THE WORLD ON THE EDGE

SPECIAL EDITION | MARCH 2026

THE WORLD ON THE EDGE

The Strait of Hormuz Crisis, the Collapse of Multilateral Order,

and the Forgotten Peoples of a Fractured Middle East

An EIU-style Special Report

Published: 16 March 2026

Executive Summary

On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iran under Operation Epic Fury, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and triggering the most consequential disruption to global energy markets in recorded history. Within 72 hours, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had declared the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow channel through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s daily oil supply transits — effectively closed to all vessels, with a selective re-opening granted to nations deemed non-hostile. As of this report’s publication date, tanker traffic through the waterway stands at near zero for most commercial operators, oil prices have eclipsed $100 per barrel, and the Russian Federation has emerged as an unintended but deliberate beneficiary.

This special edition of The Economist Intelligence Unit-style Report argues that the current crisis cannot be understood in isolation. It is the culmination of years of unresolved conflicts: a ceasefire in Gaza that Israel has not respected, a famine consuming Sudan, a food and water emergency approaching in Afghanistan, and a Palestinian population that has been systematically forgotten by the international community. The thread connecting all these crises runs through the decisions and posture of one man: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — a figure now subject to arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court (ICC), proceedings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and whom Pakistan’s government has formally branded a terrorist. If INTERPOL’s mandate were not explicitly insulated from political use, the case for an INTERPOL Red Notice against Netanyahu would be, by any dispassionate legal measure, overwhelming.

We do not write these words lightly, nor as polemic. We write them as analysis — and as a call for calm. The world is in urgent, desperate need of diplomacy.

I. The Strait of Hormuz: A Chokepoint Becomes a Weapon

Anatomy of the Crisis

The Strait of Hormuz is a twenty-one-mile-wide channel separating the southern coast of Iran from the Sultanate of Oman, linking the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and, ultimately, to the open ocean. Its strategic importance is almost impossible to overstate. In 2023, some 20.9 million barrels of oil passed through it every day — roughly 20 percent of global petroleum liquids consumption, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Liquefied natural gas flows are equally staggering, with approximately 80 million tonnes transiting annually. Qatar, the world’s largest LNG exporter, depends almost entirely on this waterway to reach global markets.

Following the U.S.-Israeli strikes of 28 February 2026, a senior IRGC adviser declared in stark and visceral terms that the strait was closed, threatening that any vessel attempting to cross would be set ablaze. Within 48 hours, that was not merely rhetoric: Iranian forces struck neutral merchant vessels, and over 150 tankers anchored just outside the strait’s approaches rather than risk annihilation. Major shipping lines — Maersk, MSC, Hapag-Lloyd, and CMA CGM — suspended all Hormuz transits indefinitely. War risk insurance for the corridor was cancelled from 5 March, making transit commercially impossible for most operators even if they had been willing to face the physical danger.

The economic consequences were near-immediate. Oil prices surged from approximately $65 per barrel before the strikes to above $105 per barrel within days — a rise of more than 40 percent in under two weeks. QatarEnergy declared force majeure on all LNG shipments on 4 March, after Iranian strikes damaged the Ras Laffan facility. That single event removed an estimated 20 percent of global LNG supply from the market overnight.

“The Strait of Hormuz crisis reveals a fundamental weakness in the law of the sea: transit passage is strongly protected in doctrine but difficult to enforce in practice when a coastal state is willing to violate the rules.” — Prof. Mark P. Nevitt, Emory University School of Law

The Tanker War playbook of 1987–88 — convoy escort, reflagging, a large frigate fleet — is not readily replicable in 2026. The U.S. Navy, for all its might, cannot indefinitely escort dozens of commercial vessels simultaneously while simultaneously conducting air operations against Iran. Mine countermeasure operations, if Iran has indeed mined portions of the waterway as has been reported, could require weeks of painstaking multinational effort.

The Selective Reopening: A Diplomatic Geography Lesson

By 5 March, the IRGC announced a partial recalibration of its blockade posture: the strait would remain closed to vessels from the United States, Israel, and their declared allies, but open to those from nations deemed non-hostile. This distinction has created a new diplomatic geography of maritime access, one defined not by international law but by Iran’s assessment of geopolitical allegiance.

