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Category: Benjamin Netanyahu

  • Starvation in Gaza is so bad even the BBC is covering it – and reporting it all wrong

    The BBC’s role is not to keep viewers informed. It’s to persuade them a clear crime against humanity by Israel is, in fact, highly complicated geopolitics they cannot hope to understand

    You can tell how bad levels of starvation now are in Gaza, as the population there begins the third month of a complete aid blockade by Israel, because last night the BBC finally dedicated a serious chunk of its main news programme, the News at Ten, to the issue.

    But while upsetting footage of a skin-and-bones, five-month-old baby was shown, most of the segment was, of course, dedicated to confusing audiences by two-sidesing Israel’s genocidal programme of starving 2 million-plus Palestinian civilians.

    Particularly shocking was the BBC’s failure in this extended report to mention even once the fact that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been a fugitive for months from the International Criminal Court, which wants him on trial for crimes against humanity. Why? For using starvation as a weapon of war against the civilian population.

    I have yet to see the BBC, or any other major British media outlet, append the status “wanted war crimes suspect” when mentioning Netanyahu in stories. That is all the more unconscionable on this occasion, in a story directly related to the very issue – starving a civilian population – he is charged over.

    Was mention of the arrest warrant against him avoided because it might signal a little too clearly that the highest legal authorities in the world attribute starvation in Gaza directly to Israel and its government, and do not see it – as the British establishment media apparently do – as some continuing, unfortunate “humanitarian” consequence of “war”.

    Predictably misleading, too, was BBC Verify’s input. It provided a timeline of Israel’s intensified blockade that managed to pin the blame not on Israel, even though it is the one blocking all aid, but implicitly on Hamas.

    Verify’s reporter asserted that in early March, Israel “blocked humanitarian aid, demanding that Hamas extend a ceasefire and release the remaining hostages”. He then jumped to 18 March, stating: “Israel resumes military operations.”

    Viewers were left, presumably intentionally, with the impression that Hamas had rejected a continuation of the ceasefire and had refused to release the last of the hostages.

    None of that is true. In fact, Israel never honoured the ceasefire, continuing to attack Gaza and kill civilians throughout. But worse, Israel’s supposed “extension” was actually its unilateral violation of the ceasefire by insisting on radical changes to the terms that had already been agreed, and which included Hamas releasing the hostages.

    Israel broke the ceasefire precisely so it had the pretext it needed to return to starving Gaza’s civilians – and the hostages whose safety it proclaims to care about – as part of its efforts to make them so desperate they are prepared to risk their lives by forcing open the short border with neighbouring Sinai sealed by Egypt.

    Yesterday, an Israeli government minister once again made clear what the game plan has been from the very start. “Gaza will be entirely destroyed,” Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, said. Gaza’s population, he added, would be forced to “leave in great numbers to third countries”. In other words, Israel intends to carry out what the rest of us would call the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, as it has been doing continuously for eight decades.

    Simply astonishing. We’ve had 19 months of Israeli government ministers and military commanders telling us they are destroying Gaza. They’ve destroyed Gaza. And yet, Western politicians and media still refuse to call it a genocide.

    What is the point of the BBC’s Verify service—supposedly there to fact-check and ensure viewers get only the unvarnished truth—when its team is itself peddling gross distortions of the truth?

    The BBC and its Verify service are not keeping viewers informed. They are propagandising them into believing a clear crime against humanity by Israel is, in fact, highly complicated geopolitics that audiences cannot hope to understand.

    The establishment media’s aim is to so confuse audiences that they will throw up their hands and say: “To hell with Israel and the Palestinians! They are as bad as each other. Leave it to the politicians and diplomats to sort out.”

    In any other circumstance, it would strike you as obvious that starving children en masse is morally abhorrent, and that anyone who does it, or excuses it, is a monster. The role of the BBC is to persuade you that what should be obvious to you is, in fact, more complicated than you can appreciate.

