What Now, After the World Court Condemns As Unlawful Israel’s Entire 57-Year Occupation of the Palestinian Territories?
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In a devastating opinion issued on Friday (July 19), the International Court of Justice (one of the six organs of the United Nations, also known as the World Court) condemned as illegal Israel’s presence, and its behavior, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip) ever since they were first militarily occupied in 1967. The case, “Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem,” was initiated by a request from the UN General Assembly in 2022.
This was, of course, prior to the attacks by Hamas and other militants on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s extraordinarily violent and ongoing military response, in which, according to a recent assessment, it would be reasonable to expect that the final death toll, even if hostilities ended tomorrow, would be no less than 186,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians. Israel’s actions are subject to a separate case brought to the ICJ by South Africa, in which the Court first issued “provisional measures” against Israel in January, on the basis that what it has initiated and is engaged in is a “plausible genocide.”
What the Court decided, and how the judges voted
The 15-member court, whose judges are drawn from across the member states of the United Nations, declared, by eleven votes to four, that it was “of the opinion that the State of Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful,” and was also “of the opinion that the State of Israel is under an obligation to bring to an end its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible.” Judges from countries including Israel’s staunchest allies, the US and Germany, agreed, as they did for every other decision taken by the Court, along with the recently-appointed Lebanese President, Nawaf Salam, and judges from Australia, Brazil, China, India, Japan, Mexico, Somalia and South Africa.
Horror Beyond Comprehension: Gaza Death Toll Realistically Assessed At 186,000, But Could Be As High As 600,000
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Many thanks to three medical experts, research scientist Rasha Khatib, Professor Martin McKee and Professor Salim Yusuf, who have finally broken the global medical establishment’s silence regarding the true death toll of Israel’s genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip, now in its tenth month, pointing out, in correspondence printed in The Lancet, one of the world’s most respected academic medical journals, that, at a conservative estimate, the total death toll is likely to be at least 186,000, and maybe much higher.
The experts’ assessment is based on multiplying the known, direct deaths of Israel’s unprecedentedly brutal assault on the nearly 2.4 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip (2,375,259, as of 2022), which is widely understood to be around 37,000 (37,396, as of June 19, according to the Gaza Health Ministry), by a factor of five, to include the indirect deaths that, as established through detailed research into armed conflict since the 1990s, always exceed direct deaths many times over.
The experts’ main source for indirect deaths in wartime appears to be the Geneva Declaration Secretariat’s ‘Global Burden of Armed Violence’ report, published in 2008 after the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development was adopted by 42 states at the conclusion of a ministerial summit in June 2007, which “recogniz[ed] that the fight against the global scourge of armed violence and the prospects for sustainable development are closely linked.”
A Million Palestinians Face Death by Starvation After Eight Months of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
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Eight months of unmitigated horror in Gaza demonstrates the absolute moral degradation of Israel, and the unparalleled moral failure of the west.
It’s eight months since Hamas and other militants broke out of the “open-air prison” of the Gaza Strip, where they, and the entire Palestinian population of 2.3 million people, had been subjected to a land, sea and air blockade for 16 years, and embarked on a brief but deadly killing spree in southern Israel, killing 1,068 Israelis (695 civilians and 373 members of the military and the police), as well as 71 foreign nationals, and kidnapping around 235 others, around half of whom were Israeli.
In response, as happened on numerous previous occasions when Israel was attacked by Palestinian military forces resisting the occupation of their land, Israel began carpet bombing the Gaza Strip, destroying key infrastructure, levelling apartment blocks with disproportionately heavy-duty bombs provided mainly by the US and Germany, and killing vast numbers of civilians.
In 2014, when Israel undertook the most savage of its many previous attacks on the Gaza Strip, a seven-week campaign killed over 2,300 Palestinians, wounded nearly 11,000 (including 3,374 children, of whom over 1,000 were permanently disabled), and led to the destruction of 7,000 homes, with an additional 89,000 damaged, before a ceasefire was finally reached.
Radio: I Discuss Israel’s Horrendous Prisons for Palestinians and the ICC Noose Tightening Around Netanyahu’s Neck on Gorilla Radio
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My thanks to the indefatigable Chris Cook, based in western Canada, for having me on his Gorilla Radio show to discuss Ending Israel’s Impunity for Genocide in Gaza, and the Threat to Those, Like Joe Biden, Who Are Most Complicit, my latest article on the defining horror of our times. Our discussion takes place in the second half of the one-hour show, available on Substack here, after an illuminating first half with Yves Engler, the Montreal-based political activist, whose latest book, co-authored with Owen Schalk, is ‘Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy.’ I’m also pleased to note that Chris played my song ‘Forever Prisoner’, about Guantánamo prisoner Khaled Qassim, recorded with my band The Four Fathers.
