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Palestinians demand international inquiry after mass grave found in Gaza

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One of the Israeli atrocity stories that local media in Aotearoa New Zealand have missed . . . or ignored. Bodies of Palestinian detainees who were handcuffed, blindfolded have been discovered in plastic bags near a northern Gaza school.

Al Jazeera

Palestinian authorities have demanded an international investigation after a mass grave was found in Gaza with the decomposing bodies of Palestinian detainees who were blindfolded and handcuffed.

At least 30 bodies were found in “black plastic bags” near the Hamad school in northern Gaza, with Palestinian officials accusing Israeli soldiers of killing the civilians “execution-style”.

The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs called for an international investigation last week into what it described as Israeli “massacres”, demanding that a team visit Gaza “to find out the truth and dimensions of the genocide to which our people are exposed”.

Witnesses told Al Jazeera that the deceased were blindfolded, tortured and killed before being placed in the bags.

“As we were cleaning, we came across a pile of rubble inside the schoolyard. We were shocked to find out that the dozens of dead bodies were buried under this pile,” one witness told Al Jazeera.

“The moment we opened the black plastic bags, we found the bodies, already decomposed. They were blindfolded, legs and hands tied,” the witness added.


Bodies of ‘torture victims’ found at school.     Video: Al Jazeera

“The plastic cuffs were used on their hands and legs and cloths straps around their eyes and heads.”

Hamas said human rights organisations should “document” the mass grave.

“This heinous crime and others committed by the neo-Nazis against our Palestinian people will remain a curse that haunts them, and the day will come when they will be held accountable for their brutality and crimes that exceed the most horrific violations known to humanity in our modern era,” the Palestinian armed group said in a statement on Telegram.

Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum, reporting from Rafah in southern Gaza, said the “condition of these bodies ranges from severely decomposed to mere skeletal remains . . . making it hard to identify them”.

“But people still come to the site, searching for closure in this place of tragedy,” he added.

Palestinian human rights lawyer Diana Buttu told Al Jazeera that this incident was “precisely why Israel was taken to the ICJ“.

Buttu added that the discovery of the mass grave was “clearly a war crime” and urged that it must be investigated.

The International Court of Justice has ordered Israel to take “all measures within its power” to avoid Palestinian casualties and acts that could amount to “genocide”.

The Foreign Ministry said the discovery of the mass grave was evidence of the forms of “genocide committed by the occupation forces against our people in the Gaza Strip without accountability or oversight”.

Palestinian detainees are routinely abused by Israeli forces in the enclave, subjected to weeks of imprisonment in unknown locations, beatings and verbal abuse.

Last month, a United Nations human rights official called for an end to Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinian detainees and said he had met men who had been held for weeks and were beaten and blindfolded.

“These are men who were detained by the Israeli security forces in unknown locations for between 30 to 55 days,” Ajith Sunghay, a UN human rights representative, told reporters by video link from Gaza, who met released detainees in the enclave.

“There are reports of men who are subsequently released, but only in diapers without any adequate clothing in this cold weather,” he said, adding that it was not clear why they were made to wear diapers but that “they were clearly visibly shocked and even shaken when I met them”.

Several videos shared by the Israeli army since the war began show hundreds of Palestinian men stripped to their underwear, sitting outdoors in the cold, sometimes blindfolded. In a few videos, women and children were also seen.

Much of the densely populated Gaza Strip has been destroyed after four months of intense Israeli bombardments and ground offensive.

Gaza’s health authorities have said almost 28,000 Palestinians have been killed since the war began on October 7, following Hamas attacks in Israel that killed at least 1,139 people.

This article was first published by Al Jazeera on 1 February 2024.

Caitlin Johnstone: However bad you think Israel is, it’s actually worse

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They call different parts of it the Israel-Hamas War . . .
They call different parts of it the Israel-Hamas War, the Iraq War, the War on Terror, but really it’s all the same war: the war on disobedience. Image: Caitlin Johnstone

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

So it turns out the IDF (Israeli Defence Force) has been running a Telegram channel featuring homemade snuff films in which Gazans are brutally murdered by Israeli forces, captioned with celebrations of the gore and pain therein like “Burning their mother . . . You won’t believe the video we got! You can hear their bones crunch.”

The IDF had previously denied any association with the channel, 72 Virgins – Uncensored, but Haaretz now reports that it was directly run by an IDF psychological warfare unit.

This is one of those many, many times where Israel is so awful that at first you’re not sure what you’re looking at. You think you must be misreading the report. Then you read it again and go, “Oh wow, that’s SO much worse than I would have guessed.”

However bad you think Israel is, you can always be sure that information will come out later that proves it’s even worse.

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Tucker Carlson has been spotted in Moscow, generating speculation that he’s there to interview President Vladimir Putin, and the liberal commentariat are losing their minds about it.

There’s no valid basis for Westerners to object to Putin being interviewed by a Western pundit. There’s no moral basis because Israeli officials have had unfettered access to a wildly sympathetic Western press throughout four months of administering an active genocide.

There’s no basis on the grounds that it hurts US information interests, because that would be admitting that US information interests depend on hiding information from the public about matters as basic as what a foreign leader thinks about his own actions, and essentially acknowledging that the Western media are supposed to function as propaganda services for US military and intelligence agencies.

Every possible objection is also a confession about what the US empire and its media actually are.

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Americans: healthcare please

US government: Sorry did you say bomb Syria, Iraq and Yemen in facilitation of an active genocide?

Americans: no, healthcare

US government: Alright you drive a hard bargain but let’s go bomb Syria, Iraq and Yemen in facilitation of an active genocide.

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Biden isn’t technically lying when he says the US does not seek conflict in the Middle East. The US seeks DOMINATION in the middle east, and would prefer to receive that domination willingly from submissive subjects. Only when Middle Easterners refuse to submit is there conflict.

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The US has never done anything good for the Middle East. All it’s brought to the region is a bunch of murderous military operations and the nonstop murderous military operation that is the state of Israel.

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Setting up a bunch of military bases in countries on the other side of the planet and then going to war with anyone who tries to kick them out is pretty much the exact opposite of how a sane and ethical military would be used.

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US foreign policy is essentially one big long war against disobedience. Bombing, regime changing, starving and destabilising any population anywhere on earth who dares to insist on its own self-sovereignty instead of letting itself be absorbed into the folds of the global empire.

They call different parts of it the Israel-Hamas War, the Iraq War, the War on Terror, but really it’s all the same war: the war on disobedience. One long operation to brutalise the global population into obedience and submission, year after year, decade after decade.

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When it comes to Israel the main difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives support Israel because they like it when Muslims get murdered while liberals support Israel because mumble mumble something something antisemitism Israel has a right to defend itself but we have serious concerns about the humanitarian, HEY LOOK OVER THERE IT’S TRUMP!