    There may be skin-and-bones babies, but there are also hostages. There may be tens of thousands of children being slaughtered, but there is also a risk of antisemitism. Israeli officials may be calling for the eradication of the Palestinian people, but the Jewish state they run needs to be preserved at all costs.

    If we could spend five minutes in Gaza without the constant, babbling distractions of these so-called journalists, the truth would be clear. It’s a genocide. It was always a genocide.

    The post Starvation in Gaza is so bad even the BBC is covering it – and reporting it all wrong first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Expulsion and Occupation: Israel’s Proposed Gaza Plan

    Killing civilians wholesale, starving them to convince those unaffected to change course, and shepherding whole populations like livestock into conditions of further misery would all qualify as heinous crimes in international law.  When it comes to Israel’s war in Gaza, this approach is seen as necessary politics, unalloyed by the restraints of humanitarianism.  When confronted with these harsh realities on the ground, unequivocal denials follow: This is not happening in Gaza; no one is starving. And if that were the case, blame those misguided savages in Hamas.

    As the conflict chugs along in pools of blood and bountiful gore, the confused shape of Israel’s intentions continues in all its glorious nebulousness.  Pretend moderation clouds murderous desire.  There is no sense that those unfortunate Israeli hostages captured by Hamas in its assault on October 7, 2023, matter anymore, being merely decorative for the imminent slaughter.  There is even less sense that Hamas will be cleansed and removed from the strip, however attractive this idea continues to be.

    Such evident limits have not discouraged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, who have decided that more force, that old province of the unimaginative, is the answer.  According to the PM, the cabinet had agreed on a “forceful operation” to eliminate Hamas and salvage what is left of the hostage situation.

    A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces, Brigadier-General Effie Defrin, has explained on Israeli radio that the offensive will apparently ensure the return of the hostages.  What follows will be “the collapse of the Hamas regime, its defeat, its submission”.  Anywhere up to two million Palestinian civilians in Gaza will be herded into the ruins of the south.  Humanitarian aid will be arranged by the Israeli forces to be possibly distributed through approved contractors.

    The IDF chief of staff, Lt. General Eyal Zamir, confirmed that the approved plan will involve “the capture of the Strip and holding the territories, moving the Gazan population south for its defence, denying Hamas the ability to distribute humanitarian supplies, and powerful attacks against Hamas.”

    Within the Israeli cabinet, ethnocentric and religious fires burn with bright fanaticism.  The Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich remains a figure who ignores floral subtlety in favour of the blood-stained sledgehammer.  He remains that coherent link between cruel lawmaking and baffling violence.  “Within a few months,” he boasts, “we will be able to declare that we have won.  Gaza will be totally destroyed.”  With pompous certitude, he also claimed that the next six months would see Hamas cease to exist.

    Such opinions, expressed at the “Settlements Conference” organised by the Makor Rishon newspaper in Ofra, a West Bank settlement, give a sense of the flavour.  Palestinians are to be “concentrated” on land located between the Egyptian border and the arbitrarily designated Morag Corridor.  As with any potential abuser keen to violate his vulnerable charges while justifying it, Smotrich tried to impress with the idea that this was a “humanitarian” zone that would be free of “Hamas and terrorism”.

    The program here is clear in its chilling crudeness.  Expulsion, relocation, transfer.  These are the words famously used to move on populations of a sizeable number in history, often at enormous cost.  That this should involve lawmakers of the Jewish state adds a stunning, if perverse, poignancy to this.  They, the moved on in history, the expelled and the condemned wanderers, shall expel others and condemn them in turn.  Smotrich also points the finger at desperation and hopelessness, the biting incentives that propel migration.  The Palestinians will feel blessed in their banishment.  “They will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.”

    Impossible to ignore in Smotrich’s steaming bile against the Palestinians is the broader view that no Palestinian state can arise, necessitating urgent, preventative poisoning.  In addition to the eventual depopulation of Gaza, plans to reconstitute the contours of the West Bank, ensuring that Israeli and Palestinian traffic are separated to enable building and construction for settlements as a prelude to annexation, are to be implemented.

