Israel Approves Lawless Show Trials and Mass Executions for Palestinians Seized on Oct. 7, 2023
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As the beleaguered International Criminal Court seeks an arrest warrant for Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir, in charge of Israel’s torture prisons, and a key driver of legislation approving the death penalty for Palestinians, and establishing a special military tribunal to prosecute and execute those seized on Oct. 7 , 2023, continues to evade accountability.
When the Nazis held the Wannsee Conference on January 1942 to co-ordinate the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” — the extermination of all the Jews in German-controlled Europe — it was attended by 15 high-level administrators in the relevant government departments, and the SS.
When senior officials in Israel were planning the genocide of the Palestinian people of the Gaza Strip, after October 7, 2023, no single conference was convened to facilitate what it would be appropriate to call Israel’s “Final Solution to the Palestinian Question”, but key officials can be readily identified.
The first two are Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, for whom arrest warrants were issued by the International Criminal Court on November 21, 2024, for war crimes and crimes against humanity — the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare, and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.
Judge Blocks Punitive US Sanctions on UN Rapporteur Francesca Albanese
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In wonderful news from the District Court in Washington, D.C., Judge Richard Leon has blocked the imposition of US sanctions on Francesca Albanese, the tenacious UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, who, since Israel’s exterminatory assault on Gaza began, 31 months ago, has been fearless and indefatigable in her support of the Palestinians, and her condemnation of Israel’s almost innumerable crimes — including war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide — and has also condemned the countries and companies that have been complicit. See her reports here: “Genocide as colonial erasure”, “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide”, “Gaza Genocide: a collective crime” and “Torture and genocide.”
The 26-page ruling, a preliminary injunction, will be particularly irritating for the Trump administration, because Judge Leon cannot be dismissed as a “left-wing activist judge.” An appointee of George W. Bush, he first came on my radar in 2008-09, when, as a judge dealing with the habeas corpus petitions of prisoners at Guantánamo, he became notorious for his frequent rulings against the prisoners, including one particular case which I condemned as How Cooking For The Taliban Gets You Life In Guantánamo.
The latest case before Judge Leon was brought in February by Albanese’s husband, who, like her, is an Italian citizen, and by their daughter, who is a US citizen, seeking a preliminary injunction against the decision, last July, by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, to designate Albanese as a foreign national who has “directly engaged with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in efforts to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute nationals of the United States or Israel, without the consent of those two countries.”
In his press statement, Rubio added, “The United States has repeatedly condemned and objected to the biased and malicious activities of Albanese that have long made her unfit for service as a Special Rapporteur”, claiming, hysterically, that she ”has spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West.”
Israel’s New World Order: Nothing But the Threat of Endless Death
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For the last two and a half years, the State of Israel has unilaterally — and with jaw-dropping illegality — reimagined warfare as a religiously-mandated existential struggle against alleged “forces of darkness” in which there are no rules, and no sense of proportionality or restraint.
Everyone in the Gaza Strip — 2.3 million people at the start of this “conflict” — has been regarded as, in one way or another, “associated” with Hamas, the administrative government of Gaza whose military wing, along with other armed factions, broke out of the “open-air prison” of Gaza on October 7, 2023, killing hundreds of Israeli security personnel, and hundreds of civilians.
Completely supported by almost all the nations of the west, who approved the shamefully ill-defined notion that Israel had “the right to defend itself”, Israel has reinterpreted “self-defense” to mean genocide, inflicting such disproportionate destruction on Gaza that almost its entire built environment has been destroyed, and over ten percent of its population — a quarter of a million people — have been killed or wounded.
Israel, the US, the UK and Germany Have Destroyed Human Rights
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Yesterday, December 10, was Human Rights Day, marking the anniversary of the proclamation and adoption by the United Nations, on December 10, 1948, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a hugely commendable and aspirational template for a better world, in which, to quote from its Preamble, “the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” were recognized as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”
Translated into 577 languages, from Abkhaz to Zulu, the UDHR is, as the UN explains, “the most translated document in the world”, and is “generally agreed to be the foundation of international human rights law”, having “inspired a rich body of legally binding international human rights treaties.”