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If the Gaza genocide had happened pre-internet it would’ve been a fringe issue hardly anyone knew about. The Western press would have been able to get away with exponentially more cover-ups of Israeli crimes, Western politicians would’ve been able to get away with way more lies about what’s really happening, Israeli officials would have been far less careful about their statements of genocidal intent in their own media, and the IDF would’ve been vastly more blatant and obvious about its extermination campaign.

It’s only because normal people are getting eyes into what’s really happening that this issue is subject to worldwide outcry and condemnation that has placed the empire on the back foot.

The political/media class never does the right thing because it wants to, it does the right thing when it is forced to by normal human beings with healthy consciences. The fate of humanity rests on the ability of ordinary people to freely circulate truth.

Caitlin Johnstone is an independent Australian journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished from Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix with permission.

Waitangi Day 2024: Thousands of visitors, one clear message – ‘Toitū te Tiriti!’

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About 1000 people matched onto the Waitangi Treaty Grounds 2024
About 1000 people marched onto the Waitangi Treaty Grounds, all echoing a call that has gone out again and again over the past few days - Uphold te Tiriti - Toitū te Tiriti! Image: Peter de Graaf/RNZ

By Pokere Paewai and Shannon Haunui-Thompson

Before the sun rose and the birds started singing in Aotearoa today, thousands of people arrived for the traditional dawn service on the Waitangi Treaty Grounds.

Standing in the footprints of those who first signed Te Tiriti o Waitangi, they listened to sermons from church ministers and Bible readings from politicians, while singing hymns.

But as always, the highlight was the spectacular sunrise, which washed the grounds in golden rays.

It was a moment which made standing in the longest queue in the world for coffee seem fine.

The waka came back to the beach — Kaihoe paddling strongly and proud just like their tūpuna — and the rowers were called ashore, then entertained the thousands of onlookers with a haka.

Watch a livestream of this morning’s ceremony:

The Waitangi dawn Service. Video: RNZ News

The grounds were awash with thousands of people again later in the morning, holding or wrapped in Tino Rangatiratanga and Te Whakaputanga flags for the hīkoi — another tradition.

About 1000 people marched onto the Treaty grounds, all echoing a call that has gone out again and again over the past few days — Uphold te Tiriti — Toitū te Tiriti!

Hīkoi leader Reuben Taipari acknowledged those who walked with him and encouraged everyone to continue the fight for their mokopuna.

The sun rises over the Treaty Grounds in Waitangi on Waitangi Day 2024.
The sun rises over the Treaty Grounds in Waitangi on Waitangi Day 2024. Image: RNZ

“This new generation coming through now, it’s a powerful generation. They are the raukura, they are the graduates of kōhanga reo, kura kaupapa, whare wānanga,” he said.

“They don’t have a struggle with who they are . . .  so we need to support that new generation.

“We have the experience, but they have the energy.”

The hikoi crossing Waitangi Bridge.
The hīkoi crossing Waitangi Bridge. Photo: RNZ/Angus Dreaver

It did not take long for the grounds and surrounding markets to fill up, with every piece of shade taken as the sun was scorching.

Lines for drinks, ice creams or anything cold were endless, while teens jumped from the bridge into sea below to cool off and show off.

The roads in and out of Waitangi ground to a stand-still as an endless stream of cars kept coming.

Boy on a horse south of Kawakawa
A boy on a horse south of Kawakawa. Image: RNZ

The festival was pumping — each stage was packed with spectators as kapa haka and bands entertained. All the free rides and bouncy castles were full of happy kids.

The most popular item being sold was anything with a Tino Rangatira or Whakaputanga flag on it, or iwi merch.

All accommodation was booked out weeks ago, but it did not stop people coming — some sleeping in their cars just to be part of the day.

This could be one of the biggest turn-outs in Waitangi on Waitangi Day, with tens of thousands of people attending, coming to Waitangi to be part of the Kotahitanga movement, and enforce the message of Toitū te Tiriti.

Pokere Paewai is RNZ News Māori issues reporter and Shannon Haunui-Thompson is Te Manu Korihi editor. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ and Asia Pacific Report.

Waitangi Day 2024: 5 myths and misconceptions that confuse NZ’s 1840 Treaty debate

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Treaty of Waitangi
A common view persists that the English and Māori versions of the Treaty are fundamentally at odds with each other, especially over the central issue of sovereignty. Incorrect. Image: 1News screenshot APR

ANALYSIS: By Paul Moon

When it comes to grappling with the Treaty of Waitangi/Te Tiriti o Waitangi, one of the commonest responses is that it is a matter of interpretation. It seems to be a perfectly fair reaction, except that historical interpretation generally requires adherence to rules of evidence.

It is not a licence to make any claims whatsoever about the Treaty, and then to assert their truth by appealing to the authority of personal interpretation.

Yet since the 1970s New Zealanders have been faced with the paradoxical situation of a growing body of Treaty scholarship that has led to less consensus about its meaning and purpose.

It is therefore worthwhile to investigate some of the more common misconceptions about the Treaty that have accrued over recent decades.

This will not lead to a definitive interpretation of the Treaty. But it might remove a few obstacles currently in the way of understanding it better.

1. The Treaty or Te Tiriti?
A common view persists that the English and Māori versions of the Treaty are fundamentally at odds with each other, especially over the central issue of sovereignty.

But research over the past two decades on British colonial policy prior to 1840 has revealed that Britain wanted a treaty to enable it to extend its jurisdiction to its subjects living in New Zealand.

It had no intention to govern Māori or usurp Māori sovereignty. On this critical point, the two versions are essentially in agreement.

2. The Treaty is not a contract
The principle of contra proferentem — appropriated from contract law — refers to ambiguous provisions that can be interpreted in a way that works against the drafter of the contract.

However, there are several problems in applying this principle to the Treaty. Firstly, treaties are different legal instruments from contracts. This explains why there are correspondingly few examples of this principle being used in international law for interpreting treaties.

Secondly, as there are no major material differences between the English and Māori versions of the Treaty when it comes to Māori retaining sovereignty, there is no need to apply such a principle.

And thirdly, under international law, treaties are not to be interpreted in an adversarial manner, but in good faith (the principle of pacta sunt servanda). Thus, rather than the parties fighting over the Treaty’s meaning, the requirement is for them to work with rather than against each other.

3. Relationships evolve over time
No rangatira (chief) ceded sovereignty over their own people through the Treaty. Nor was that Britain’s intention — hence Britain’s recognition in August 1839 of hapū (kinship group) sovereignty and the guarantee in the Treaty that rangatiratanga (the powers of the chiefs) would be protected.

Britain simply wanted jurisdiction over its own subjects in the colony. This is what is known as an “originalist” interpretation — one that follows the Treaty’s meaning as it was understood in 1840.

This has several limitations: it precludes the emergence of Treaty principles; it wrongly presumes that all involved at the time of the Treaty’s signing had an identical view on its meaning; and, crucially, it ignores all subsequent historical developments.

Treaty relationships evolve over time in numerous ways. Originalist interpretations fail to take that into account.