    The issue of twisting and mangling humanitarian aid in favour of Israel’s territorial lust has raised some tart commentary.  A statement from the Humanitarian Country Team of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, a forum led by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), does not shy away from the realities on the ground.  All supplies, including those vital to survival, have been blocked for nine weeks.  Bakeries and community kitchens have closed, while warehouses are empty.  Hunger, notably among children, is rampant.  Israel’s plan, as presented, “will mean that large parts of Gaza, including the less mobile and most vulnerable people, will continue to go without supplies.”

    The UN Secretary General and the Emergency Relief Coordinator have confirmed that they will not cooperate in the scheme, as it “does not adhere to the global humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, independence, and neutrality.”

    The foreign ministers of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany have made the same point.  Despite all being solid allies of Israel, they have warned that violations of international law are taking place.  “Humanitarian aid must never be used as a political tool and a Palestinian territory must not be reduced nor subjected to any demographic change”.

    To date, a promise lingers that the offensive will only commence once US President Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar takes place.  But no ongoing savaging of Gaza with some crude effort at occupation will solve the historical vortex that continues to drag the Jewish state to risk and oblivion.

    The post Expulsion and Occupation: Israel’s Proposed Gaza Plan first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Financial Times: The West’s shameful silence on Gaza – do more to restrain Benjamin Netanyahu

    EDITORIAL: The Financial Times editorial board

    After 19 months of conflict that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and drawn accusations of war crimes against Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu is once more preparing to escalate Israel’s offensive in Gaza.

    The latest plan puts Israel on course for full occupation of the Palestinian territory and would drive Gazans into ever-narrowing pockets of the shattered strip.

    It would lead to more intensive bombing and Israeli forces clearing and holding territory, while destroying what few structures remain in Gaza.

    This would be a disaster for 2.2 million Gazans who have already endured unfathomable suffering.

    Each new offensive makes it harder not to suspect that the ultimate goal of Netanyahu’s far-right coalition is to ensure Gaza is uninhabitable and drive Palestinians from their land. For two months, Israel has blocked delivery of all aid into the strip.

    Child malnutrition rates are rising, the few functioning hospitals are running out of medicine, and warnings of starvation and disease are growing louder. Yet the US and European countries that tout Israel as an ally that shares their values have issued barely a word of condemnation.

    They should be ashamed of their silence, and stop enabling Netanyahu to act with impunity.

    In brief remarks on Sunday, US President Donald Trump acknowledged Gazans were “starving”, and suggested Washington would help get food into the strip.

    But, so far, the US president has only emboldened Netanyahu. Trump returned to the White House promising to end the war in Gaza after his team helped broker a January ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

    Under the deal, Hamas agreed to free hostages in phases, while Israel was to withdraw from Gaza and the foes were to reach a permanent ceasefire.

    But within weeks of the truce taking hold, Trump announced an outlandish plan for Gaza to be emptied of Palestinians and taken over by the US.

    In March, Israel collapsed the ceasefire as it sought to change the terms of the deal, with Washington’s backing. Senior Israeli officials have since said they are implementing Trump’s plan to transfer Palestinians out of Gaza.

    On Monday, far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said: “We are finally going to occupy the Gaza Strip.”

    Netanyahu insists an expanded offensive is necessary to destroy Hamas and free the 59 remaining hostages. The reality is that the prime minister has never articulated a clear plan since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack killed 1200 people and triggered the war.

    Instead, he repeats his maximalist mantra of “total victory” while seeking to placate his extremist allies to ensure the survival of his governing coalition.

    But Israel is also paying a price for his actions. The expanded offensive would imperil the lives of the hostages, further undermine Israel’s tarnished standing and deepen domestic divisions.

    Israel has briefed that the expanded operation would not begin until after Trump’s visit to the Gulf next week, saying there is a “window” for Hamas to release hostages in return for a temporary truce.