India secured passage for two LNG carriers on 8 March, following diplomatic engagement by Tehran with New Delhi. A Pakistani-flagged Aframax tanker, the Karachi — operated by Pakistan’s National Shipping Corporation — completed its transit by early March. China entered negotiations for the safe passage of crude oil and LNG carriers, given that Beijing receives approximately 45 percent of its oil through this corridor. Turkey received Iranian authorisation for a vessel transit on 13 March, following direct government-to-government communication. The message from Tehran is deliberate and highly legible: we will not close the world’s jugular to allies, neutrals, or those willing to engage diplomatically. We will close it to those who attacked us.

This selective reopening, while pragmatic, places enormous strain on the international trading system. A waterway that was previously governed by the principle of transit passage under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) — a customary international norm under which all vessels, including warships, have the right of passage — has been unilaterally subordinated to Iran’s war aims. The precedent this sets for other choke points globally is, in the long term, as dangerous as the immediate energy disruption.

II. The Diplomatic Architecture: What Must Be Done

The crisis demands urgent, sustained, and coordinated diplomatic engagement across every axis of international relations. No single power — not the United States, not China, not the European Union — can resolve this alone. What follows is an assessment of the diplomatic imperatives facing each of the principal actors.

American Diplomacy: Owning the Consequences

The United States initiated this conflict. Operation Epic Fury was executed without prior consultation with Washington’s European allies, its Asian partners, or the broader coalition of nations that depend on Middle Eastern energy. That unilateralism has come at a cost measured not just in barrels of oil but in diplomatic capital that will take years to rebuild.

President Trump’s demand that allied nations join a naval coalition to secure the Strait of Hormuz has met with a notably muted response. A Middle East security analyst told Al Jazeera that it was unlikely U.S. allies would get involved, since most of them opposed the war to begin with and now feel little obligation to pay for its consequences. Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been diplomatically careful, acknowledging that reopening the Strait is not a simple task while pledging to work through collective allied frameworks. The European Council presidency, for its part, has called on all parties to exercise maximum restraint and return to the negotiating table, noting tartly that unilateralism can never be the path forward.

American diplomacy must now do several things simultaneously: de-escalate military tensions with Iran while maintaining deterrence; engage bilaterally and multilaterally to create conditions for renewed nuclear negotiations; and reassure allies — particularly in Europe and Asia — that Washington understands the economic damage it has unleashed. The suggestion, reported in multiple outlets, that the Trump administration is considering sanctions relief on Russia to help stabilise energy markets represents a deeply counterproductive response to a crisis of its own making. The political logic may be expedient; the strategic logic is almost nonexistent.

Most urgently, American diplomats must stop treating the re-opening of the Strait as purely a military problem. It is, at root, a political problem — and its solution will be political.

European Diplomacy: Finding a Collective Voice

Europe has both the most to lose from a prolonged Hormuz closure and the most credibility to bring to its resolution. Natural gas prices in Europe surged 63 percent in the week following the strikes — a figure that carries existential implications for European industrial competitiveness and household energy bills during the coming spring and summer. The EU’s Operation Aspides, originally constituted in 2024 to protect Red Sea shipping against Houthi attacks, has been discussed as a potential vehicle for expanding into Hormuz corridor protection; as of this writing, consensus among member states remains elusive.

European diplomats occupy a position of unique utility. Unlike Washington, European capitals — Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Rome, and Madrid — retain functional diplomatic channels with Tehran. Iran’s foreign minister has indicated that the Islamic Republic has been approached by numerous countries seeking safe passage, and that it remains open to dialogue with nations not party to the aggression. Europe qualifies. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has raised the idea of replicating the Black Sea Grain Initiative — the UN-brokered mechanism that allowed Ukrainian grain exports to resume during the Ukraine war — as a model for restoring Hormuz shipping. That is precisely the kind of creative multilateral problem-solving that the moment demands.

European diplomacy must also confront uncomfortable internal debates. Some European LNG infrastructure operators have already been quietly exploring whether increased purchases of Russian LNG — which currently faces no EU sanctions — could bridge the supply gap. That avenue, while commercially understandable in the short term, carries severe longer-term costs, as it rewards Russian geopolitical opportunism and weakens the sanctions architecture that the EU has spent four years constructing.

Asian Diplomacy: The Quiet Leverage

China, India, Japan, and South Korea collectively account for the overwhelming majority of oil transiting the Strait of Hormuz — over 80 percent of the corridor’s outbound energy flows head to Asian markets. This gives Asian nations unique leverage with Tehran, and with it, an unusually weighty diplomatic responsibility.