4. Questions of motive
British motives for the Treaty were made explicit in 1839, yet in the following 185 years false motives have entered into the historical bloodstream, where they have continued circulating.

What Britain wanted was the right to apply its laws to its people living in New Zealand. It also intended to “civilise” Māori (through creating the short-lived Office of Protector of Aborigines) and protect Māori land from unethical purchases (the pre-emption provision in Article Two of the Treaty).

And Britain wanted to afford Māori the same rights as British subjects in cases where one group’s actions impinged on the other’s (as in the 1842 Maketū case, involving the conviction for murder and execution of a young Māori man).

The Treaty was not a response to a French threat to New Zealand. And it was not an attempt to conquer Māori, nor to deceive them through subterfuge.

5. Myths of a ‘real’ Treaty and 4th article
Over the past two decades, some have alleged there is a “real” Treaty — the so-called “Littlewood Treaty” – that has been concealed because it contains a different set of provisions. Such conspiratorial claims are easily dispelled.

The text of the Littlewood Treaty is known and it is merely a handwritten copy of the actual Treaty. And, most obviously, it cannot be regarded as a treaty on the basis that no one signed it.

Another popular myth is that there is a fourth article of the Treaty, which purportedly guarantees religious freedom. This article does not appear in either the Māori or English texts of the Treaty, and there is no evidence the signatories regarded it as a provision of the agreement.

It is a suggestion that emerged in the 1990s, but lacks any evidential or legal basis.

Finally, there is the argument that the Treaty supports the democratic process. In fact, the Treaty ushered in a non-representative regime in the colony. It was the 1852 New Zealand Constitution Act that gave the country a democratic government – a statute that incidentally made no reference to the Treaty’s provisions.

This list is not exhaustive. But in dispensing with areas of poor interpretation, we can improve the chances of a more informed and productive discussion about the Treaty.The Conversation

Dr Paul Moon is professor of history, Auckland University of Technology. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Pressure must go on Israel to comply with World Court genocide rulings

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"Genocide on Gaza" . . . Already New Zealand is swimming against the tide of world opinion. We have refused to criticise the killing of Palestinian civilians by Israel despite loudly condemning the killing of Israeli civilians in the October 7 attack. Image: AJ screenshot APR

Aotearoa New Zealand must ramp up pressure on Israel to abide by last month’s International Court of Justice ruling, writes John Minto.

COMMENTARY: By John Minto

In 2003, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s “apartheid wall” being built through Palestinian territory was a violation of international law and should be dismantled. Israel ignored the ruling and more than 20 years later the wall remains a potent symbol of Israeli policies of segregation based on ethnicity.

Last December, Israel was taken to the court again, this time by South Africa which argued Israel was committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza with genocidal talk from Israeli leaders and indiscriminate killing of civilians — more than 27,000 killed so far including more than 12,000 Palestinian children.

The charge of genocide against Israel will take years to be heard and decided upon but in the meantime South Africa argued for the court to issue interim orders to require Israel to end its military operation and allow desperately needed humanitarian assistance to flow freely into Gaza.

Last month, the ICJ gave an interim ruling and although it did not demand an immediate ceasefire, it agreed with South Africa’s case that there was evidence to suggest Israel had breached the Genocide Convention and requiring Israel to report back to the court within a month on the steps it was taking to protect Palestinian lives and their very existence in Gaza.

Israel is now on probation. What happens in the coming weeks will determine whether Israel ends its killing spree in Gaza or shows the ICJ its middle finger as it did in 2003.

Commentary on the ICJ decision indicates the huge moral weight the decision carries for Israel and its small coterie of supporters, including New Zealand, which has been complicit through its silence, to end the war on Gaza.

The only way Israel will follow the ICJ ruling is if it comes under enough pressure from countries such as New Zealand.

Strong demand or look away?
Western countries have previously called on other countries to abide by ICJ rulings — such as the ruling which said Russia must end its war in Ukraine. Will we make the same strong demand of Israel or will we look the other way?

So far New Zealand has been equivocal, Foreign Minister Winston Peters making a few obligatory tweets but nothing more. The contrast with how we dealt with Russia compared with Israel could not be clearer.

The Foreign Minister’s stance seems more aimed to avoid difficult conversations with US representatives at diplomatic cocktail parties than pressure to end the killing of Palestinian children.

With Israel’s history of ignoring international law, New Zealand must speak out in a principled, assertive way. The alternative is to be silent and for this country to suffer derision for such cowardly, obsequious behaviour.

Already New Zealand is swimming against the tide of world opinion. We have refused to criticise the killing of Palestinian civilians by Israel despite loudly condemning the killing of Israeli civilians in the October 7 attack.

We have also refused to condemn other war crimes such as the “collective punishment” of Palestinians through the withholding of food, water and other necessities of life. We haven’t even made an unequivocal call for an immediate, permanent ceasefire or called for an International Criminal Court investigation into war crimes on and after October 7.

We did this for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, so why the reticence over the Middle East?

The lines are drawn . . . “ceasefire now”
The lines are drawn . . . the “ceasefire now” and “hands off Yemen” protest at Auckland’s Devonport Naval Base last Monday. Image: David Robie/APR

NZ’s selective morality
Our embarrassing history is one of selective morality. In 2014 when Israel launched a war on Gaza with similar mass killing of Palestinians, the John Key government called in the Israeli ambassador and made clear New Zealand’s expectations. The Christopher Luxon-led government has failed to take even this most rudimentary measure.

The time for doing that is well past. We must indicate to Israel that its behaviour is morally and ethically reprehensible.

The government should immediately close the Israeli embassy until Israel is in full compliance with the ICJ decision as well as the broader provisions of international law such as allowing Palestinian refugees the right to return to their land and homes in Palestine, ending the military occupation and ending Israel’s apartheid policies against Palestinians.

Wringing our hands is not an option. It might be acceptable for the comfort of the Minister of Foreign Affairs but for Palestinians it means ongoing death and destruction.

John Minto is the national chairman of Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) and contributes to Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published by the Otago Daily Times and is republished wit the author’s permission.

Watching the watchdogs: Law, propaganda, and the media walk into a bar

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The dual legacy of the US’s distorted reporting
The dual legacy of the US’s distorted reporting and dysfunctional state policies is no longer as potent as it used to be, as the global public reactions to the ICJ genocide hearing have shown. Image: AJ screenshot CP

ANALYSIS: By Rami G Khouri

Last month, the world watched South Africa initiate International Court of Justice (ICJ) hearings on the genocidal acts Israel committed in Gaza. In a two-day session on January 11 and 12, the court heard the extensive evidence the South African legal team had gathered to support their case against Israel, and the rebuttal by the Israeli team.

The hearings were historic for two reasons. First, this was the first time that Israel’s decades-long aggression against the Palestinians was articulated in detail for the world to hear, without having to pass through the distorting lens of Western media or politicians.

Second, this was the first time that Israel was substantively held to account in public under international law, without being shielded from such accountability by its Western backers, as it has been for the past century.

