Three Octobers, and a peace that is not yet one

Deux États, ou aucun avenir

Begin where the wound is deepest. On October 7th 2023 Hamas gunmen crossed from Gaza into southern Israel and killed roughly 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and dragged some 250 hostages back across the fence. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, and any honest speech about this conflict must start by saying so without qualification. Nine days from now, Israeli families will mark the third anniversary of that day. They deserve the world's grief, and they deserve a future in which it can never happen again.

What followed was a war that the UN now counts as having killed more than 70,000 Palestinians and reduced most of Gaza to rubble. A ceasefire reached in October 2025, built on President Donald Trump's 20-point plan and endorsed by the Security Council in resolution 2803, stopped the worst of it. The hostages came home. Aid trucks moved. A “Board of Peace”, chaired by Mr Trump, was set up to oversee Gaza's transition, with a US-appointed executive board that includes Tony Blair and Jared Kushner and a Palestinian technocratic committee led by Ali Shaath.

Credit where it is due: the ceasefire saved lives, and Washington's leverage over Israel's government was essential to getting it. But a ceasefire is a pause, not a peace. Phase two—Hamas's disarmament, Israeli withdrawal, an international stabilisation force, and a handover to a reformed Palestinian Authority—was announced in January and then stalled for months. In July the Board of Peace proclaimed a “historic breakthrough” on a roadmap for full implementation; in August Israel's prime minister rejected it. Israeli strikes in Gaza have continued. So has the slow strangulation of the West Bank, where UN figures show 275 Palestinian communities hit by settler attacks so far this year.

What the satellites now show

Yesterday, Sunday, users noticed that Google had quietly refreshed its satellite imagery of Gaza on Google Earth and Google Maps. Google has not said when the new pictures were captured. What they show needs no caption. In Rafah, neighbourhoods that were once dense rows of family homes appear largely scraped flat, replaced by sprawling fields of makeshift shelters. In Gaza City, the area around al-Shifa hospital is barely recognisable from earlier imagery. Khan Younis tells the same story. One Irish MEP's side-by-side of old and new images drew around 2m views within hours; the Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed described the scale as beyond comprehension.

The pictures confirm what the UN's satellite centre, UNOSAT, had already measured. Its assessment of August 12th found that 82% of all structures in the Gaza Strip had been damaged to some degree, and about two-thirds of those damaged had been destroyed outright. As someone who worked in Silicon Valley, I find it striking that the most damning public record of this war may turn out to be a consumer map app. Technology did not stop the destruction. It has made it impossible to deny.

At a side event last Tuesday, hosted by Canada, France, Saudi Arabia and Britain, António Guterres put it plainly: support for two states, he said, “must go beyond words.” He is right, and the reason is arithmetic, not sentiment. There are roughly as many Palestinians as Israeli Jews living between the river and the sea. The alternatives to partition are permanent occupation, which corrodes Israel's democracy and guarantees another October 7th; or a single state in which one people rules another, which the world will never accept; or expulsion, which is a crime. Everything else is a slogan.

What France—and I—would propose

First, lock in the ceasefire by deploying the international stabilisation force with a clear timetable for Israeli withdrawal tied to verified Hamas disarmament. Neither side's obligation should be a hostage to the other's. Second, give the Board of Peace an expiry date and a destination: a handover to a reformed Palestinian Authority, with elections, within a defined period. A transitional authority without an end becomes a trusteeship. Third, freeze settlement expansion and prosecute settler violence; every new outpost is a vote against two states. Fourth, let the Arab states that signed the New York Declaration put money and normalisation on the table—conditional on a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines with agreed swaps, and on iron-clad security guarantees for Israel. Fifth, bring the Palestinian state into the UN as a full member once those conditions are met, with the permanent members that have not yet recognised it doing so.

The warrant in the room

There is one more fact about this General Assembly that the diplomats would rather not discuss. On Thursday, Benjamin Netanyahu flew to New York to address the Assembly. He is the subject of an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court in November 2024, together with his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including the use of starvation as a method of warfare. (The court also issued a warrant for Hamas's military chief, Muhammad Deif, since confirmed dead.) His plane crossed the airspace of Greece, Italy, France and Canada—all four of them parties to the Rome Statute and, in principle, obliged to cooperate with the court.

The court has not backed down. Its deputy prosecutor, Nazhat Shameem Khan, said last week that the case is proceeding and that the prosecution has taken no steps to withdraw the warrants; reports say it has also filed a confidential application concerning Israel's finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich. Israel, which is not a member of the court, rejects its jurisdiction and has two appeals pending. The United States has gone further, sanctioning the court's former chief prosecutor, both deputy prosecutors and nine judges.