Chris and I began by discussing Jonathan Cook’s latest article for Middle East Eye, The message of Israel’s torture chambers is directed at all of us, not just Palestinians, which drew on a detailed CNN investigation published on May 11, Strapped down, blindfolded, held in diapers: Israeli whistleblowers detail abuse of Palestinians in shadowy detention center, about Sde Teiman, a secret Israeli prison on a military base in the Negev Desert, where Palestinians seized in the Gaza Strip since October 7 are kept naked, blindfolded and handcuffed, and, permanently, “forced to remain motionless and silent”, as Cook describes it, adding, “At night, dogs are set on them. Anyone who speaks or moves risks being savagely beaten till bones are broken.”
The whistleblowers who spoke to CNN also explained that “doctors sometimes amputated prisoners’ limbs due to injuries sustained from constant handcuffing; of medical procedures sometimes performed by underqualified medics earning it a reputation for being “a paradise for interns”; and where the air is filled with the smell of neglected wounds left to rot.”
Ending Israel’s Impunity for Genocide in Gaza, and the Threat to Those, Like Joe Biden, Who Are Most Complicit
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I just want the bombing to stop. Billions of us around the world just want to the bombing to stop. But last night, in Rafah, Israel dropped countless US-supplied 2,000-pound bombs — hideously powerful weapons designed to pierce otherwise impenetrable military targets — on a displaced Palestinian civilian population, living in flimsy makeshift tents in what they were told was a “safe zone,” burning dozens of them alive, including children who were decapitated as their bodies burned.
For seven and a half months, a moral sickness has engulfed the State of Israel, also infecting parliaments and the mainstream media throughout most of the western world, as shrill, bullying and sometime gleeful proponents of genocide have sought to compel us, sometimes through violence, and often through intimidation, not only to turn a blind eye to the murder of 40,000 civilians in the Gaza Strip — killed with bombs of such intensity that they shouldn’t even exist, let alone be dropped onto packed civilian neighbourhoods day after day after day — but to endorse it, to support it as enthusiastically as they do.
For seven and a half months, those of us living in the majority of the countries of the west (or the Global North), have been ordered to believe that, despite the openly genocidal comments that have been regularly and insistently made by Israel’s leaders since the deadly attacks on southern Israel by Hamas and other militants on October 7 last year, (in which 1,139 people were killed), Israel’s response, in which most of the Gaza Strip has been destroyed, and 10,000 decomposing corpses are buried under the rubble, is not a genocide, but simply Israel exercising its “right to defend itself”, to “eliminate Hamas”, and to free the hostages seized by Hamas and other militants on October 7.
For seven and half months, we have been told that “this began on October 7”, in a blatant and frankly sickening effort to erase 76 years of oppression of the Palestinian people by the State of Israel, oppression which began in earnest with the blood-soaked establishment of the State of Israel, in 1948, when 15,000 Palestinians were murdered and 750,000 permanently exiled from their homes, but which actually began decades before, via the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which the British government, then ruling Palestine as a Mandate after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, announced its support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, and encouraged the migration of hundreds of thousands of European Jews.
As Israel Shuns a Ceasefire and Continues Its “Forever Genocide” in Rafah and Across Gaza, An End Must Be in Sight
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For over seven months, the Israeli military, largely using weapons provided by the United States and Germany, has been bombing the Gaza Strip with an intensity unmatched in modern history. In March, the NGO Humanity & Inclusion assessed that, on average, 500 bombs a day had been dropped on Gaza, meaning that, as of today, the total number of bombs dropped exceeds 100,000.
Hundreds of these bombs have been US-supplied 2,000lb bombs, which, last week, Frank Gardner, the BBC’s Security Correspondent, citing the UN, described as having “a lethal fragmentation radius of 350 metres”, which “can penetrate concrete more than three metres thick”, and which “leave a crater over 15 metres wide, making it completely unsuitable for use in a place heavily populated by civilians.” As Gardner added, “Even for those people several streets away, the effects can be horrific”, with the UN stating that “the pressure from the explosion can rupture lungs, burst sinus cavities and tear off lies hundreds of metres from the blast site.”
The Gaza Strip, which is home to 2.3 million people — largely the descendants of refugees from the brutal and bloody ethnic cleansing that accompanied the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 — covers just 140 square miles (or 365 square kilometres) of land along the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea — roughly half the size of New York City, and a quarter of the size of London.