The unprecedented nature of the hearings drew international attention. The media around the world covered the proceedings extensively, often with live feeds of both presentations. But in the West, once again an anti-Palestinian media bias became apparent.

Channels like the BBC were accused of not fully showing the South African presentation, while broadcasting more of the Israeli one. American, Canadian and British newspapers were chastised for not featuring the ICJ case on their front pages.

The bias was clearest in the glaring parallels between the main points in Israel’s presentations to the court — which reflected the longstanding main themes of Israeli propaganda — and the reporting of Western mainstream media, with some exceptions. Indeed, Western coverage of the war has been skewed since day one.

‘Heavily favoured Israel’
The US progressive publication The Intercept did its own analysis of three leading US newspapers — The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times — and found that their reporting “heavily favoured Israel”. It said that they “disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict; used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians; and offered lopsided coverage of antisemitic acts in the US, while largely ignoring anti-Muslim racism in the wake of October 7.”

According to The Intercept’s analysis, the word “slaughter” was used in reference to Israeli deaths vs Palestinian deaths in a ratio of 125 to 2; the word “massacre” in a ratio of 60 to 1. Anti-Semitism was mentioned 549 times, while Islamophobia just 79 times.

This anti-Palestinian bias in print media “tracks with a similar survey of US cable news that the authors conducted last month that found an even wider disparity,” it concluded.

Many other such studies and examples of Western media bias towards Israel are now available.

Tweeting The Intercept report, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, asked a pertinent question: “After months of western media misrepresenting or not reporting the unfolding genocide in Gaza and all sort of int’l law violations against Palestinians: I have a question. Don’t journalists have codes of conducts and professional ethics to abide by and be held accountable to?”

To answer her question: They do, in principle. But in practice, journalists and their media managers and owners operate in the context of most Western media playing a central role in the continuing legacies of Western-Israeli settler-colonialism, apartheid, and genocide against the Palestinians.

Settler-colonial brutality
Consequently, the majority of citizens and politicians are convinced that they must support Israeli policies, even if these include settler-colonial brutality and apartheid.

It is no surprise that American, and most other Western, public opinion in the last half-century or so heavily sided with Israel over the Palestinians — because citizens mainly heard Israeli perspectives that dominated the news media and the statements and policies of their governments.

Over the past three months, however, the war in Gaza has revealed just how much Israeli state propaganda shapes US policy and the media’s dominant narrative of events. As Norman Solomon, media critic and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, put it in a January 18 Common Dreams article:

“What is most profoundly important about the war in Gaza – what actually happens to people being terrorized, massacred, maimed, and traumatized – has remained close to invisible for the U.S. public … With enormous help from US media and political power structures, the ongoing mass murder – by any other name  – has become normalized, mainly reduced to standard buzz phrases, weaselly diplomat-speak, and euphemistic rhetoric about the Gaza war. Which is exactly what the top leadership of Israel’s government wants.”

This dual legacy of the US’s distorted reporting and dysfunctional state policies is no longer as potent as it used to be, as the global public reactions to the ICJ genocide hearing have shown.

Discredited Israeli propaganda
The global protests in solidarity with Palestine revealed that Israel and its Western protectors and media parrots, who repeat largely discredited Israeli propaganda arguments, can no longer convince global audiences to the same extent they did in the past. This is due to Israel’s own brutal actions, but also the changed global information system.

The world now sees daily on social media and some alternative media Israel’s genocidal actions and apartheid policies. The ICJ presentations and thousands of associated articles, commentaries, webinars, public talks and other events across the world exposed these Israel-Palestine realities.

Changed information flows have caused serious concern in Washington, as well as Tel Aviv, because decent, justice-loving citizens reject the US’s fervent support for Israel’s military brutality — and many say they are likely to reject voting for “Genocide Joe” Biden in the presidential election this November. This is what happens when ordinary citizens see the full story of events in Palestine — for the first time in modern history.

A new US opinion poll confirms that likely voters are more inclined to vote for candidates who supported a ceasefire in Gaza, by a 2-to-1 margin (51-23 percent). Among young and non-white voters, who are crucial for a Democratic win, between 56 and 60 percent said they would back ceasefire supporters.

But the growing awareness of what is going on in Israel-Palestine has had an impact well beyond US politics. As South African journalist Tony Karon noted in an article in The Nation on January 11:

“So Israel is waging a classic colonial war of pacification of a native population resisting colonization — at a moment when much of the global citizenry is producing the receipts of centuries of Western violence and enslavement, demanding justice and a reordering of global power relations. Standing up for Palestine has become shorthand for that global struggle to change how the world is ruled.”

Indeed, the intense global support for Palestine, which peaked during the ICJ hearing, represents the Global South challenging the political and economic hegemony of the North. People across the world are saying they support justice and will continue to resist Western colonial forces that have ravaged scores of societies for half a millennium.

Rami G Khouri is a distinguished fellow at the American University of Beirut, and a journalist and book author with 50 years of experience covering the Middle East. This article was first published by Al Jazeera.

NZ legally obliged to step up and speak out after World Court ruling on Israel

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Why the ICJ did not order a ceasefire
As most international commentary has highlighted, even fixated on, the ICJ did not order a ceasefire as South Africa requested. But the fact that it didn’t is a manifestation of how constrained the court was. Image: South African legal team at The Hague/ APR/X

New Zealand’s commitment to the international rule of law means it must also go beyond the UN court’s genocide case findings on Gaza, writes the University of Auckland’s Treasa Dunworth.

ANALYSIS: By Treasa Dunworth

As Newsroom has reported, 15 aid agencies have joined forces to call on the Aotearoa New Zealand government to do more to encourage an immediate and sustainable ceasefire in Gaza, in the wake of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) decision.

Those 15 agencies are joining an international and increasingly loud chorus of calls for an immediate ceasefire.

I would go further, and remind the government that whatever it thinks of last month’s ICJ ruling, New Zealand has a number of international legal obligations to inform its response to Israel’s military attack on Gaza.

As most international commentary has highlighted, even fixated on, the ICJ did not order a ceasefire as South Africa requested. But the fact that it didn’t is a manifestation of how constrained the court was.

Despite its lofty title, the ICJ (sometimes referred to as the “World Court”) isn’t a “world” court in any meaningful sense of the word. It only has jurisdiction to consider issues in cases where countries have explicitly agreed to the court’s authority over them.

In this current litigation, the court was able to consider the case only on the basis that both South Africa and Israel are States Parties to the Genocide Convention. That meant South Africa had to frame its application through a “genocide lens”, and that the court had no power to go beyond the obligations arising out of that treaty. This jurisdictional conundrum partly explains why the court did not order a ceasefire — it didn’t have the authority to do so.

It also partly explains why the court could not order Hamas to release the remaining Israeli hostages. Hamas was not a party to the proceedings (the court can only hear proceedings on disputes between states), and despite the claim by Israel in its oral pleadings, the hostage taking by Hamas and their subsequent mistreatment and killing didn’t “plausibly”, according to the court, meet the threshold of genocide.