    Arab leaders are infuriated by Netanyahu’s relentless pursuit of conflict in Gaza yet they will fete Trump at lavish ceremonies with promises of multibillion-dollar investments and arms deals.

    Trump will put the onus on Hamas when speaking to his Gulf hosts. The group’s murderous October 7 attack is what triggered the Israeli offensive.

    Gulf states agree that its continued stranglehold on Gaza is a factor prolonging the war. But they must stand up to Trump and convince him to pressure Netanyahu to end the killing, lift the siege and return to talks.

    The global tumult triggered by Trump has already distracted attention from the catastrophe in Gaza. Yet the longer it goes on, the more those who remain silent or cowed from speaking out will be complicit.

    This editorial was published by the London Financial Times under the original title “The west’s shameful silence on Gaza: The US and European allies should do more to restrain Benjamin Netanyahu” on May 6, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Smotrich: Israel Won’t Leave Gaza, “Not Even in Exchange for Hostages”

    A top Israeli minister has vowed that Israel’s military will “conquer” Gaza and flatten everything that’s left, regardless of whether or not that plan endangers the lives of the remaining Israeli captives being held in the Strip — undercutting Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu and the media’s narrative about Israel pushing for a deal. On Sunday, Netanyahu’s security cabinet approved a plan…

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  • Sci-fi Antidote for the Age of Genocide

    Are you overwhelmed by Israel, Trump, starvation, drones, hypersonic monstrosities, doubling our ‘defense’ budget, reducing people to things, bloodlust? Did I mention ISRAEL?

    I turn to sci fi when the world looks/ feels super bleak. Mickey7 is a 2022 science fiction novel by Edward Ashton with a sequel, Antimatter Blues, and a film adaptation, Mickey 17, directed by Bong Joon-ho. As with any really good novel-film, you should start with a nice hardback in a comfortable chair and launch yourself into the cosmos, let your imagination do the travelling. The many metaphors behind it are too savory to waste on a rushed, cut-to-the-bone glossy visual spectacle. The special effects are best conjured in your mind in this page-turner with multiple meanings.

    The eponymous Mickey7 is a cyborg, the expendable member of a beachhead colony on an alien world. He fell down a deep hole in the snowy, rocky planet Neflheim and was left for dead by his supposed best human friend Berto, though his human true-love Nasha wanted to volunteer to save him. But he failed to die. A huge creeper – a native (nephilim?) – shepherds him out of the tunnel, though by the time he returned to the colony, there was already a Mickey8 being ‘born’ out of primordial soup, a reconstruction of him, a kind of super 3D-bioprint. This latest technology requires supercomputers and huge amounts of energy, but with the harnessing of antimatter, energy is limitless and such a creation is possible.

    Sounds great, but this process was used by a psychopath, Manikova, in the past, on the terraformed Eden II, to make multiple clones of himself and, well, the whole process was shutdown and then refashioned to be used only to assist colonization of other planets. One ‘expendable’ would accompany each colony to be used to test the atmosphere, land, water for toxins and other suicidal missions and if he dies horribly, he would be reconstituted.

    Who would want to do that? Criminals, but also volunteers who would imagine themselves as living a kind of eternal life. As long as they were nice, heroic and obedient. If not, they would, well, you get the picture. Not so eternal.

    It’s a delightful tale of essentially identical twins, thinking alike, rivals, playing the usual twin games of fooling your lover with your twin taking your place, leading to jealousy and then a threesome (with yourself!). You laugh, and ponder lots of philosophical and war&peace issues:

    *The ship of Theseus paradox: if you repair the ship over time, or just rebuild it from scratch, is it still the ship? Are Mickey7&8 sharing one consciousness, one soul? When an expendable takes a trip to the tank, he’s just doing in one go what his body would naturally do over the course of time anyway. As long as memory is preserved, he hasn’t really died. Kant’s phenomenology means we can never really know the nous of the phenomenon, i.e., there’s no answer. The Natalist religion that arose after the initial psychopath scare proclaims ‘one human one soul’, with capital punishment for any violation. I.e., the question doesn’t/shouldn’t arise.

