In 2014, during the Israeli assault on Gaza that killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, Giorgia Meloni, then just a member of the Italian parliament, wrote on social media: “Another massacre of children in Gaza. No cause is fair when it sheds the blood of the innocent.”More than a decade on, that moral clarity is nowhere to be found.As prime minister, Meloni’s remarks on Gaza have become increasingly cautious and equivocal, marked by the kind of “on the one hand, on the other” tone that frustrates many Italians. Her address on the war against Iran last March captured that ambiguity perfectly. She declared that she “neither condemns nor condones” the conflict, a sentence that managed to confuse many while clarifying nothing.So when Italy announced earlier this month that it was suspending the automatic renewal of its defence pact with Israel, many observers hailed it as a turning point: Evidence, perhaps, that Meloni’s government was finally bending under the moral weight of Gaza’s destruction. Some hoped this gesture, however cautious, was a rare nod to the conscience of Italians who have marched for months, demanding an end to the war.Yet it’s impossible to ignore the sequence that prompted the suspension. It did not follow the killing of some 75,000 Palestinians, nor the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, schools and mosques. Meloni only acted after Israeli forces fired warning shots at a convoy of Italian United Nations peacekeepers in Lebanon, a follow-up to a 2024 incid …