But the court did order Israel to take all measures in its power to prevent genocide, and ordered Israel to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions faced by Palestinians in Gaza.

Orders fall within ‘genocide jurisdiction’
These orders fall within the “genocide jurisdiction” because the treaty defines genocide as not only direct killing, but also “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.

An immediate ceasefire would go a long way toward Israel complying with these orders so the calls for a ceasefire are well made, despite the court not having the power to order one.

What is New Zealand’s role in all this? What are the moral and legal responsibilities it has and should fulfil?

In its decision, the court (re)confirmed that all states parties to the Genocide Convention have a “common interest” in ensuring the prevention, suppression, and punishment of genocide. That includes New Zealand, which has a legal obligation to do what it can to ensure that Israel complies with the court’s orders.

This is not a question of New Zealand’s choice of foreign policy, but a legal obligation.

The second relevant international obligation for New Zealand arises from international humanitarian law (IHL) — the body of law which governs the conduct of war, and which includes prohibitions against the direct targeting of civilians, causing superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering, the taking of hostages, the use of “human shields” and engaging in indiscriminate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure.

These rules don’t just apply to the parties directly involved in any given conflict — in this instance, Israel and Hamas. The relevant treaties stipulate all states have a shared responsibility “to ensure respect” for these rules. That responsibility exists independently of the lack of ICJ jurisdiction to consider these matters.

Must act in good faith
There is a third legal obligation for New Zealand in the wake of these orders.  Although decisions of the court are only binding as between the parties to a case (here South Africa and Israel), as a member of the United Nations, New Zealand has a legal obligation to act in good faith towards the court, being one of the organs of the UN and its principal legal body.

This obligation aligns with New Zealand’s self-professed commitment to the international rule of law.

Thus, regardless of political preferences and whether the current government agrees or disagrees with the court’s findings, the findings have been made and New Zealand ought not undermine the court or the international rule of law.

Governments of all political persuasions repeatedly pronounce that a small nation such as ours depends on the international rule of law and a rules-based international order.

Now is the time for New Zealand to step up and defend that order, even if it feels uncomfortable, even if it annoys some of our “friends” (such as the US). We are legally obliged to step up and speak out.

Dr Treasa Dunworth is an associate professor, Faculty of Law, at the University of Auckland. First published by Newsroom and republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.

In waging war on the UN refugee agency, the West is openly siding with Israeli genocide

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Cafe Pacific Publisher
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Palestinian students rally in front of the Gaza City headquarters
Palestinian students rally in front of the Gaza City headquarters of UNRWA in 2019 against attempts led by Israel to block its funding. Image: Ashraf Amra APA

Israel has long plotted the downfall of UNRWA, aware that it is one of the biggest obstacles to eradicating the Palestinians as a people.

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

There is an important background to the decision by the United States and other leading Western states, the UK among them, to freeze funding to the United Nations’ Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main channel by which the UN disseminates food and welfare services to the most desperate and destitute Palestinians.

The funding cut — which has been also adopted by Germany, France, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, Netherlands, Italy, Australia and Finland — was imposed even though the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on Friday that Israel may be committing genocide in Gaza.

The World Court judges quoted at length UN officials who warned that Israel’s actions had left almost all of the enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe, including famine.

The West’s flimsy pretext for what amounts to a war on UNRWA is that Israel claims 12 local UN staff — out of 13,000 — are implicated in Hamas’ break-out from the open-air prison of Gaza on October 7. The sole evidence appears to be coerced confessions, likely extracted through torture, from Palestinian fighters captured by Israel that day.

The UN immediately sacked all the accused staff, seemingly without due process. We can assume that was because the refugee agency was afraid its already threadbare lifeline to the people of Gaza, as well as millions of other Palestinian refugees across the region — in the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria — would be further threatened.

It need not have worried. Western donor states cut their funding anyway, plunging Gaza deeper into calamity.

They did so without regard to the fact their decision amounts to collective punishment: some 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza face starvation and the spread of lethal disease, while another 4 million Palestinian refugees across the region are at imminent risk of losing food, health care and schooling.

Direct and active participation in genocide
According to law professor Dr Francis Boyle, who filed a genocide case for Bosnia at the World Court some two decades ago, that shifts most of these Western states from their existing complicity with Israel’s genocide (by selling arms and providing aid and diplomatic cover) into direct and active participation in the genocide, by violating the 1948 Genocide Convention’s prohibition on “deliberately inflicting on the group [in this case, Palestinians] conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

The World Court is investigating Israel for genocide. But it could easily widen its investigation to include Western states. The threat to UNRWA needs to be seen in that light.

Not only is Israel thumbing its nose at the World Court and international law, but states like the US and UK are doing so too, by cutting their funding to the refugee agency. They are slapping the court in the face, and indicating that they are four-square behind Israel’s crimes, even if they are shown to be genocidal in nature.

The following is the proper context for understanding what is really going on with this latest attack on UNRWA:

1. The agency was created in 1949 — decades before Israel’s current military slaughter in Gaza — to provide for the basic needs of Palestinian refugees, including essential food provision, health care and education. It has an outsize role in Gaza because most of the Palestinians living there lost, or are descended from families that lost, everything in 1948.

That was when they were ethnically cleansed by the fledgling Israeli military from most of Palestine, in an event known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or “Catastrophe”. Their lands were turned into what Israel’s leaders described as an exclusively “Jewish state”. The Israeli army set about destroying the Palestinians’ towns and villages inside this new state so that they could never return.

Genocides don’t just emerge out of thin air. They happen after long periods in which the oppressor group dehumanises another group, incites against it and abuses it. Image:UNRWA

Insisted on division
2. UNRWA is separate from the UN’s main refugee agency, the UNHCR, and deals only with Palestinian refugees. Although Israel does not want you to know it, the reason for there being two UN refugee agencies is because Israel and its Western backers insisted on the division back in 1948.

Why? Because Israel was afraid of the Palestinians falling under the responsibility of the UNHCR’s forerunner, the International Refugee Organisation. The IRO was established in the immediate wake of the Second World War in large part to cope with the millions of European Jews fleeing Nazi atrocities.

Israel did not want the two cases treated as comparable, because it was pushing hard for Jewish refugees to be settled on lands from which it had just expelled Palestinians. Part of the IRO’s mission was to seek the repatriation of European Jews. Israel was worried that very principle might be used both to deny it the Jews it wanted to colonise Palestinian land and to force it to allow the Palestinian refugees to return to their former homes.

So in a real sense, UNRWA is Israel’s creature: it was set up to keep the Palestinians a case apart, an anomaly.

3. Nonetheless, things did not go exactly to plan for Israel. Given its refusal to allow the refugees to return, and the reluctance of neighbouring Arab states to be complict in Israel’s original act of ethnic cleansing, the Palestinian population in UNRWA’s refugee camps ballooned. They became an especial problem in Gaza, where about two-thirds of the population are refugees or descended from refugees. The tiny coastal enclave did not have the land or resources to cope with the rapidly expanding numbers there.