    *A corollary paradox: Does a threesome with your double and his/your lover make you a ‘perv’?

    *When he’s facing death for the 8th time, he tells Nasha not to watch. No, I’ll be there. Dying … even if it’s temporary, you shouldn’t have to do it with nobody around for company.

    *The hero is portrayed as a venal selfish coward, a traitor. Sound like hasbara about Hamas guerrilla fights? Living in tunnels that the colonizers can’t seem to penetrate, and fear? The protagonist(s) wearing suicide antimatter vests in the tunnels to kill the enemy/themselves. Israeli commandos destroying Hamas in their tunnels? Later, when faced with execution, Nasha says, This colony wasn’t chartered as a theocracy. You can’t just burn us at the stake.

    *A man has conspired with the enemy in a time of war. There is no greater crime./ What about genocide? It wasn’t conspiring with the enemy that led us to abandon old Earth.

    *The creepers are communal intelligence. The Marshall thinks that they are at war because the creepers killed a few humans. The idea that dissecting a few ancillaries would be considered an act of aggression is beyond them. They are just parts of the whole, not intelligent things themselves. I realized reading this that Nature is communal. There are no individuals except as fractal bits of the whole. This is a principle throughout Nature. If a few humans die, so what? The human race goes on. We have lost this vital understanding of Nature. We only exist communally.

    *Don’t kill the messenger. When Mickey7 refuses to commit genocide against the natives, Netanyahu (sorry, the Marshall) wants first to just kill him, but Mickey7 is now the only emissary, mediator with the native creepers, the only one they trust. Netanyahu (sorry!) assumes they are just Amalek, not really Jewish (sorry, human) so it is fine to kill them all and terraform Niflheim. Mickey7 realized they were sentient, as they magnanimously saved him. They read his mind and realized he was not their enemy, that he trusted them, so while Mickey8 was getting ready to kill them all in their tunnel with an antimatter bomb, they killed him and let Mickey7 return to mediate with Netanyahu (I’m not going to keep apologizing, though to be fair to Netanyahu, Trump fits the bill equally.).

    *The tunnels are immune to carpet bombing – low tech defensive technology – keeping the natives safe from the colonists/Zionists.

    *Antimatter WMDs hover over the novel, a silver bullet but extremely dangerous. We may not have the high ground anymore, but we still have an insane amount of power available. Sound familiar? When Netanyahu/the Marshall doesn’t kill Mickey7&8 immediately, Mickey 7 cracks, Don’t get too excited, Eight. I’m pretty sure this is a temporary reprieve. Poor Gazans at this very moment!

    *It’s a truism that every new technological advancement has been applied first to advance the interests of the horny. The printing press? Some Bibles, mostly porn. Antibiotics? Perfect for treating STIs. The second area of course is war.

    *The best colonizing effort was on a planet with sentient, shy tree-dwelling cephalopods (octopuses) who were not even noticed by colonizers for two decades, so the colonizers were not primed to face a lethal enemy by then and a common language and modus vivendi was achieved. These natives were so attuned to their environment that they didn’t need fire, killing, agriculture, war – all the things that made humans so toxic. (Read: Palestinians as the shy natives, but Muslims in general, who lived peacefully in the Ottoman caliphate and never developed lethal industrial technology, vs European countries, obsessed with war and world conquest.) Sadly, no analogy with resolving the Palestine-Israel standoff today.

    Ashton mulled over these provocative themes for years, rewriting his 2022 novel from an earlier short story, but it’s as if he’s writing it today. Genocide of natives by venal colonizers, tunnels as refuge, runaway greenhouse effect, Earth abandoned. It is cathartic to read a vision of how it is possible to escape the nightmare world that US-Israel is creating and live in peace and harmony with natives. It’s very difficult, and can only come after heart-wrenching suffering.