These include, as I discussed in an article year ago, entitled, Is Hope Still Alive on the Anniversaries of the Genocide and Torture Conventions, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?, the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (more generally known as the Torture Convention), which was adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1984, the 36th anniversary of the UDHR, expanding on Article 5 of the Declaration, which states, unequivocally, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
The Slow But Significant Erosion of Israel’s Genocidal Impunity in the West
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As the second anniversary looms — in just nine days’ time — of the attacks on southern Israel by Hamas and other militants on October 7, 2023 and the start of Israel’s sickeningly disproportionate and still ongoing genocidal response, it seems increasingly unlikely that the occasion will be marked by even the tiniest fraction of the outpouring of collective support that was on display two years ago, when world leaders queued up to declare that Israel had an open-ended and irresponsibly undefined “right to defend itself.”
By now, the outright lies that fuelled approval for Israel’s genocide — lies about 40 beheaded babies and mass rapes — have been thoroughly debunked, and the scale of Israel’s revenge has been so horrific that none of its supporters can credibly ignore the blunt truth that, in response to the 1,195 people killed on October 7, 2023 (including an untold number killed by Israel itself under the Hannibal Directive), Israel has routinely been killing the same number of Palestinians every few weeks for the last 100 weeks (at least 60,000, officially, but almost certainly many times more), and that, despite their protestations to the contrary, the vast majority of those killed have been blameless civilians, amongst them at least 20,000 children, as I discussed in my recent article, Gaza Horror: IDF Admits 83% of Those Killed Were Civilians, But the True Total May Be 95%.
Israel has so carefully cultivated support in western governments and in the mainstream media — and has so flagrantly ignored UN resolutions without punishment for decades — that it thought it could exterminate the Palestinians, in response to October 7, and get away with it, seeking to hide the extent of its dehumanizing genocidal intent through its usual combination of lies, threats, distortions and self-pity, and also seeking to hide the appalling truth that its true purpose was to destroy the whole of Gaza to make it unliveable, while killing as many people as possible in the vain hope that those who somehow managed to survive would subject themselves to what was euphemistically described as “voluntary migration.”
UN Report Confirms Genocide in Gaza, But the World Still Shrugs, Even As Israel Erases Gaza City
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Four days ago, ripples of concern briefly surfaced in the global media, as a UN Commission of Inquiry — the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel — issued a devastating 72-page report establishing, definitively, that the State of Israel is engaged in a genocide of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, and has been throughout the whole of the last 23 months.
The Commission of Inquiry — chaired by Navi Pillay, who, over the last 30 years has served as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal dealing with the Rwanda genocide, and at the International Criminal Court, and who was also, from 2008 to 2014, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights — was established in May 2021 by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate violations of international humanitarian law in the territories illegally occupied by Israel since 1967, and its latest report follows on from other devastating reports over the last year.
One of these was in October last year, focusing on Israel’s exterminatory “war” on Gaza’s hospitals, and its extraordinarily brutal treatment of Palestinians in its prisons, which I wrote about in detail in two articles at the time — UN Report Confirms Israel Guilty of War Crimes and “Extermination” in Attacks on Gaza’s Hospitals and UN Report Condemns Unparalleled Violence, Including Torture, Rape and Murder, in Israel’s Unaccountable Prisons for Palestinians.
It’s Official: UN Declares Catastrophic Famine Conditions in Gaza; Israel Still Denies It
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Today, in an extraordinary declaration, delivered from Geneva with articulate, controlled fury and indignation, Tom Fletcher, a British diplomat, and, since October last year, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, confirmed to the world what has been increasingly apparent over the last six months: that the most severe famine conditions are occurring in the Gaza Strip, that this is an “entirely man-made” disaster, deliberately engineered by the State of Israel, and that it can and must be “halted and reversed”, via an immediate ceasefire “to allow humanitarian aid to reach everyone in the Gaza Strip.”
According to the devastating new report by the IPC (the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification), which Fletcher was presenting to the world, 514,000 people, roughly a quarter of Gaza’s surviving population, are experiencing famine, with the number rising to 641,000 by the end of September unless immediate action is taken.