The fear in Israel was that, as the plight of the Palestinians of Gaza became more desperate, the international community would pressure Israel into a peace agreement, allowing for the refugees’ return to their former homes.

That had to be stopped at all costs. In the early 1990s, as the supposed Oslo “peace process” was being unveiled, Israel began penning the Palestinians of Gaza inside a steel cage, surrounded by gun towers. Some 17 years ago, Israel added a blockade that prevented the population’s movement in and out of Gaza, including via the strip’s coastal waters and its skies.

Prisoners in giant concentration camp
The Palestinians became prisoners in a giant concentration camp, denied the most basic links to the outside world. Israel alone decided what was allowed in and out. An Israeli court later learnt that from 2008 onwards the Israeli military put Gaza on what amounted to a starvation diet by restricting food supplies.

There was a strategy here that involved making Gaza uninhabitable, something the UN started warning about in 2015. Israel’s game plan appears to have gone something like this:

By making Palestinians in Gaza ever more desperate, it was certain that militant groups like Hamas willing to fight to liberate the enclave would gain in popularity. In turn, that would provide Israel with the excuse both to further tighten restrictions on Gaza to deal with a “terrorism threat”, and to intermittently wreck Gaza in “retaliation” for those attacks — or what Israeli military commanders variously called “mowing the grass” and “returning Gaza to the Stone Age”.

The assumption was that Gaza’s militant groups would exhaust their energies managing the constant “humanitarian crises” Israel had engineered.

At the same time, Israel could promote twin narratives. It could say publicly that it was impossible for it to take responsibility for the people of Gaza, given that they were so clearly invested both in Jew hatred and terrorism. Meanwhile, it would privately tell the international community that, given how uninhabitable Gaza was becoming, they urgently needed to find a solution that did not involve Israel. The hope was that Washington would be able to arm-twist or bribe neighbouring Egypt into taking most of Gaza’s destitute population.

4. On October 7, Hamas and other militant groups achieved what Israel had assumed was impossible. They broke out of their concentration camp. The Israeli leadership’s shock is not just over the bloody nature of the break-out. It is that on that day Hamas smashed Israel’s entire security concept — one designed to keep the Palestinians crushed, and Arab states and the region’s other resistance groups hopeless.

Last week, in a knockout blow, the World Court agreed to put Israel on trial for genocide in Gaza, collapsing the moral case for an exclusive Jewish state built on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland.

The judges’ near-unanimous conclusion that South Africa has made a plausible case for Israel committing genocide should force a reassessment of everything that went before.

Genocides don’t just emerge out of thin air. They happen after long periods in which the oppressor group dehumanises another group, incites against it and abuses it. The World Court has implicitly conceded that the Palestinians were right when they insisted that the Nakba — Israel’s mass dispossession and ethnic cleansing operation of 1948 — never ended. It just took on different forms. Israel became better at concealing those crimes, until the mask was ripped off after the October 7 break-out.

UN refugee agency a thorn in Israel’s side
5. Israel’s efforts to get rid of UNRWA are not new. They date back many years. For a number of reasons, the UN refugee agency is a thorn in Israel’s side — and all the more so in Gaza. Not least, it has provided a lifeline to Palestinians there, keeping them fed and cared for, and providing jobs to many thousands of local people in a place where unemployment rates are among the highest in the world.

It has invested in infrastructure like hospitals and schools that make life in Gaza more bearable, when Israel’s goal has long been to make the enclave uninhabitable. UNRWA’s well-run schools, staffed by local Palestinians, teach the children their own history, about where their grandparents once lived, and of Israel’s campaign of dispossession and ethnic cleansing against them.

That runs directly counter to the infamous Zionist slogan about the Palestinians’ identity-less future: “The old will die and the young forget.”

But UNRWA’s role is bigger than that. Uniquely, it is the sole agency unifying Palestinians wherever they live, even when they are separated by national borders and Israel’s fragmentation of the territory it controls. UNRWA brings Palestinians together even when their own political leaders have been manipulated into endless factionalism by Israel’s divide and rule policies: Hamas is nominally in charge in Gaza, while Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah pretends to run the West Bank.

In addition, UNRWA keeps alive the moral case for a Palestinian right of return — a principle recognised in international law but long ago abandoned by Western states.

Even before October 7, UNRWA had become an obstacle that needed removing if Israel was ever to ethnically cleanse Gaza. That is why Israel has repeatedly lobbied to stop the biggest donors, especially the US, funding UNRWA.

Back in 2018, for example, the refugee agency was plunged into an existential crisis when President Donald Trump acquiesced to Israeli pressure and cut all its funding. Even after the decision was reversed, the agency has been limping along financially.

Full attack mode
6. Now Israel is in full attack mode against the World Court, and has even more to gain from destroying UNRWA than it did before. The freeze in funding, and the further weakening of the refugee agency, will undermine the support structures for Palestinians generally.

But in Gaza’s case, the move will specifically accelerate famine and disease, making the enclave uninhabitable faster.

But it will do more. It will also serve as a stick with which to beat the World Court as Israel tries to fight off the genocide investigation. Israel’s barely veiled claim is that 15 of the International Court of Justice’s 17 judges fell for South Africa’s supposedly antisemitic argument that Israel is committing genocide.

The court quoted extensively from UN officials, including the head of UNRWA, that Israel was actively engineering an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Now, as former UK ambassador Craig Murray notes, the coerced confessions against 12 UNRWA staff serve to “provide a propaganda counter-narrative to the ICJ judgment, and to reduce the credibility of UNRWA’s evidence before the court”.

Extraordinarily, the Western media have done Israel’s PR work for it, happily focusing more attention on Israel’s claims about a handful of UNRWA staff than it has on the World Court’s decision to put Israel on trial for genocide.

Equally a boon to Israel is the fact that leading Western states have so quickly pinned their colours to the mast. The funding freeze cements their fates to Israel’s. It sends a message that they will stand with Israel against the World Court, whatever it decides.

Their war on UNRWA is intended as an act of collective intimidation directed towards the court. It is a sign that the West refuses to accept that international law applies to it, or its client state. It is a reminder that Western states refuse any restraint on their freedom of action — and that it is Israel and its sponsors who are the true rogue states.

Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.

Caitlin Johnstone: Everything Israel wants to destroy is Hamas

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Cafe Pacific Publisher
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The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA)
The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) . . . "Cutting off aid to the most aid-dependent population on earth would be a psychopathically monstrous act all by itself . . . " Image: Caitlin Johnstone

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

UNRWA is Hamas. The hospitals are Hamas. The ambulances are Hamas. The journalists are Hamas. The schools are Hamas. South Africa is Hamas. People tweeting unfavorable things about Israel are Hamas. Basically everyone Israel and its supporters want killed is Hamas.