    The post Sci-fi Antidote for the Age of Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Drip-drip of Slanted Gaza Reporting Erodes Our Sense of Right and Wrong

    It is quite possible to take apart virtually any report in the Guardian on Gaza – as I have done with a story in today’s paper – and identify the same kinds of journalistic malpractice.

    Further, I could have taken any paragraph in the article and parsed it in much the same way as I do below. But for the sake of brevity, I have selected four paragraphs (each in bold) that illustrate the abysmal state of reporting about Gaza by Britain’s supposedly most serious, liberal newspaper.

    Note that these misrepresentations are included in a story that is ostensibly critical of Israel. A new report by the United Nations accuses Israel of physically abusing and torturing its staff, including teachers, doctors, and social workers, and of using others as human shields.

    The language and framing used by the Guardian below serve to dilute the impact of the UN report, and thereby give Israel’s behaviour far more legitimacy than it deserves.

    “The Palestine Red Crescent Society said on Tuesday that Israel had released a medic held since a deadly and hugely controversial attack by Israeli troops on ambulances in southern Gaza on 23 March.”

    “Hugely controversial” is the Guardian’s cowardly way of referring to an indisputable atrocity. Israel murdered 15 paramedics and fire crew members in a three-and-a-half-minute hail of bullets on clearly marked emergency vehicles. Israel then crushed the vehicles, and buried them and the crews’ bodies to hide the evidence.

    In what world is that only “controversial”?

     

    “Controversy” implies two sides to an issue. It suggests room for doubt. There is no debate or doubt about what happened, apart from one perpetuated by the Western media. Had Russia done the same to Ukrainian medics, the Guardian would be calling it what it is: a war crime.

    War crimes aren’t “controversial”. They are war crimes.

    “Israel banned all cooperation with UNRWA’s activities in Gaza and the occupied West Bank earlier this year, and claims the [United Nations] agency has been infiltrated by Hamas, an allegation that has been fiercely contested.”

    Again, “fiercely contested” is the Guardian’s weaselly way of giving credence to an obvious Israeli lie. Israel has had many, many months to produce even a sliver of evidence to support its claim that Hamas infiltrated the UN refugee agency, UNRWA – and they have signally failed to do so.

    To call the smear an “allegation” and claim it is “contested” is to suggest that someone apart from Israel takes the smear seriously. They don’t. That is why it is a smear.

    “Rights groups accuse Israel of using a ‘starvation tactic’ that endangers the whole population, potentially making it a war crime.”

    It is not just “rights groups”, and it’s not just an “accusation”. The International Criminal Court has an arrest warrant out for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against humanity, and one of those crimes is for starving Gaza’s population. Israel’s starvation policy has actually intensified since Israel broke the ceasefire agreement last month. Israeli leaders even proudly admit they are starving the population. So, how is that just an “accusation”?

    And starving the population isn’t just “potentially” a war crime. It is a war crime. It is a prime example in international law of “collective punishment” – collectively punishing civilians for the actions of their leaders. And in this case, “punishment” is starving them to death – the gravest kind of collective punishment and the gravest kind of war crime.

    “Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has vowed to continue the offensive until all the hostages are returned and Hamas is either destroyed or agrees to disarm and leave the territory.”

    Journalists usually use the word “vow” to indicate a positive view of a proposed action. A more neutral word here would be “threatened”. Even the conservative International Court of Justice suspects Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. How does “Netanyahu vowed to continue the genocide until all the hostages are returned” sound? Strange? Outrageous? Then, you understand the point.

    Further, why is the Guardian parroting only the most self-serving of Netanyahu’s claims about the aims of Israel’s war crimes (while giving Israel the benefit of the doubt about whether they are war crimes)? There are a whole host of other, far more plausible reasons for Israel destroying all of Gaza’s infrastructure, including its hospitals, and killing and maiming 100,000s of Palestinians, than “getting the hostages back” or “disarming Hamas”.

    They include an aim stated by Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders that they wish to “encourage” Palestinians to leave their homeland. The wanton death and destruction spread by Israel seem to be what they all mean by “encouragement”.

