New York — Chile’s President Gabriel Boric used his address at the United Nations General Assembly to insist that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should answer before an international court for atrocities in Gaza, describing the conflict as a test of the global legal order and the will of states to enforce it. In making that demand, he emphasized justice through law, not vengeance, aligning Chile with a widening bloc that treats Gaza not as a distant tragedy but as a measure of whether rules still bind the powerful. For readers tracking this arc, his podium appeal to face an international court crystallized a year of rising legal pressure.
His argument landed in a hall primed by investigations and emergency debates. Formal findings have moved the conversation from euphemism to legal vocabulary, with jurists and commissioners describing patterns consistent with genocide and courts advancing criminal liability. The thread tying these fronts together is the divide between state responsibility and individual culpability. That distinction sharpened after early rulings that affirmed genocide risk at the ICJ, even as prosecutors pressed separate files on war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Chile’s position did not materialize overnight. The country hosts what is widely regarded as the largest Palestinian diaspora outside the Arab world, and that community’s civic and political presence has pulled foreign policy toward international law. In recent years, Santiago has recalled its ambassador to Israel and downgraded military ties as civilian deaths mounted. Those steps set the stage for a leader who now uses the world’s biggest microphone to elevate legal accountability above ritualized talking points. In this sense, the UN week was less an inflection than a culmination.
In the chamber, the subtext was practical. Arrest warrants change itineraries. Governments that are parties to the Rome Statute carry obligations to cooperate with the court, and even those that are not parties must contend with the optics of exceptionalism. That is why the debate over Gaza has migrated from the language of “proportionality” to the mechanics of enforcement. Travel plans, security protocols, and stopover choices take on a different meaning when a head of government is wanted by an international tribunal. As recent days demonstrated, even the perception of risk can bend a route—see the scrutiny on a leader’s altered flight path to evade ICC.
Chile’s leader linked his case to a broader shift across Latin America and beyond. Brazil’s foreign ministry has moved to intervene in South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice, a signal that the genocide file has broken out of activist circles and into the mainstream of statecraft. The momentum is visible in court dockets as well as cabinet rooms—Brazil joins the ICJ genocide case, and within days Brasília escalated with measures that sanctioned Israel over Gaza. Chile has not stood apart from that tide; rather, it has helped define it.
Inside the UN system, momentum has been driven by investigators and jurists who have documented mass killing, starvation as warfare, and forced displacement. Their conclusions, dismissed by Israeli officials as biased or unfounded, nevertheless sit on the desks of foreign ministers and national security advisers who must decide whether to execute warrants, restrict weapons exports, or adjust economic ties. The human ledger behind those binders is visible in our field reports, including UN warnings about terrorizing tactics amid repeated strikes on dense neighborhoods.
Opponents of the Chilean position argue that genocide is a term of art that requires judicial determination, and that public officials should avoid pronouncing verdicts from the UN rostrum. They say Israel is fighting a designated terrorist organization and that its campaign, however devastating, is bounded by the laws of war rather than defined by them as genocide. They point to the October 7 attack and the continued holding of hostages. They insist that commissions and prosecutors have stretched their mandates and that the entire edifice risks collapse if it is used to target a close Western ally.
The reply from Chile’s president is to move the dispute to the venue designed to resolve it. If the world wants to de-escalate, it must strengthen law, not skirt it. A courtroom disciplines rhetoric and narrows claims to evidence. That is not naïveté; it is an appeal to the only tradition that can replace improvised immunity with something like order. In the absence of enforcement, the same cycles repeat: impunity for those who can marshal powerful patrons and punishment for those who cannot. That is why courtroom momentum—such as judges who rejected Netanyahu’s ICC appeal—matters beyond symbolism.
In the margins of the UN week, the political map shifted further. European governments that long maintained close alignment with Washington have begun to diverge on Palestinian recognition and on cooperation with the court. The arithmetic is not uniform, but the drift is unmistakable, narrowing the space for leaders to keep the legal track abstract. That divergence was chronicled inside the hall as well as outside it, where a recognition wave for Palestine made the diplomatic isolation of old positions harder to conceal.
Chile’s position is grounded in national experience. A country that has navigated dictatorship and truth commissions carries a particular sensitivity to the machinery of accountability. Palestinian Chileans, who have helped shape business, sports, and culture for more than a century, have pressed successive governments to align policy with humanitarian law. Their influence is visible in parliamentary debates over product labeling and in calls to suspend defense relationships. It is also visible in the streets, where marches for Gaza have filled plazas from Santiago to Valparaíso.