China’s role is particularly pivotal. Beijing receives 45 percent of its oil through the Strait and has been pressing Iran — quietly but firmly — to allow commercial vessels to pass. Beijing has friendly relations with Tehran and simultaneously maintains extensive commercial relationships with Gulf Arab states and significant investments in the global energy infrastructure that the current crisis is destroying. Chinese officials have repeatedly called on all parties to immediately halt military operations and avoid further escalation, characterising the disruption to the global economy as unacceptable.

India’s position deserves particular attention. New Delhi has managed to secure passage for its own vessels, leveraging its long-standing and carefully nurtured relationship with Tehran. India is simultaneously the world’s third-largest oil importer and has historically maintained cordial ties with Iran while navigating U.S. sanctions pressure. India’s ability to serve as a back-channel interlocutor — between Tehran and Washington, between the Gulf states and the broader international community — should not be underestimated. New Delhi has strategic interest in de-escalation that transcends energy supply: any prolonged regional conflict risks spillover into the Indian Ocean, where India’s own maritime interests are paramount.

Japan and South Korea, both almost entirely dependent on Gulf energy imports, have been largely quiet during the initial days of the crisis. Both have strong reasons to be louder. Tokyo’s and Seoul’s combined energy dependency on the Strait is existential. Their diplomatic engagement with Tehran — respectful, trade-oriented, historically non-threatening — gives them access that Washington currently lacks. Both capitals should be deploying their full diplomatic weight toward a negotiated resolution.

Arab Diplomacy: The Neighbourhood in Flames

The Arab states of the Gulf Cooperation Council — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain — find themselves in an extraordinarily precarious position. Iranian missile and drone attacks have struck targets in Dubai and Saudi Arabia. Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG facilities have been damaged. Yet these same states have profound interests in de-escalation: their own oil exports are bottled up behind Iran’s blockade, their economies are deeply integrated with global trade, and they have no appetite for becoming collateral casualties in a war that they did not choose.

Saudi Arabia has accelerated oil diversion through its East-West Crude Oil Pipeline, routing crude to the Red Sea port of Yanbu. The UAE has similarly increased throughput via the Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline to the port of Fujairah on the Arabian Sea. These are sensible contingency measures, but their combined capacity is insufficient to replace the volume lost through Hormuz — leaving a deficit of approximately 12 million barrels per day against global demand.

Arab diplomatic engagement must take two forms: first, direct communication with Tehran to signal that the Gulf states are not party to the U.S.-Israeli operation and have no hostile intent; and second, coordinated engagement with Washington to impress upon the American administration that its allies in the region require a swift de-escalatory pathway. The Arab world’s historically complex relationship with Iran need not prevent pragmatic diplomacy in a moment of shared crisis.

Iranian Diplomacy: The Logic of Survival

Iranian diplomacy in this moment operates under existential pressure. The killing of Supreme Leader Khamenei in an American-Israeli strike represents an act of violence against a sovereign state’s leadership that has no modern precedent in its brazenness. Iran’s decision to close the Strait — a move it has threatened for decades but never previously executed at scale — is, from Tehran’s perspective, the only credible deterrent available to a state whose supreme leader has been assassinated and whose military installations have been comprehensively attacked.

And yet Iranian diplomacy, even under this pressure, has shown notable discrimination. The selective reopening of the Strait to non-hostile vessels demonstrates that Tehran understands the international consequences of an absolute blockade and is calibrating its response accordingly. Iran has engaged Indian, Turkish, Chinese, and Pakistani interlocutors. Its foreign minister has appeared on international television, signalling a willingness to communicate. These are the gestures of a state that, however aggrieved and however militarily weakened, retains diplomatic agency.

The international community — and specifically those nations with credible channels to Tehran — must engage Iran on a framework that addresses its core security concerns: a cessation of U.S.-Israeli military operations, a pathway toward a new nuclear agreement, and international recognition of its sovereign rights. Without addressing Iran’s legitimate security grievances, no durable resolution to the Hormuz crisis is achievable.

III. Russia: The Uninvited Winner

While the world’s diplomats scramble to contain the consequences of the Hormuz crisis, one capital is conspicuously pleased. Moscow has emerged as perhaps the clearest immediate beneficiary of a conflict it did not initiate, did not desire to be seen as supporting, and which has nonetheless delivered it a financial windfall of historic dimensions.