❖

Defunding UNRWA over a handful of alleged Hamas members who don’t even work there anymore makes no sense from a humanitarian perspective or a military perspective, but it makes a ton of sense from a genocidal perspective.

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Cutting off aid to the most aid-dependent population on earth would be a psychopathically monstrous act all by itself, even without having caused their extreme needfulness in the first place by backing a genocidal bombing campaign on a giant concentration camp full of children.

❖

The Pentagon has admitted that it has no evidence that Iran was behind the attack on a US base on the Jordan-Syria border which killed three American troops. The one and only reason the US government and its stenographers in the western press mentioned the word “Iran” a zillion times after that attack was to administer propaganda to manufacture public hostility toward a government long targeted for regime change by the US empire.

❖

Don’t talk to me about October 7. Don’t talk to me about hostages. I don’t care. I haven’t cared for months. Many, many times more Gazans are dying and suffering than the number of Israelis who died and are suffering. That means the death and suffering of Palestinians is much more urgent and matters much more than the death and suffering of Israelis. The only way to disagree with this is to believe Israeli lives are worth much, much more than Palestinian lives.

The longer the mass atrocity in Gaza goes on for the less tragic and worthy of sympathy October 7 becomes. It’s already been diminished to a fraction of the significance it once had, and it’s getting smaller and smaller as this nightmare stretches on. This is not the fault of people like me, it is the fault of the people conducting this genocide. You don’t get to murder tens of thousands of people and then demand everyone weep over you losing a thousand. That’s not a thing.

It’s so obnoxious how Israel supporters keep acting like actions a tiny fraction as impactful as what’s been happening in Gaza are where all our sympathy and attention should still be going, nearly four months after the fact. Idiotic bullshit.

All of Israel’s actions since October 7 have revealed why Hamas did what it did on October 7. This is the kind of murderousness and depravity Palestinians have been living under from the Nakba on. Israel is so murderous and depraved that one of the most common talking points of its apologists when responding to opposition to the atrocities in Gaza has been “Yeah, what did Hamas expect would happen?” That’s not a sane or acceptable way for human beings to talk about acts of genocide and the butchery of thousands of children, but Israel apologists think it’s normal. Because that’s what Israel is.

In the eyes of the world, Israel has retroactively legitimized the acts of violence the Palestinian resistance has been inflicting upon it. It has legitimised those acts by showing the world its true face.

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You should never feel any sympathy for Israel, because Israel uses sympathy as a weapon. It uses weaponised sympathy to justify mass atrocities and endless abuses. When somebody’s using a weapon to hurt people, you take their weapon away. Stop giving Israel weapons. ANY weapons.

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Biden supporters literally believe the January 6 riot was worse than what their guy is doing in Gaza. They actually, truly, sincerely believe that. That’s how stupid and crazy party politics makes you.

Biden is doing all the very worst things Democrats claimed Trump would do if re-elected. If it had come out in 2020 that Trump was plotting a genocide and ethnic cleansing campaign in which his victims would be cut off from humanitarian aid, the shrieking from Democrats would have broken glass.

❖

It’s good to block virulent Israel supporters on social media, not so much because they’re bad people (though they are) but because they’re literally trolling for engagement with an acute awareness that time you spend arguing with them is time you’re not spending harming Israel’s image.

Like the astroturf NAFO op, Israel apologists are not merely reacting to posts they disagree with, they’re engaging in a conscious effort to protect the information interests of their prefered power structure and have a fleshed-out system and a working theory for doing so. They know that draining your time by dragging you into pointless debates and draining your emotional energy by saying things that upset you keeps you from spending your time and energy harming the information interests of their favorite ethnostate.

Caitlin Johnstone is an independent Australian journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished from Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix with permission.

It may be genocide against Gaza, but it won’t be stopped

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Cafe Pacific Publisher
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South African International Relations Minister Dr Naledi Pandor
South African International Relations Minister Dr Naledi Pandor . . . “How do you provide aid and water without a ceasefire?” Image: AJ screenshot APR

ANALYSIS: By Chris Hedges

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) refused to implement the most crucial demand made by South African jurists: “The State of Israel shall immediately suspend its military operations in and against Gaza.”

But at the same time, it delivered a devastating blow to the foundational myth of Israel. Israel, which paints itself as eternally persecuted, has been credibly accused of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

Palestinians are the victims, not the perpetrators, of the “crime of crimes”.

A people, once in need of protection from genocide, are now potentially committing it. The court’s ruling questions the very raison d’être of the “Jewish State” and challenges the impunity Israel has enjoyed since its founding 75 years ago.

The ICJ ordered Israel to take six provisional measures to prevent acts of genocide, measures that will be very difficult if not impossible to fulfill if Israel continues its saturation bombing of Gaza and wholesale targeting of vital infrastructure.

The court called on Israel “to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide.” It demanded Israel “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance”.

It ordered Israel to protect Palestinian civilians. It called on Israel to protect the some 50,000 women giving birth in Gaza. It ordered Israel to take “effective measures to prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence related to allegations of acts within the scope of Article II and Article III of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide against members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip”.

Prevent crimes
The court ordered Israel to “take all measures within its power” to prevent the crimes which amount to genocide such as “killing, causing serious bodily and mental harm, inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

Israel was ordered to report back in one month to explain what it had done to implement the provisional measures.

Gaza was pounded with bombs, missiles and artillery shells as the ruling was read in The Hague — at least 183 Palestinians have been killed in the last 24 hours. Since October 7, more than 26,000 Palestinians have been killed. Almost 65,000 have been wounded, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Thousands more are missing.

The carnage continues. This is the cold reality.

Translated into the vernacular, the court is saying Israel must feed and provide medical care for the victims, cease public statements advocating genocide, preserve evidence of genocide and stop killing Palestinian civilians. Come back and report in a month.

It is hard to see how these provisional measures can be achieved if the carnage in Gaza continues.

“Without a ceasefire, the order doesn’t actually work,” Dr Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s Minister of International Relations, stated bluntly after the ruling.

Thousands will die
Time is not on the side of the Palestinians. Thousands of Palestinians will die within a month. Palestinians in Gaza make up 80 percent of all the people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide, according to the United Nations.

The entire population of Gaza by early February is projected to lack sufficient food, with half a million people suffering from starvation, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, drawing on data from UN agencies and NGOs. The famine is engineered by Israel.

At best, the court — while it will not rule for a few years on whether Israel is committing genocide — has given legal licence to use the word “genocide” to describe what Israel is doing in Gaza. This is very significant, but it is not enough, given the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.

Israel has dropped almost 30,000 bombs and shells on Gaza — eight times more bombs than the US dropped on Iraq during six years of war. It has used hundreds of 900kg bombs to obliterate densely populated areas, including refugee camps.

These “bunker buster” bombs have a kill radius of 300m. The Israeli aerial assault is unlike anything seen since Vietnam. Gaza, only 33km long and 8km wide, is rapidly becoming, by design, uninhabitable.