Even if an arrest warrant is never executed, the process already constrains behavior. Military lawyers in Jerusalem, Washington, and Brussels factor investigations into targeting and messaging. Humanitarian access negotiations proceed with one eye on the docket. Leaders consult legal teams before boarding flights and adjust itineraries to avoid jurisdictions they fear could detain them. None of this delivers justice to families that have buried children or to those living under siege. It does, however, raise the cost of the worst abuses in real time, which is the place where deterrence either exists or does not.
For critics of Chile, the risk is that language outruns law and that a human rights vocabulary becomes a cudgel rather than a compass. For Mr. Boric, the risk of silence is greater. The UN has long been accused of teaching the world to mistake process for result. In Gaza, the cost of that mistake is counted in tens of thousands of civilian dead, a destroyed health system, and a famine that aid groups say is engineered by access restrictions. The point of invoking courts is not to produce words on paper. It is to force a choice: either the treaties mean what they say or they do not. That choice reverberates into arguments about war crimes and destabilization across the region.
That choice is not only for Europe or North America. It is for every state that has ratified the treaties, that funds the UN system, that sits on human rights councils, or that relies on international law to protect its own sovereignty. The members of that group include Chile and its Latin American neighbors, African states that have long complained of double standards, and Asian governments that have found themselves whiplashed by Western lectures and Western exceptions. The Gaza file has become the place where credibility is measured. Ankara’s posture—spelled out when its leader confronted the UN on Gaza—illustrates how the center of gravity has shifted beyond the traditional Euro-Atlantic frame.
On the ground, the war continues to carve deeper scars. Cities and camps have been turned into rubble and ash. Families have been displaced multiple times. Journalists, doctors, and aid workers appear repeatedly on casualty lists. Each strike accelerates the humanitarian collapse and pushes the political horizon further away. In such conditions, calls for accountability can sound like a luxury. Chile’s answer is that they are a necessity because they change incentives now, not later. Without enforcement, every ceasefire is a pause, not a path.
At home, Mr. Boric’s stance commands broad support. Business leaders warn about trade friction and the fragility of supply chains, including those linked to Chile’s strategic minerals. Yet the moral and legal baseline remains firm, giving the government latitude to go further than governments constrained by coalition arithmetic. In practical terms that has meant aligning procurement and training with humanitarian law, pressing for more explicit legal language in multilateral statements, and endorsing measures that would once have been treated as radical, such as targeted sanctions on officials named in investigative reports.
Within the UN complex, there was a sense that a line had been crossed from description to prescription. It is one thing to denounce massacre and starvation. It is another to name courts and demand cooperation. That shift clarifies responsibilities. It tells states to review their mutual legal assistance frameworks, to protect investigators and witnesses, and to plan for the day when an official arrives at an airport with a valid warrant attached to his name. It trades the comfort of ambiguous language for the discomfort of specific obligations.
Chile did not isolate itself with this posture. It situated itself in a growing coalition that includes European governments reconsidering their posture, Latin American states filing or supporting legal actions, and civil society networks that have organized documentation at a scale unmatched in other wars. In that coalition, Chile’s role is distinctive because it blends domestic memory, diaspora politics, and a leader who has made a habit of framing foreign policy around enforceable norms. The UN stage gave him the audience he needed.
None of this answers the hardest questions about the day after. A durable ceasefire, the release of all hostages and detainees, a reconstruction mechanism that is not a fig leaf for indefinite occupation, and a political framework that treats Palestinian self-determination as a right rather than a bargaining chip remain elusive. Yet an accountability track does not compete with those aims. It supports them. It offers a language that can be shared by adversaries and allies alike, a language that replaces retribution with judgment and impunity with record.
The intervention from Santiago asked governments to choose law over convenience. It asked them to prefer the discipline of a courtroom to the catharsis of a speech. It did not promise resolution. It promised a standard. In a crisis defined by the erosion of meaning, that is not nothing. It is a beginning.
According to Reuters, UN inquiry that found genocide in Gaza alongside the UN Commission of Inquiry press release; ICC judges rejecting Israel’s request to withdraw Netanyahu’s warrant and guidance on arrest cooperation under the Rome Statute; states’ duty to “ensure respect” for IHL in Common Article 1 and prevention and punishment obligations under the Genocide Convention; Brazil’s move to join the ICJ genocide case; Chile’s past steps to recall its ambassador and withdraw military attachés; Slovenia’s travel ban on Netanyahu; and video confirmation of Mr. Boric’s UNGA appeal via the UN audiovisual archive and major broadcasters.