The arithmetic is straightforward. Russia’s 2026 federal budget was constructed on an assumed Urals crude price of $59 per barrel. Before the strikes on Iran, analysts at SberCIB estimated that Russia’s budget deficit could reach as high as 7.3 trillion roubles, roughly $95 billion, in a low-price environment. The disruption to Hormuz supply has driven oil prices above $100 per barrel, with Brent crude at $105.70 per barrel as of 10 March. Even at sustained prices of $70 to $90 per barrel, Russia’s fiscal position transforms dramatically. Since the commencement of hostilities, Russia has accumulated nearly $7 billion in fossil fuel revenues, according to analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

The gain is, as one analyst described it, a double windfall. Russia benefits both from higher global benchmark prices and from the practical relaxation of sanctions enforcement: Asian buyers who had been hesitant to purchase Russian crude due to American tariff pressure have returned aggressively to the market. India, which had reduced Russian crude imports, has resumed purchases following a 30-day U.S. tariff waiver issued by Treasury Secretary Bessent. Russian crude held on tankers fell from 132.9 million barrels to 118.3 million barrels in the week following the crisis, suggesting rapid absorption by buyers.

“So far, there is only one winner in this war — Russia. It steadily undermines Ukraine’s position by flouting international law. It gains new resources to finance its war against Ukraine as energy prices rise.” — António Costa, President of the European Council

Vladimir Putin’s comment to his assembled ministers — that it was important for Russian energy companies to make use of the current moment — was not the remark of a man feigning reluctance. Pro-Kremlin media ran headlines predicting oil prices above $150 per barrel. The Russian president, having spoken with Donald Trump in early March (their first conversation since December), appears to have received additional gestures of accommodation, including the suggestion that sanctions on unnamed countries might be eased to stabilise energy markets.

The strategic dimensions of Russia’s windfall extend beyond oil revenues. European Council President Costa identified three compounding advantages: Russia gains energy revenues; it benefits from the diversion of Western military capabilities away from Ukraine; and it profits from the reduced international attention devoted to the Ukrainian front. Put another way: the war in Iran has gifted Moscow a simultaneous revenue boost, a military breathing space, and a diplomatic distraction. Putin told his ministers the timing could not be more opportune.

The proper response from the international community is not to reward this opportunism with sanctions relief. The International Energy Agency’s decision to release 400 million barrels of emergency reserves represents a more calibrated tool for moderating price spikes without strengthening the Kremlin’s hand. Europe, in particular, must resist the temptation to bridge its LNG gap by increasing purchases of Russian energy — a short-term fix that would haemorrhage both strategic coherence and moral authority.

IV. The Forgotten: Palestine, Sudan, and Afghanistan

The Palestinian People and the Ceasefire That Wasn’t

The world’s attention has been redirected — as it so often is — to the great-power dimensions of the Middle East crisis: oil prices, naval strategy, nuclear deterrence. In that reorientation, the people of the Palestinian Territories have once again become invisible to the international discourse that should be most urgently focused on them.

A ceasefire in Gaza came into effect in October 2025, brokered with considerable American and Qatari effort. It was fragile from its first hours. The Norwegian Refugee Council, in its review of crises to watch in 2026, noted that despite the ceasefire, civilians remained in urgent need of food, medicine, shelter, clean water, and other essential items. More than 70,000 Palestinians had been killed by that point, and 170,000 injured, over two years of hostilities. Approximately 1.9 million people — close to 90 percent of Gaza’s population — had been forcibly displaced, often multiple times.

Since the ceasefire’s nominal commencement, Israeli strikes have continued to kill Palestinians with regularity. The actress Saja Kilani, speaking at the 2026 Academy Awards in Los Angeles on 15 March — the night of this report’s finalisation — was unequivocal: there is no ceasefire right now. There are bombings happening to this day. Her words were spoken from the red carpet at the Dolby Theatre, where she arrived representing the film The Voice of Hind Rajab — a film documenting the killing of a five-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza — which had been nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. One of the film’s lead actors, Motaz Malhees, was denied a visa to attend the ceremony by the Trump administration, which has imposed travel restrictions on holders of Palestinian Authority documents.

The famine that gripped Gaza’s northern governorate in 2025 — the first confirmed famine in the occupied territory in modern history — was, according to UN agencies and the ICC’s own analysis, substantially attributable to deliberate Israeli restrictions on humanitarian aid. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification confirmed famine conditions in Gaza’s northern areas, with an estimated 925,000 Gazans in emergency acute food insecurity by May 2025, and a further 244,000 in catastrophic conditions. These are not statistics. They are human beings, starved.