Here the Quai d'Orsay-of-one must speak to Paris as bluntly as to anyone else. France's position is that the Rome Statute does not oblige it to stop a state aircraft carrying a suspect from flying over its territory; the UN special rapporteur Ben Saul, among others, argues the opposite. Lawyers can debate overflight. What cannot be debated is consistency. France rightly insists that the ICC warrant against Vladimir Putin, issued in 2023, must be honoured. It cannot then treat another warrant from the same court as an inconvenience. The honest position is simple: France should say clearly that any suspect subject to an ICC warrant who sets foot on French soil will be handed over; it should oppose, with its European partners, American sanctions on the court's judges and staff; and it should let the judges, not governments, decide the questions of immunity and jurisdiction. International justice that applies only to one's adversaries is not justice. It is foreign policy in a gown.

Day 213 of a war with no declared end

Iran : la guerre qui a tout rallumé

Every other Middle Eastern crisis in this essay now runs through Tehran. On February 28th, the United States and Israel launched air strikes against Iran's nuclear and ballistic-missile programmes. The strikes killed the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Iran answered with missiles and drones against Israel, against American bases and against targets across the region, and closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil normally passes. Hezbollah joined in from Lebanon, which is how the war described in the next chapter began. Today is, by one widely used count, day 213.

The human cost has fallen very unevenly. Iranian civilian deaths are estimated at between about 1,700 (the number individually named by the monitoring group HRANA) and more than 3,600 (Iranian official and forensic figures). Iranian strikes killed 24 people in Israel, all of them civilians, according to a Times of Israel tally. Thirteen American service members were confirmed killed by May. And in Lebanon, the war's second front, the toll passed 4,300.

Let me be fair to the case for the war, because many readers will hold it. Iran's regime has called for Israel's destruction for decades, armed and funded Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis, enriched uranium far beyond any civilian need, and restricted the access of UN inspectors. Its own citizens have paid for its repression with their lives. For Israel and for Washington, a regime with that record approaching a bomb was an intolerable risk.

But the Charter is not optional. It allows force in self-defence against an armed attack, or with the Security Council's authorisation; preventive war sits outside both. And even on its own terms, the war has not delivered what was promised. Iran's missile programme, Tehran says, is not up for negotiation. The fate of its highly enriched uranium is still being haggled over. Hormuz remains a weapon. Oil prices have hurt importers everywhere, and nowhere more than in the poor countries on this essay's famine list, which depend on Gulf oil and, in part, Gulf fertiliser.

France and its European partners have signalled a willingness to lift some sanctions under a new nuclear agreement. That offer should be the backbone of a European plan: publish the June memorandum, so that the world knows what is being negotiated; put the IAEA back in charge of verifying the removal or down-blending of Iran's enriched uranium; reopen Hormuz without tolls under a multinational naval arrangement that includes Gulf and Asian importers, not just Western navies; and tie sanctions relief to verification, step by step. And Europe should say, loudly, that a durable deal also requires an end to Iran's executions of protesters and the release of its political prisoners. Iranians, too, deserve a peace that includes them.

A small country, a toll larger than September 11th

Le Liban, notre cousin méditerranéen

France's relationship with Lebanon is a family affair, with all the affection and exasperation that implies. So it should shock Paris—and everyone—that the war that reignited on March 2nd this year has already killed more people than the September 11th attacks. Hezbollah fired on Israel after the killing of Iran's supreme leader at the start of the 2026 Iran war; Israel responded with an air and ground campaign and, in March, announced a “buffer zone” in the south that it still occupies. By September 17th, Lebanon's Ministry of Public Health counted 4,386 dead and 12,407 wounded since March 2nd. Counting from October 2023, the toll is 8,953.

Two US-brokered agreements were signed in June. Neither required Israeli forces to leave southern Lebanon, and the strikes have continued—on hospitals, on ambulances, on villages whose names most of the world will never learn. Lebanon's government has, remarkably, banned military activity by Hezbollah; the Lebanese Armed Forces want to deploy south. The logic of resolution 1701 has never been more achievable: a disarmed south under the Lebanese state, and an Israel that withdraws. What is missing is a sequenced deal with a timetable and a guarantor.

France, which has sat on the ceasefire monitoring mechanism alongside the United States and contributes troops to UNIFIL, should table a clear plan: phased Israeli withdrawal matched, village by village, by Lebanese army deployment and verified Hezbollah disarmament, with UNIFIL and French engineers there to certify each step. A country that has survived civil war, occupation, the port explosion and economic collapse should not now be abandoned to a permanent low-intensity war.

