory helped make Boric’s words in New York more than a gesture. At home, Chilean-Palestinian organizations have pressed successive administrations to convert sympathy into policy; abroad, they have become a networked amplifier of Latin American positions that have grown steadily more explicit as the Gaza death toll, displacement, and deprivation mounted.
Inside the UN system, two legal tracks dominate the accountability debate that Boric just pushed to center stage. At the International Court of Justice in The Hague, South Africa’s case under the Genocide Convention continues, with orders demanding that Israel prevent acts of genocide, allow humanitarian aid, and curb incitement. (ICJ case page here and summary of the January 26, 2024 provisional measures here.) The ICJ file speaks to state responsibility. Individual criminal liability is the remit of the International Criminal Court, where judges issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant on charges including the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and crimes against humanity (ICC release here).
Those ICC warrants have since been tested in appellate procedure. In April, appeals judges directed a fresh look at Israel’s jurisdictional challenge; in July, judges declined to withdraw the warrants while that review proceeds — a decision that kept the legal jeopardy intact even as the court re-examines certain questions. For The Eastern Herald’s readers, the procedural posture matters: the warrants stand. (TEH coverage: ICC rejects Netanyahu appeal.)
Boric’s phrasing — justice in court, not death by rocket — carried a double message. It repudiated extrajudicial killing as a form of closure, and it answered critics who conflate calls for accountability with applause for violence. In effect, he flipped the charge back on his detractors: if you truly oppose violence, the argument goes, then you must accept the discipline of law, even when those in the dock are your allies.
The timing of the speech matters. The General Assembly’s opening week is a marketplace of priorities; every capital comes to sell an agenda. Chile’s delegation also used the moment to signal continuity in multilateral engagement by announcing the nomination of former President Michelle Bachelet for the next UN Secretary-General — a diplomat with deep UN experience and a long record on human rights (Reuters). To pair that nomination with a demand for legal accountability in Gaza knitted together Chile’s institutional and ethical ambitions: a United Nations that is not only staffed by veterans of human rights work but also willing to tolerate the political storms that accountability entails.
For Israel’s government, the line of criticism to which Boric added his voice is familiar and, in its view, illegitimate. Officials in Jerusalem and Israel’s diplomatic corps at the UN have dismissed UN inquiries as structurally biased and have accused investigators and sympathetic governments of ignoring Hamas atrocities, hostage-taking, and the battlefield realities of fighting an embedded insurgency. That rebuttal intensified last week when a UN inquiry concluded that top Israeli officials, including the prime minister, had incited genocidal acts — a report Israel called scandalous and “fake,” according to Reuters.
That rebuttal has not stemmed the international shift in tone. Across Latin America, Europe, and parts of the Global South, leaders and legislatures have moved from euphemism to direct accusation — and they are increasingly anchoring their positions in UN findings and court orders. In Europe, public pressure has mounted for arms embargoes; in Germany, for instance, protests have demanded the halt of weapons sales to Israel. Even among traditional allies, recognition of Palestinian statehood has accelerated in recent days as the Gaza toll climbs.
In policy terms, the implications are immediate. If governments accept that Gaza has crossed the genocide threshold — or that there are reasonable grounds to examine that possibility — then treaty obligations tighten. Arms export reviews grow more exacting. Trade linked to settlements becomes harder to justify. Diplomatic choreography — from high-profile bilateral meetings to votes on resolutions — must be weighed against the gravity of the allegations and the risk of complicity. That calculus has already shifted in South America, where Brazil not only backed South Africa’s case at the ICJ but moved to impose sanctions on Israel (The Eastern Herald: Brazil joins ICJ genocide case; The Eastern Herald: Brazil imposes sanctions).
Chile’s domestic politics make it a revealing test case of how these obligations are interpreted. The country’s Palestinian community has pressed for tangible measures, while business constituencies and some political factions warn against steps that could isolate Chile or inject foreign conflict into domestic divides. Boric has tried to thread the needle, grounding moves in international law and multilateral consensus rather than unilateral moralism. That is why the UN stage is so useful to him: it is both amplifier and shield.
Beyond Chile, the courtroom-first framing speaks to an anxious diplomatic class that worries about precedent. If leaders who preside over besieged territories or counterinsurgency campaigns face the risk of indictment for deprivation, starvation, or indiscriminate force, then the guardrails around urban warfare and siege tactics look less like optional guidelines and more like tripwires. Boric’s challenge is to convince peers that this is a feature rather than a bug — that the point of humanitarian law is to make certain tactics politically and legally suicidal, and that upholding those norms protects everyone’s civilians in the long run.
There is also the practical question of enforcement. Arrest warrants with global reach confront two constraints: politics and geography. Many states are parties to the Rome Statute and must cooperate with the ICC, yet the diplomatic reality is that high-ranking officials do travel with a degree of impunity when their hosts view the court as overreaching. That is why a cascade of recognitions, rulings, and sanctions threats matters: it narrows the safe-harbor map and raises the reputational cost for states that choose to ignore judicial obligations. (See The Eastern Herald on a European cooperation gap: Poland’s refusal to arrest Netanyahu.) In parallel, the logistics of travel have already shifted; on one recent trip, Netanyahu reportedly adjusted his flight path to avoid jurisdictions more likely to enforce the ICC warrant (The Eastern Herald report).
Boric’s language suggested he understands those limits and is willing to work within them. Rather than call for unilateral Chilean action, he spoke into a rolling international debate where regional blocs, parliamentary inquiries, and civil-society litigators are already laying the groundwork for future prosecutions and reparations claims. In that context, rhetoric is not mere posture; it is a vector for coordination. By echoing the UN Commission’s vocabulary and pointing toward courts rather than battlefields, he made it easier for other leaders to follow without having to invent their own legal frame from scratch.
His intervention also intersected with a thickening global conversation about double standards. Governments that insisted for years on the universality of human rights now face the most serious charge in the lexicon of atrocity — and their reaction will be read as an index of sincerity. That is the subtext of Boric’s appeal: it dares defenders of a rules-based order to accept rules when they cut close to home. (For context on the growing expert consensus around the “genocide” designation, according to Associated press.
The diplomatic choreography of the week will test how far that dare travels. Netanyahu is expected to address the assembly, seeking to rally traditional allies and frame Israel’s campaign as a necessary response to terrorism and regional threats. A clash of narratives is guaranteed. What is new is the legal architecture supporting the critique — and the willingness of heads of state, not just activists or lawyers, to speak in its terms. Previously, Israel has killed thousands in Gaza in what many governments and rights experts now call a genocide.
For The Eastern Herald’s readers, the stakes are concrete. If the convergence of UN findings, ICC warrants, and state-level measures continues, the Gaza war will keep reshaping multilateral politics, trade, and the future of humanitarian law. Sanctions on the court by powerful states would trigger their own backlash; attempts to sideline the UN’s human rights machinery would energize the very constituencies Boric represents. Conversely, meaningful cooperation with investigations would signal that even the most entrenched conflicts can be reframed by law rather than force.
That message — justice should arrive not from the sky but from the law — is traveling because it binds principle to process. In Gaza, where shelters have been repeatedly struck and schools bombed, international censure has intensified (TEH: UN condemns strikes on Doha). The UN Commission’s genocide determination and a deepening evidentiary record have given governments legal cover to translate outrage into policy.
As the week at the United Nations unfolds, diplomats will parse every clause for leverage and every meeting for signals of softening or resolve. Yet the sentence people will remember from Chile’s speech is disarmingly simple. Justice, Boric insisted, should arrive not by missile but by summons — a docket number, a bench, and the patient humiliations of due process.