Palestine Vision: An Astonishing Night of Music at the Tabernacle in Notting Hill as an Alternative to the Tainted Eurovision Song Contest
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On Tuesday evening (May 7), I was humbled, honoured and privileged to attend ‘Palestine Vision’, an evening of Palestinian music at the Tabernacle in Notting Hill, London W11, which featured Palestinian musicians from the global diaspora of Palestinian refugees, as well as performances by Palestinian musicians flown in from the Occupied Territories, and from Israel itself. The programme is available here.
Sadly, but understandably, there were no musicians from the Gaza Strip, essentially because those musicians who have not been murdered by Israel since October 7 — as part of targeted bombings aimed specifically at cultural figures, or via the ceaseless and indiscriminate carpet bombing — are trapped in what, for many years, has been described as an “open-air prison”, but which, since Israel’s genocide began seven months ago, has become the world’s largest concentration camp.
The event was organized by the Bethlehem Cultural Festival, established in 2020, and was specifically labeled as an alternative to the Eurovision Song Contest, timed to coincide with Eurovision’s first round of semi-finals, prior to the grand final this Saturday, in Malmö, Sweden, in which, disgracefully, Israel is taking part, despite being engaged in a genocide of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.
As Israel’s Genocide in Gaza Grinds On, the Old Order Is Collapsing, But Can a New World Arise?
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Who knew, just seven months ago, that it would be Joe Biden, the Democratic President of the United States, who would be responsible for supporting a genocide, and for the most severe betrayal of the principles of international humanitarian law and the most acute increase in the suppression of free speech that any of us in the west have seen in our lifetimes?
The trigger, of course, was Biden’s response to the attacks in Israel by Hamas and other militants on October 7, 2023, when, having broken out of the “open-air prison” of the Gaza Strip, they killed 1,068 Israeli civilians (695 civilians and 373 members of the military and the police), as well as 71 foreign nationals, and abducted around 240 hostages (both Israeli and foreign nationals), taking them back to the Gaza Strip with the intention of using them for hostage exchanges with some of the many thousands of Palestinians, including women and children, who are held in Israeli prisons in shockingly brutal and fundamentally lawless conditions.
These attacks were horrendous, but they didn’t take place in a vacuum. Since 1948, when the State of Israel was created — largely by settlers who arrived from Europe in their hundreds of thousands, after the British, administering Palestine following the fall of the Ottoman Empire, promised it to them as a Jewish homeland — and its founders killed around 15,000 Palestinians, and forced 700,000 others into exile, violence and bloodshed have defined the story of this bitterly contested land.
End Times for Humanity, With the West Fully Committed to Israel’s Genocide of the Palestinians and to Complete Climate Collapse
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Over the last few weeks, I’ve been suffering from a state of exhaustion that made me wonder if I had some undiagnosed terminal illness. I’ve been unable to concentrate, and, as soon as I woke up, I was wondering when I could go back to bed again.
Yesterday, the fog finally lifted, and I realized that my exhaustion was almost certainly a result of the dire state of the world right now — primarily related to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza (still, after the murder of over 37,000 civilians, largely supported by western politicians and the mainstream media), but also to the cascading climate collapse that these same politicians and media outlets don’t want to talk about.
On Gaza, I suspect that my exhaustion was primarily related to an overwhelming sense of futility and powerlessness regarding any hope that the relentless genocide might be stopped. For those, like myself, who have been watching this grotesque live-streamed genocide unfold for over six months — ever since Hamas militants and other Gaza-based militants broke out of the “open-air prison” of the Gaza Strip on October 7 and killed 695 Israeli civilians, 373 members of the military and the police, and 71 foreign nationals — there have only been a few moments when hope appeared to be in the ascendant, and on each occasion the aftermath, when that hope was crushed, has been difficult to negotiate.
Yes, AI Is a Component of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, But It’s Not the Whole Story
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On Wednesday (April 3) the NGO Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor published its latest infographic showing how many Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip by Israeli since October 7 — 41,496 Palestinians in 180 days. That’s 230 a day, or nearly ten people killed every single hour for the last six months.
This is a devastating indictment of Israel’s actions, and is also damning with regard to all the western nations, led by the US, who have been supporting this unprecedented frenzy of civilian slaughter.
According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, who, notably, include the nearly 10,000 people buried under the rubble of countless bombing attacks, the total death toll includes 15,370 children and 9,671 women, with 90% of the dead identified as civilians.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