The IPC sets stringent conditions on the evidence required for a famine to be declared. Famine (Phase 5) requires an area to have 20% of households facing an extreme food shortage, 30% of children to be acutely malnourished, and two adult non-trauma deaths or four child non-trauma deaths for every 10,000 people to be taking place every day “due to outright starvation or to the interaction of malnutrition and disease.”
Israel Defeated As A Million Palestinians Return to Northern Gaza From Exile in the South
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As a result of the ceasefire deal in Gaza, agreed to on January 15 — after 14 months of negotiations that were cynically and persistently blocked by Benjamin Netanyahu, with cover provided by the US — something truly remarkable is happening.
Now that the relentless carpet-bombing has stopped, and the child-killing snipers and armed quadcopters have withdrawn, along with the ever-present drones, the surviving Palestinians — no longer fearing death at every single moment of their lives — are beginning to reclaim their country, their land.
After two weekends in which, in exchange for 290 Palestinian prisoners, seven Israel hostages have been freed by Hamas — deliberately released in small numbers, eked out over at least three months, to prevent Israel from thinking that it can safely resume its previously uninterrupted genocidal assault — yesterday Israel was forced to confront the triumph of the Palestinians, despite 15 months of collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.
Dare We Hope That the Gaza Ceasefire Deal Will End the Horror of Israel’s Extermination of the Palestinian People?
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Is it really true? After 470 days of the most grotesque, publicly-celebrated, western-backed atrocities that any of us have ever seen, dare we hope that a durable ceasefire has been agreed that will bring to an end the soul-draining horrors of Israel’s relentless efforts to exterminate the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip?
On Wednesday (January 15), the Prime Minister of Qatar, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, announced the agreement of a ceasefire deal, agreed to by Israel and Hamas, in negotiations involving Qatar, Egypt and the US. President Biden and the President-Elect, Donald Trump, both claimed responsibility for securing the success of the deal, although it was noticeable that the terms of the deal were almost identical to those agreed to by Hamas over eight months ago, on May 6, 2024, which Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, then refused to accept.
This suggests that, despite their protestations, neither Biden nor the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, who also rushed to take credit for the deal, had actually done much at all in the intervening eight months, except to be publicly humiliated by Netanyahu, while continuing to send an extraordinary amount of deadly weapons to Israel, indicating that they were prepared to accept humiliation because they continued to unconditionally support Israel’s apparently never-ending hunger for Palestinians’ blood.
Plumbing the Depths of Human Depravity: 450 Days of Extermination in Gaza
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For 450 days, the State of Israel has been engaged in a sustained policy of vengeance and extermination against the trapped civilian population of the Gaza Strip, a “Holy War” driven by a vile supremacist settler colonial mentality masquerading as the fulfilment of an invented religious entitlement to the Palestinians’ land, involving a giddy and unfettered hatred of the Palestinians as sub-human, and specific revenge for the assault on Israel, on October 7, 2023, in which armed militants who had broken out of the “open-air prison” in which they had been confined for 16 years, went on a killing spree that left 1,068 Israelis and 71 foreign nationals dead, and also kidnapped 251 others.
At the barest minimum, over the last 450 days, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians — mostly civilians — have been killed, or will die, as a result of relentless bombing raids, in which block after block of residential housing, containing almost a quarter of a million homes, has been completely destroyed or damaged, mostly without warning, using bombs of such devastating ferocity that those killed have been torn apart, decapitated, crushed, hurled through the air like broken dolls, or buried alive.
Survivors, meanwhile, have been picked off by snipers, or by armed drones and quadcopters, or have died — and will continue to die — because of a “complete siege” imposed two days after the October 7 attacks, cutting off supplies of food and water, of fuel and of vital medical equipment and supplies. This, accompanied by the almost unimaginably cynical destruction of most of Gaza’s hospitals and health centres, has sentenced to death as yet untold numbers of the elderly, pregnant women, babies and children, those with existing medical conditions, and those with diseases created by the siege, as well as the complete destruction of Gaza’s water and sewage systems.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