Approaching 1,700 days

Une guerre d'usure au cœur de l'Europe

Today is the 1,677th day since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24th 2022. On October 20th, the count reaches 1,700. For context, the Soviet Union's war against Nazi Germany lasted 1,418 days. The UN's human-rights monitors had verified 70,950 civilian casualties—killed and injured—by the end of July, and they stress that the true figure is higher. In April, short-range drones killed and injured more civilians than in any month since the invasion began. On Friday a Russian strike on Kyiv killed seven people, including a 14-year-old boy; Ukraine's air force said it downed 267 of 295 drones launched that night.

Diplomacy has been fitful. US-mediated trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi in February produced prisoner exchanges but no settlement; an Orthodox Easter truce in April collapsed within days; Washington's attention was then consumed by its war with Iran. In early September, after a six-month gap, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner visited Moscow and Kyiv separately. The Kremlin said afterwards that it would “continue the dialogue” but signalled no retreat from its demand that Ukraine surrender territory it still holds. Kyiv, for its part, has proposed a package built on a ceasefire, a free economic zone and security guarantees involving the EU and NATO. Another round is expected in October.

The European position—France's position—should be unambiguous. Peace yes; capitulation no. A ceasefire along the current line is conceivable as a pause; recognition of annexation is not. Whatever is signed must come with guarantees that make a fourth Russian invasion (after 2008 in Georgia, 2014 and 2022) too costly to attempt: a European reassurance force, sustained arms production, frozen Russian assets put to work for reconstruction, and a clear path to EU membership. Europeans must also stop outsourcing the negotiating table. If Washington's envoys are going to Moscow, Europe's must be in the room.

The famine the world decided not to see

Le Soudan, la plus grande crise humanitaire du monde

If there is a single case that shames the post-war order, it is Sudan. The war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces began on April 15th 2023—1,262 days ago—and has produced the world's largest humanitarian, hunger and displacement crisis. In 2024 the UN-backed IPC system confirmed famine in El Fasher; in 2025 it confirmed famine in both El Fasher and Kadugli, with screening data showing acute-malnutrition rates between 38% and 75% of children in parts of El Fasher. In October 2025 the RSF completed its conquest of El Fasher, amid reports of mass atrocities, and largely emptied the city.

The IPC's latest analysis, published in May, found around 19.5m Sudanese in acute food insecurity: some 14m in “crisis”, more than 5m in “emergency”, and about 135,000 in “catastrophe”, the famine-level phase, across 14 hotspots in Darfur and South Kordofan. Nearly 9m people were displaced inside the country at the end of March. The IPC projects around 4.2m cases of acute malnutrition this year, including more than 800,000 children with the severe, lethal form. And drones are now the weapon of choice: the UN human-rights office counted at least 880 civilians killed by them in the first months of the year alone.

What would an Assembly that “delivers” do? Three things. It would demand, and fund, humanitarian access across front lines—starting with Tawila, Kadugli, Dilling and the displacement camps of North Darfur. It would name and sanction the foreign governments that arm both sides; the Council's sanctions regime, up for renewal this month, is only as good as its enforcement. And it would treat the atrocities in El Fasher as what they are: crimes for the International Criminal Court. France, which has hosted donor conferences for Sudan, should push the Council toward a no-fly arrangement for drones over civilian areas and an arms embargo that covers the whole country, not just Darfur.

Five years on, the forgotten country

Afghanistan : cinq ans de silence

I will speak about Afghanistan in the first person, because for me it is not an abstraction. On August 15th 2021 the Taliban entered Kabul, and the world watched people cling to the undercarriage of departing aircraft. That was five years—1,870 days—ago. The cameras left. The crisis did not.

According to the UN's 2026 Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan, 21.9m people—nearly half of Afghanistan's population, about 45%—require urgent humanitarian assistance this year, including 11.6m children. 3.7m children under five are suffering from acute malnutrition, 942,000 of them with the severe form that kills without treatment. Another 1.2m pregnant and breastfeeding women are acutely malnourished. During the winter lean season 17.4m people faced crisis-level hunger or worse, and 4.7m were in emergency conditions—more than double the previous year.

The causes are layered. Drought grips a dozen provinces. Around 5m Afghans—a tenth of the population—have returned in two years, many forcibly, from Iran and Pakistan, into a country with no jobs to receive them. And the Taliban's decrees against women and girls, barring them from secondary school, university and most work, have hollowed out the very workforce that aid needs: female health workers are often the only way to reach mothers and children.