    The constant drip-drip of skewed language, slanted reporting, and prejudicial framing by the Western media has a purpose. It is intended to erode the reader’s sense of right and wrong, fact and fiction, victim and oppressor.

    It is there to disorientate us, leaving us more open to disbelieving what we can see with our own eyes: that there is a genocide going on, and our own leaders are actively assisting it.

    The post The Drip-drip of Slanted Gaza Reporting Erodes Our Sense of Right and Wrong first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • UK’s Continued Designation of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) Makes It Complicit in Genocide

    ‘In a historic, groundbreaking legal challenge The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) have instructed British lawyers to submit a formal application to the British Secretary of State, requesting that the movement be de-proscribed as a ‘terrorist organisation’. The several hundred page application is supported by leading experts in law, international relations, politics, academia and journalism.’ (Hamas Legal Team.)

    In international law Palestinians, living under a brutal occupation, have a legal right to all forms of resistance – including that of armed struggle. It is argued that in designating Hamas as a terrorist organisation Britain’s actions are politically motivated and have rendered them complicit in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

    Hamas only operates within Israel and has never been a threat to Britain. Designating Hamas as a terrorist organisation within the U.K. will likely have come at the behest of Israel, US and Zionist organisations who openly support Israel’s racist, colonial settler aspirations to establish a Jewish State over all of historic Palestine and beyond.

    During the free and fair elections in 2006, Palestinians, in both Gaza and the occupied territories of West Bank, overwhelmingly voted for Hamas as their government. While the Palestinian Authority has retained power in the West Bank, Hamas is the recognised government within Gaza and is responsible for all public services in Gaza, including schools, police and hospitals. As such, anyone working in the public sector is deemed by Israel to be ‘Hamas’ and is regarded by the Israeli ‘Defence’ Force, as a legitimate military target. As the genocide of Palestinians has continued into its third calendar year, several Israeli officials have stated that all of the civilian population are legitimate military targets because of the wide support Hamas received from the people. This mass criminalisation of a civilian population, including its children and babies, is used by Israel to justify the slaughter that we are witnessing on a daily basis. The ethnic cleansing that began with the establishment of Israel in 1948, is in its final stages of clearing the land of its native Palestinian population.

    The submission presented by the legal team makes reference to Nelson Mandela, who during his resistance of South Africa’s racist apartheid policies, was labelled as a terrorist by Margaret Thatcher’s British Government. The comparison is apt. These politically motivated labels serve to justify the criminal behaviour of oppressive brutal regimes. In South Africa the racism and labels led to the displacement of millions of blacks and the imprisonment and slaughter of those who stood up for freedom and dignity. Today Nelson Mandela is considered to be a hero and before his death, was welcomed into Britain as an honoured statesman. In the U.K. racism, discrimination and incitement to violence through ‘hate speech’ is now deemed to be a crime.

    Zionism is Israel’s official racist policy. Palestinians are regarded as lesser beings, frequently subjected to military incursions, detention, murder and humiliating checks in the occupied territories of the West Bank. The refugees of 1948, who fled into Gaza, having had their land and homes stolen, are imprisoned in a small enclave without adequate support for life. For almost 20years there has been a growing crisis where potable water, food and medicine have become scarce commodities resulting in starvation and chronic disease amongst its most vulnerable – the old and the young. The people of Gaza have been subjected to ongoing displacement, bombing raids and military incursions, since 2006. This current Israeli crime of genocide – ‘Sending Gaza back to the stone age’, has left hundreds of thousands dead, families without shelter and is seen as Israel’s final extermination of an honourable people whose crime is to be the rightful ancestral inhabitants of the land.

    After a case was brought by the Government of South Africa, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel is guilty of plausible genocide. This means that governments and individuals are charged with a responsibility to do everything within their power to bring a halt to the genocide in Gaza. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, for their participation in war crimes. Other non-governmental organisations have attempted to bring about further charges of complicity to war crimes and genocide, against several Western leaders.