Israel will no doubt continue its assault arguing that it is not in violation of the court’s directives. In addition, the Biden administration will undoubtedly veto the resolution at the Security Council demanding Israel implement the provisional measures. The General Assembly, if the Security Council does not endorse the measures, can vote again calling for a ceasefire, but has no power to enforce it.

Defence for Children International — Palestine v Biden was filed in November by the Center for Constitutional Rights against President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin. The case challenges the US government’s failure to prevent complicity in Israel’s unfolding genocide of the Palestinian people. It asks the court to order the Biden administration to cease diplomatic and military support and comply with its legal obligations under international and federal law.

Only active resistance
The only active resistance to halt the Gaza genocide is provided by Yemen’s Red Sea blockade. Yemen, which was under siege for eight years by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, France, Britain and the US, experienced more than 400,000 deaths from starvation, lack of health care, infectious diseases and the deliberate bombing of schools, hospitals, infrastructure, residential areas, markets, funerals and weddings.

Yemenis know too well — since at least 2017 multiple UN agencies have described Yemen as experiencing “the largest humanitarian crisis in the world” — what the Palestinians are enduring.

Yemen’s resistance — when the history of this genocide is written — will set it apart from nearly every other nation. The rest of the world, including the Arab world, retreats into toothless rhetorical condemnations or actively supports Israel’s obliteration of Gaza and its 2.3 million inhabitants.

The Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported that the US has sent 230 cargo planes and 20 ships filled with artillery shells, armoured vehicles and combat equipment to Israel since the attacks of October 7, in which some 1139 Israelis were killed. US weapons and military equipment are being shipped to Israel — which is running out of munitions — from the British base RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, according to the UK investigative website Declassified UK.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that more than 40 US and 20 British transport aircraft, along with seven heavy-lift helicopters, have flown into RAF Akrotiri, a 40-minute flight from Tel Aviv. Germany reportedly plans to provide 10,000 rounds of 120mm precision ammunition to Israel.

If the court rules against Israel, these countries will be recognised by the world’s most important international court as accomplices to genocide.

The ruling was dismissed by Israeli leaders.

‘Outrageous’ says Netanyahu
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, seeking to paint the decision not to demand a ceasefire as a victory for Israel, said: “Like every country, Israel has an inherent right to defend itself. The vile attempt to deny Israel this fundamental right is blatant discrimination against the Jewish state, and it was justly rejected. The charge of genocide leveled against Israel is not only false, it’s outrageous, and decent people everywhere should reject it.”

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said: “The decision of the antisemitic court in The Hague proves what was already known: This court does not seek justice, but rather the persecution of Jewish people. They were silent during the Holocaust and today they continue the hypocrisy and take it another step further.”

The ICJ was founded in 1945 following the Nazi Holocaust. The first case it heard was submitted to the court in 1947.

“Decisions that endanger the continued existence of the State of Israel must not be listened to,” Ben-Gvir added. “We must continue defeating the enemy until complete victory.”

The court, which rejected Israel’s arguments to dismiss the case, acknowledged “that the military operation being conducted by Israel following the attack of 7 October 2023 has resulted, inter alia, in tens of thousands of deaths and injuries and the destruction of homes, schools, medical facilities and other vital infrastructure, as well as displacement on a massive scale.”

The ruling included a statement made by the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Martin Griffiths, who on January 5, called Gaza “a place of death and despair.” The court document went on:

. . . Families are sleeping in the open as temperatures plummet. Areas where civilians were told to relocate for their safety have come under bombardment. Medical facilities are under relentless attack. The few hospitals that are partially functional are overwhelmed with trauma cases, critically short of all supplies, and inundated by desperate people seeking safety.

A public health disaster is unfolding. Infectious diseases are spreading in overcrowded shelters as sewers spill over. Some 180 Palestinian women are giving birth daily amidst this chaos. People are facing the highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded. Famine is around the corner.

For children in particular, the past 12 weeks have been traumatic: No food. No water. No school. Nothing but the terrifying sounds of war, day in and day out.

Gaza has simply become uninhabitable. Its people are witnessing daily threats to their very existence — while the world watches on.

The court acknowledged that “an unprecedented 93 percent of the population in Gaza is facing crisis levels of hunger, with insufficient food and high levels of malnutrition. At least 1 in 4 households are facing ‘catastrophic conditions’: experiencing an extreme lack of food and starvation and having resorted to selling off their possessions and other extreme measures to afford a simple meal. Starvation, destitution and death are evident.”

The ruling, quoting Philippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), continued:

Overcrowded and unsanitary UNRWA shelters have now become ‘home’ to more than 1.4 million people,” the ruling read. “They lack everything, from food to hygiene to privacy. People live in inhumane conditions, where diseases are spreading, including among children. They live through the unlivable, with the clock ticking fast towards famine.

The plight of children in Gaza is especially heartbreaking. An entire generation of children is traumatized and will take years to heal. Thousands have been killed, maimed, and orphaned. Hundreds of thousands are deprived of education. Their future is in jeopardy, with far-reaching and long-lasting consequences.

The court also referred pointedly to comments made by multiple senior Israeli government officials advocating genocide, including the president and minister of defence. Statements made by government and other officials form a crucial element of the “intent” component when seeking to establish the crime of genocide.

It quoted Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant who declared — two days after the Hamas-led attack of October 7 — that he ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza City with “no electricity, no food, no fuel” being permitted.

“I have released all restraints . . . You saw what we are fighting against. We are fighting human animals. This is the ISIS of Gaza,” Gallant told Israeli troops massing around Gaza the following day.

“This is what we are fighting against . . . Gaza won’t return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate everything. If it doesn’t take one day, it will take a week, it will take weeks or even months, we will reach all places.”

The ICJ quoted Israel’s President Isaac Herzog as saying: “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It is absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’état. But we are at war. We are at war. We are defending our homes.”

Herzog continued: “We are protecting our homes. That’s the truth. And when a nation protects its home, it fights. And we will fight until we’ll break their backbone.”

The decision was read out by the ICJ’s current president, Judge Joan Donoghue, an American lawyer who used to work at the US State Department and the Department of the Treasury before she joined the World Court in 2010.

South African genocide claims ‘plausible’
“In the Court’s view, the facts and circumstances mentioned above are sufficient to conclude that at least some of the rights claimed by South Africa and for which it is seeking protection are plausible,” it read.

“This is the case with respect to the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide and related prohibited acts identified in Article III, and the right of South Africa to seek Israel’s compliance with the latter’s obligations under the Convention.”

It is clear from the ruling that the court is fully aware of the magnitude of Israel’s crimes. This makes the decision not to call for the immediate suspension of Israeli military activity in and against Gaza all the more distressing.

But the court did deliver a devastating blow to the mystique Israel has used since its founding to carry out its settler colonial project against the indigenous inhabitants of historic Palestine. It made the word genocide, when applied to Israel, credible.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author and journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times. This article was first published on his Substack page.

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