The diplomatic debate has become sterile: engage the Taliban and legitimise them, or isolate them and punish the people. There is a third way. Fund the humanitarian appeal fully and directly through UN agencies and NGOs; condition any development money, and any step toward recognition, on measurable reopening of girls' schools and women's employment; and keep UNAMA's mandate strong enough to document abuses. Afghanistan was, for two decades, the West's war. It cannot now become nobody's problem.

The war that restarted while nobody was looking

Le Yémen, rechute d'une guerre oubliée

For four years Yemen enjoyed something like a truce. In early September, the Houthis broke it with an offensive on several fronts, driving Saudi-backed government forces out of the port of Mokha and parts of Taiz so quickly that soldiers abandoned their vehicles. UNHCR says more than 130,000 people have fled since the start of the month, over 60% of them from Taiz. Thousands have crossed the Bab el-Mandeb strait by boat to Djibouti.

This is a fresh catastrophe on top of an old one. Even before the offensive, more than 22m Yemenis needed humanitarian assistance and about 18m faced acute food insecurity; 5.2m were already internally displaced. UNICEF screening among the newly displaced found more than one child in four acutely malnourished. And the UN's ability to respond has been crippled: its staff in Houthi-held areas have been detained and its premises occupied, and agencies say they lack safe access to 65–70% of Yemen's children.

The Council should do three things for Yemen this autumn: demand the immediate release of detained UN personnel as a precondition for any engagement with the Houthis; press Saudi Arabia and the Houthis back toward the UN-led roadmap that nearly closed in 2023; and fund the response, which aid groups say is only about a fifth financed. Yemen sits on one of the world's great shipping lanes. Its collapse is not a local problem.

Forty-eight hours to decide

Haïti, sœur francophone

For France, Haiti is not a faraway place. It is a French-speaking nation whose history is bound up with ours—including the debt France imposed after independence, which a French president must one day address honestly. Today, gangs control an estimated 80–90% of Port-au-Prince and have pushed into the Artibonite valley, the country's rice bowl, and into the hills above the capital. In August an attack in Kenscoff killed at least 47 people. The UN recorded more than 3,000 killings in the first half of 2026, and nearly 1.47m Haitians—about one in eight—are displaced. Some 200,000 people were sent back to Haiti from abroad in the first eight months of the year.

The force has never come close to its authorised strength, and funding has lagged. Renewal on paper will not put boots on the ground. Still, the alternative—letting the mandate lapse two months before an election—would be an abdication. The Council should renew for two years as the force requests, and donors, France and Canada first among them, should fund the UN Support Office properly and pay for the Haitian National Police's salaries and training. Security first, yes; but security in service of a transition that Haitians themselves lead.

Minerals, militias and a peace built one protocol at a time

Le Congo, cœur de l'Afrique et de nos smartphones

Every reader of this site carries a piece of eastern Congo in their pocket. The cobalt, coltan and copper in our phones, laptops and gaming rigs come disproportionately from a region where the Rwandan-backed M23 rebellion has held the provincial capitals of Goma and Bukavu since early 2025. Some 5.3m people are displaced in the east; a new Ebola outbreak since May has added a public-health emergency on top of a humanitarian one.

There has been more diplomacy here than anywhere else on this list. The Washington Accords between Congo and Rwanda were signed in December 2025; the Doha Framework between Kinshasa and the M23 in November 2025. The Doha process runs through eight protocols. Progress on the remaining six—covering humanitarian access, restoration of state authority, interim security, returns, economic recovery and justice—is still needed, and negotiators were back in Geneva in August. Critics argue that mineral access for American companies has advanced faster than protection for Congolese civilians. They have a point.

France, a Great Lakes interlocutor for decades, should argue for a simple principle: no mineral deal without a civilian-protection deal. Supply-chain due diligence, already European law in part, should be enforced so that minerals traded from M23-held areas are traceable and taxed for reconstruction, not for rebellion. And Rwanda's troop withdrawal, promised in Washington, must be verified by MONUSCO, not merely announced.

A Council member at war with itself

La Somalie entre sécheresse et djihad

Somalia sits on the Security Council this year—an irony worth dwelling on. Al-Shabaab, now al-Qaeda's largest and wealthiest affiliate, regained territory in central Somalia in 2025, including areas south of Mogadishu. An Islamic State cell in Puntland has become a node for the group's global finances. The government has spent much of its energy on a hotly contested electoral cycle, in which Puntland and Jubaland reject the constitutional changes pushed through by Mogadishu.