The ceasefire, such as it is, has not been accompanied by the reconstruction of Gaza’s devastated infrastructure, the restoration of sufficient humanitarian corridors, or any credible political process toward Palestinian statehood. The Palestinian population of the West Bank continues to face systematic settler violence and land appropriation under conditions that the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has described as steadily deteriorating.

What the world must confront — honestly, uncomfortably — is that the Palestinian people have been forgotten not once but repeatedly, by the same international community that produced the Oslo Accords, the Roadmap for Peace, the Abraham Accords, and every other framework that has addressed Palestinian interests as a peripheral concern rather than a central imperative. The current conflagration in Iran, however catastrophic its immediate effects, cannot be allowed to extinguish the international obligation to the people of Palestine.

Sudan: The World’s Most Overlooked Famine

While Gaza has received, at least intermittently, the world’s attention, Sudan has been consumed by a famine of proportions that most international audiences remain largely unaware of. The figures are staggering: as of September 2025, an estimated 21.2 million people — 45 percent of Sudan’s population — faced high levels of acute food insecurity. Of these, 375,000 were in IPC Phase 5, the classification for catastrophic conditions, while 6.3 million were in emergency status.

The IPC’s Famine Review Committee confirmed, with what the organisation described as reasonable evidence, that famine conditions — the most severe classification — existed in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, and Kadugli, the capital of South Kordofan. Both cities have been besieged by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group that has been fighting the Sudanese Armed Forces since April 2023. Dilling, another besieged town, is understood to face equivalent conditions, though the absence of reliable data has prevented formal classification.

UNICEF’s Director of Emergency Operations described the situation with shattering clarity: the deadly combination of hunger, disease, and displacement is placing millions of children at risk. The Sudan Doctors Union estimated in January 2025 that 522,000 children had died due to malnutrition since the conflict began. Eighty percent of health facilities in conflict-affected areas are damaged or out of service. Cholera, measles, and diarrhoea are spreading through displacement camps without access to safe water or sanitation.

Researchers at Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, reporting in March 2026, identified 41 farming communities in North Darfur that were systematically attacked between March and June 2024 — their agriculture destroyed, their livestock enclosures dismantled, their residents driven out — in what legal experts cited in The Guardian characterised as strong evidence that the RSF had used starvation as a deliberate method of warfare. This is a war crime.

Yet the world’s humanitarian funding for Sudan remains catastrophically insufficient. Barely 40 percent of the funding required to address the crisis was secured in 2025. The scaling back of U.S. foreign assistance under the current administration — the World Food Programme reported that 80 percent of emergency food kitchens had shut down following American aid cuts — has compounded a catastrophe already defined by abandonment. More than half of the displaced people suffering from hunger in Sudan receive no aid at all.

Sudan is the country with the most territories in active famine on the planet. It is also among the least reported crises in international media. The failure of international attention is not merely a communications failure: it is a moral failure, and it is costing lives daily.

Afghanistan: The Coming Spring and Summer of Thirst

Afghanistan enters the spring and summer of 2026 facing a compounding humanitarian emergency that has been building for years and has received almost no meaningful international response. Four years after the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, the country faces mounting challenges from every direction simultaneously: economic collapse, mass deportations from both Iran and Pakistan that are returning Afghans to a country without jobs or services, the impacts of climate change and seismic activity, and the systematic exclusion of women and girls from education, employment, and public life.

The Norwegian Refugee Council’s 2026 crisis assessment noted with particular concern that international funding and attention for Afghanistan have shrunk dramatically, leaving many Afghans without access to the most basic services. Food insecurity is severe and structural. The UN’s FAO and WFP Hunger Hotspots report, published in November 2025, identified Afghanistan as a country of very high concern, with acute food insecurity expected to worsen significantly through May 2026. Drought conditions are projected to intensify across key agricultural regions during the spring and summer, reducing both the availability and quality of water for drinking, agriculture, and livestock.

The particular cruelty of Afghanistan’s situation is that it is both acutely foreseeable and apparently beyond the world’s current attention span. The country is now governed by a regime that the international community refuses to recognise, making sustained humanitarian coordination enormously difficult. UN agencies and NGOs operate under severe access constraints. The economic isolation imposed on Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover has impoverished a population that played no role in bringing the Taliban to power.