Two cliffs loom. The UN's political mission is handing its responsibilities to the Somali state and UN country team by October 2026. And the African Union's mission, AUSSOM, faces a funding crisis, with Washington signalling it will not support UN-assessed financing beyond this year. Withdraw the peacekeepers without a funded successor and al-Shabaab will fill the vacuum. Europe, which already pays much of the bill, should push for predictable UN financing under resolution 2719, and use it to bind Somali elites to an electoral compromise.

A civil war with a new costume

Birmanie : la junte change de costume, pas de nature

Since the coup of February 1st 2021—more than 2,000 days ago—Myanmar has slid into a civil war fought on dozens of fronts by ethnic armies and pro-democracy militias. The junta staged elections in three phases between December 28th 2025 and January 25th 2026, which its own party won in a preordained landslide; General Min Aung Hlaing took the presidency in April. The costume changed. The war did not.

Myanmar is also a global security problem: industrial-scale scam compounds along its borders defraud people from California to Kenya, often using trafficked workers. The international response should refuse to confer legitimacy on the staged polls, extend cross-border aid through local organisations that the junta does not control, and target the jet-fuel supply chains that make airstrikes on villages possible.

The war that isn't called a war

Le Mexique, une guerre sans nom

Mexico's drug war has no UN agenda item, yet since the government declared war on the cartels in 2006 it has produced more than 463,000 homicides and more than 130,000 disappeared people. In February 2026 Mexican forces, with American intelligence help, killed Nemesio Oseguera, “El Mencho”, leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel; his men responded with coordinated arson and road blockades across several states. In Sinaloa, the internal war between cartel factions that began on September 9th 2024 killed 1,657 people last year and has shifted from the state capital into the countryside.

Washington has designated the major cartels as foreign terrorist organisations, struck suspected trafficking boats at sea, and threatened strikes on Mexican soil. President Claudia Sheinbaum has extradited nearly 100 suspects to the United States in response. Unilateral American military action inside Mexico would be a grave error: it would violate the sovereignty of a friendly democracy, and the evidence of two decades is that decapitation strategies splinter cartels and raise the body count. The part of the problem most within America's power is the southbound river of firearms. Stop the guns, and you weaken the gangs. France and the EU can help with judicial cooperation and financial-intelligence work against cartel money, much of which is laundered through global banks.

Famines are cheaper to prevent than to bury

L'aide humanitaire en faillite

Across almost every crisis in this essay, the same pattern recurs: the UN and its partners publish a plan, cost it, and then receive a fraction of the money. Western aid budgets—America's first and most drastically, but also Britain's, Germany's and, yes, France's—have been cut just as needs have peaked. The result is not savings. It is triage: food rations halved, clinics closed, malnourished children turned away.

Afghanistan's entire 2026 appeal is US$1.7bn—small change beside the defence increases European capitals are now announcing. The Assembly should adopt a simple benchmark: no appeal for a famine or famine-risk zone should be allowed to fall below 50% funding by mid-year without the Secretary-General reporting publicly on which donors failed to contribute.

War is a mental-health emergency, too

Santé mentale, soutien émotionnel, musicothérapie

At ZACK TECHNOLOGY we talk about mental health, emotional support and music therapy, and I want to bring those words into the Assembly hall, where they are rarely heard. Every figure in this essay is also a psychological figure. The children of Gaza, Kharkiv, El Fasher, Taiz and Port-au-Prince are growing up with bombardment, hunger and displacement as their normal. The World Health Organization has long estimated that roughly one in five people living in conflict-affected areas has a mental-health condition. Untreated trauma does not stay local; it becomes the recruitment pool, the domestic violence and the lost generation of the next war.

What a French presidency should leave behind

Le multilatéralisme, ou la loi du plus fort

The French presidency of the Security Council ends on Wednesday, the same day the Council votes on Haiti. A month is short; the problems are old. But presidencies set tone, and tone matters when the world's most powerful diplomatic service has chosen to be a dealmaker rather than a steward. France said at the start of September that it would place its month under the banner of “effective multilateralism” and use it to press for Security Council reform, including permanent seats for India and the other G4 countries. Good. Let me be more specific, and put the whole argument into nine points.

The 81st General Assembly also has one more consequential task before it: choosing the next Secretary-General. The Council held its third straw poll on September 18th. Whoever wins inherits an organisation that is broke, bypassed and blamed. The criteria should be simple: someone who will say publicly, to every permanent member including the ones that pay the most, what this essay has tried to say. That the Charter is not a menu. That famine is a choice. That a peace that serves only the powerful is not peace.

Monsieur le Président, Mesdames et Messieurs les délégués: thank you. Merci. تشکر.

— Zaki “Zack” Qayoumi, Sacramento, 28 September 2026 🇺🇳 🇫🇷 🇺🇸 ☕