As the Iran crisis dominates global headlines and absorbs diplomatic energy, Afghanistan’s approaching food and water crisis risks passing unnoticed until it has reached catastrophic scale. The international community must not allow a second consecutive year of neglect to seal Afghanistan’s humanitarian fate.

V. Netanyahu, International Law, and the Accountability Deficit

The ICC Arrest Warrants

On 21 November 2024, the International Criminal Court’s Pre-Trial Chamber I — comprising judges from Benin, France, and Slovenia — voted unanimously to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. The decision was based on findings that there were reasonable grounds to believe both men bore criminal responsibility for the war crime of using starvation as a method of warfare; the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts; and the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population.

The Chamber’s reasoning was specific and detailed. It attributed to Netanyahu and Gallant the deliberate denial to Gaza’s residents of access to food, water, medication, medical equipment, and medical treatment, with the intent to cause starvation, suffering, and death. It found that these actions could constitute the crime of persecution under international law. Crucially, the Chamber noted its concern that the alleged crimes may still be ongoing — a living indictment, not merely a historical verdict.

All 125 ICC member states — including France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the overwhelming majority of the European Union — are legally required under the Rome Statute to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant if they enter their territory. In practice, no European state has been willing to do so. Netanyahu’s aircraft has taken circuitous flight routes to avoid the airspace of ICC state parties. When he attended the 80th anniversary commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz in Poland in early 2025, the Polish government’s internal debate about whether to comply with its legal obligations — ultimately resolved in favour of offering guarantees of safe passage — illustrated the gap between international legal obligation and political will.

The ICJ Proceedings

Concurrently, Israel faces proceedings before the International Court of Justice in a genocide case initiated by South Africa. Israel’s legal team has managed to delay the substantive evidence-gathering phase multiple times, most recently securing a postponement to March 2026. The Israeli government has kept much of its legal defence classified, and its forthcoming brief is expected to remain secret for at least another year.

The ICJ case rests on the Genocide Convention and carries an exceptionally high burden of proof — one that Israel’s legal advisers assess as manageable, provided the court maintains the traditional high standard from Yugoslavian-era precedents. Nonetheless, the very existence of this case represents an unprecedented indictment of Israeli state conduct in the international arena. A UN Commission of Inquiry has recommended that genocide charges be added to the ICC proceedings after finding Israel guilty of multiple violations of the 1948 Genocide Convention.

Pakistan’s Characterisation and the INTERPOL Question

Pakistan’s government has been among the most forthright in the world in characterising Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct. Pakistani officials have formally referred to Netanyahu as a terrorist — language that carries both legal and political significance in a country that has itself been the subject of Western pressure over its counterterrorism posture. The characterisation reflects a broader sentiment across the Global South: that a double standard is at work in international justice, where the leaders of Western-aligned states escape accountability that would be swiftly applied to leaders of adversary nations.

The question of an INTERPOL Red Notice deserves direct analytical treatment, even if its answer must be hedged with legal precision. INTERPOL’s rules expressly prohibit its member states from using the organisation’s tools for political, military, religious, or racial persecution. Article 3 of INTERPOL’s constitution states that it is strictly forbidden for the organisation to undertake any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious, or racial character. This provision exists precisely to prevent the weaponisation of international policing mechanisms by powerful states against their adversaries.

As a result, an INTERPOL Red Notice against Netanyahu — regardless of the ICC warrants that are nominally its precondition — is almost certainly blocked by Article 3, precisely because the ICC proceedings themselves are characterised by Israel and its allies as politically motivated. INTERPOL, acutely sensitive to accusations that it is being used as a tool of political pressure in either direction, would in all probability decline to issue such a notice.

But the analytical point that follows is important: if INTERPOL’s rules did not exist for this very purpose — if its mandate were purely the mechanical execution of international judicial orders — then the ICC’s arrest warrants would constitute, by any standard legal reading, a sufficient basis for a Red Notice. A sitting head of government subject to unanimous, internationally valid arrest warrants from the world’s foremost criminal tribunal, for crimes including starvation as a method of warfare, with charges of crimes against humanity affirmed by three judges of different nationalities — these are not the circumstances of a frivolous or politically motivated prosecution. They are, by every sober legal measure, exactly what the ICC and its enforcement mechanisms were designed to address.

The figure of over 75,000 confirmed Palestinian deaths — documented by Gaza’s Health Ministry and corroborated by international agencies — represents a body count that, in any other context and involving any other state, would be the subject of urgent international criminal enforcement. Broader estimates, accounting for deaths from disease and starvation that official counts do not capture, are considerably higher, with some methodologies projecting cumulative mortality approaching several hundred thousand. Even the most conservative published figures situate the Gaza conflict among the deadliest episodes of urban warfare in recent decades.

This is not anti-Israeli sentiment. It is a statement of fact about the operation of international law. The accountability deficit — the gap between legal obligation and political will — is itself a driver of ongoing instability. When powerful states and their leaders can act with impunity, the legitimacy of the international legal order is corroded for everyone.

The Cultural Moment: Oscars and the Conscience of a Generation

On 15 March 2026 — the evening before this report’s publication — the 98th Academy Awards were held at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. Spanish actor Javier Bardem, presenting the award for Best International Feature Film alongside actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas, delivered six words that became among the most discussed of the evening: No to war, and free Palestine.

Bardem wore two pins: one reading No a la guerra — the same phrase he used at the 2003 Academy Awards to protest the invasion of Iraq — and another expressing solidarity with Palestine. Speaking to journalists, he connected the symbolism explicitly to the current moment, describing the war in Iran as another illegal war and condemning what he called the radicalisation of the region by the actions of Trump and Netanyahu. He also referenced the International Association of Genocide Scholars’ formal declaration regarding Gaza, and called for a commercial and diplomatic blockade and sanctions on Israel.

The category’s nominees included The Voice of Hind Rajab, a Tunisian-produced film about the killing of a five-year-old Palestinian girl by Israeli forces in Gaza in 2024. The film’s lead actor, Palestinian Motaz Malhees, had been prevented from attending the ceremony by the Trump administration’s restrictions on Palestinian Authority travel documents. His absence — the face of Palestinian civilian suffering, barred by executive order from a red carpet in Los Angeles — was its own statement.

The Oscars, whatever their commercial and cultural complexity, function as a mirror of global moral concern. That the ceremony’s most discussed political moment involved not domestic American politics but a call for peace in the Middle East and the liberation of the Palestinian people reflects something real about the current state of global conscience. British-Indian actress Charithra Chandran, wearing an Artists4Ceasefire pin, reminded reporters that the news cycle moves fast and people move on, but the people in Gaza and the West Bank are still suffering.

They are. And the world must not be permitted to forget them.

VI. A Prayer for Calm: Toward a Framework for De-escalation

This report has covered considerable distance across the most severe constellation of crises the international community has faced in decades. Before concluding with analytical prescriptions, we will say plainly what analysis sometimes forecloses: the world is in desperate need of calm. Leaders must pray — in whatever form that word means to them — for the wisdom to step back from the precipice.

The Middle East has been ablaze, in various configurations, for more years than can be attributed to any single cause or actor. The 1979 Islamic Revolution created the foundational architecture of Iranian-American antagonism. The Gulf Wars of the 1990s and 2003 reshaped the region’s political geography in ways that continue to generate instability. The Arab Spring produced transitions to disorder as often as transitions to democracy. The rise of Islamic State traumatised populations across Iraq, Syria, and beyond. And since October 2023, the war in Gaza has added a catastrophe of civilian suffering to a region already straining under the weight of accumulated grievances.

But the accumulation of grievances does not make the current moment inevitable. Decisions by human beings — particularly by leaders in positions of enormous power — have driven the world to this point. Different decisions by different leaders could change its trajectory.

The EIU identifies the following minimum conditions for a de-escalatory pathway.

First: an immediate cessation of military operations targeting Iran, accompanied by a credible diplomatic framework for addressing Iran’s nuclear programme and security concerns. The strikes of 28 February 2026 did not resolve the nuclear question — they inflamed it. A state that has just had its supreme leader killed in a foreign military operation will not voluntarily relinquish nuclear ambitions; it will redouble them. Only a negotiated framework that addresses Iran’s sovereign security interests can achieve the denuclearisation that Washington claims to want.

Second: the unconditional reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to all commercial traffic, under a multilateral framework that includes Iranian participation, UN oversight, and guarantees of neutral enforcement. The precedent of a state weaponising a global maritime corridor cannot be allowed to stand, but neither can the precedent of extra-judicial military strikes that created the conditions for the closure in the first place.

Third: a genuine, enforced ceasefire in Gaza, accompanied by the restoration of humanitarian access, the release of all hostages and prisoners held by all parties, and the launch of a credible political process toward Palestinian statehood. The October 2025 ceasefire has not been respected. A new framework, with international monitors and binding enforcement mechanisms, must replace it.

Fourth: full international funding for the humanitarian emergencies in Sudan and Afghanistan, insulated from the political calculations that have allowed both crises to deteriorate while attention has been focused elsewhere. Famine does not respect geopolitical priorities. Children dying in Darfur and dying of thirst in Kabul are equally the world’s responsibility.

Fifth: a renewed commitment to the principles of international law, including the ICC’s jurisdiction and the enforceability of its warrants. The selective application of international law — where some leaders are pursued and others are protected by political affiliation — is among the deepest sources of instability in the current order. An international system in which accountability is optional is a system that invites impunity.

VII. Conclusion: The Cost of Forgetting

History will judge this moment by how the world’s leaders — and the world’s citizens — responded to it. The Strait of Hormuz crisis is not primarily an energy crisis. It is a crisis of international governance, of accountability, and of the collective will to prevent suffering. The energy disruption will, in time, be resolved: through diplomacy, through alternative routes, through the slow reopening of a waterway that the world’s economy cannot do without. The deeper questions will not resolve themselves.

The Palestinian people have survived seven decades of dispossession. The people of Sudan are surviving a famine that the world’s wealthiest nations could end if they chose to. The people of Afghanistan are surviving the consequences of a decades-long foreign intervention that left before the work of stability was complete. These are not abstract humanitarian statistics. They are tests of whether the international community’s stated values — sovereignty, human dignity, the laws of war, the rights of children — mean anything at all.

Javier Bardem said it on the world’s most watched stage: No to war. Free Palestine. These words were met with applause, not merely because they were politically convenient, but because they expressed something that a vast portion of humanity feels with visceral intensity. The question is whether that feeling can be translated into the patient, unglamorous, multilateral diplomatic work that de-escalation requires.

Russia is counting on it not being so. Putin has told his ministers to make use of the current moment. The test for the rest of the world — for Washington’s diplomats, for Brussels, for Beijing, for New Delhi, for the Arab capitals, for Tehran itself — is whether they can find a moment of collective humanity in the wreckage that surrounds them.

The Strait of Hormuz is a passage. In its current condition, it is also a metaphor: the world’s ability to conduct normal commerce, to cooperate across political divides, to choose trade over warfare, is blocked. The blockage is not permanent. The question is who has the courage to reopen it — and on what terms.

We close with what we hope is not merely an aspiration but a demand: that the leaders of every nation involved in this crisis — American, European, Asian, Arab, Iranian — find within themselves the moral clarity to recognise that the world cannot sustain indefinite conflict, that the people bearing its costs are overwhelmingly those who never chose it, and that the time for the exercise of statecraft — careful, humble, and genuinely multilateral statecraft — is now.

Pray for calm. And then work for it.

Sources and Methodology

This report draws on reporting and analysis published between February 28 and March 16, 2026, including: Wikipedia’s continuously updated record of the 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis; Al Jazeera’s live diplomatic coverage of Iranian passage permissions; the Congressional Research Service report on the Iran Conflict and the Strait of Hormuz (March 11, 2026); the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air’s February 2026 Monthly Analysis of Russian Fossil Fuel Exports; analysis from The Moscow Times, Newsweek, NBC News, TIME Magazine, and Bloomberg on Russian energy revenues; UN FAO and WFP Hunger Hotspots reporting from November 2025; IPC Sudan classification data (November 2025); UNICEF’s Sudan famine reportage; the Norwegian Refugee Council’s 2026 crisis review; ICC official documentation on the Netanyahu and Gallant arrest warrants (November 2024 and May 2025); the International Court of Justice proceedings; the Jerusalem Post’s reporting on Israeli legal strategy at the ICJ; and multiple outlets covering the 98th Academy Awards on March 15, 2026, including The National News, Outlook India, Screen Daily, and Egyptian Streets.

Statistical figures cited reflect best available estimates at the time of writing. Casualty figures for Gaza are drawn from the Gaza Health Ministry and corroborated by international agencies; broader mortality estimates including indirect deaths are subject to ongoing methodological debate and are noted as such in the text. All analytical assessments are the judgements of the Zack Technology LLC editorial team, which is currently simply just Zaki Qayoumi.

© 2026 Zack Technology LLC. All rights reserved.

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