    People around the world have watched in horror as this holocaust is being played out in real time. This legal case is of immense importance in a first step toward putting things right. Britain has a special responsibility toward contributing to a just closure to this tragedy because of its historical role in the setting up of this hundred year plus, colonial settler project. Continuing to be subservient to Israel, US and Zionist power groups, the British Government is not acting in the interests of the British people. They are acting in the interests of a foreign state. By taking a leadership role in de-proscribing Hamas as a terrorist organisation, Britain would go some way toward public recognition of the historical harm Britain has done to the Palestinians.The Government’s continued support of Israel’s crimes by military assistance and cover by giving ‘legal legitimacy’ to an otherwise murderous enterprise, must end. It is a violation of human rights and a violation of sovereignty that brings shame down upon all of us.

  • See also “How Fair Was it to Label Hamas ‘Terrorists’?How Fair Was it to Label Hamas ‘Terrorists’?“
    • The post UK’s Continued Designation of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) Makes It Complicit in Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Yale Voids Pro-Palestine Group’s Status After Protest of Israeli Police Minister

    Yale University revoked the registration status of a pro-Palestine student group on Wednesday after hundreds of students protested against a speaking event by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir on Tuesday, despite the group saying that it was not responsible for organizing the demonstration. This past week, Yale students reestablished their Gaza solidarity encampment in…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Orbán Faces ICC Investigation After Refusing To Arrest Netanyahu

    In a shameless attempt to undermine international accountability for accused war criminal Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Hungarian President Viktor Orbán graciously hosted the architect of Israel’s 18-month genocide in Gaza on April 3.

    The International Criminal Court (ICC) is now formally investigating Hungary’s blatant refusal to fulfill its legal obligation to arrest Netanyahu and send him to The Hague. States parties to the Rome Statute have a duty to cooperate with the court and facilitate the arrest of any ICC suspect who enters their territory. Although Orbán announced Hungary’s withdrawal from the statute on April 3, it does not take effect for one year.

    The post Orbán Faces ICC Investigation After Refusing To Arrest Netanyahu appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Orbán Faces ICC Investigation After Refusing to Arrest Netanyahu in Hungary

    In a shameless attempt to undermine international accountability for accused war criminal Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Hungarian President Viktor Orbán graciously hosted the architect of Israel’s 18-month genocide in Gaza on April 3. The International Criminal Court (ICC) is now formally investigating Hungary’s blatant refusal to fulfill its legal obligation to arrest Netanyahu…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • How Israel Used October 7 to Spread Propaganda

    This video dives into a groundbreaking investigation by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit, exposing how fabricated stories about October 7 were used to justify mass violence — and how the Western media played along.

    The post How Israel Used October 7 to Spread Propaganda first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Al Jazeera.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Pope Has Died, and the Palestinian People Have Lost an Important Advocate

    Pope Francis has died after using his Easter Sunday address to call for peace in Gaza. I don’t know who the cardinals will pick to replace him, but I do know with absolute certainty that there are transnational intelligence operations in the works to make sure they select a more reliable supporter of Israel. They’ve probably been working on it since his health started failing.

    Anyone who’s been reading me for a while knows my attitude toward Roman Catholicism can be described as openly hostile because of my family history with the Church’s sexual abuses under Cardinal Pell, but as far as popes go this one was decent. Francis had been an influential critic of Israel’s mass atrocities in Gaza, calling for investigation of genocide allegations and denouncing the bombing of hospitals and the murder of humanitarian workers and civilians. He’d been personally calling the only Catholic parish in Gaza by phone every night during the Israeli onslaught, even as his health deteriorated.

    In other words, he was a PR problem for Israel.

    I hope another compassionate human being is announced as the next leader of the Church, but there are definitely forces pushing for a different outcome right now. There is no shortage terrible men who could be chosen for the position.

    *****


    https://x.com/caitoz/status/1913617746052386854

    *****

    Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman Omer Dostri told Israel’s Channel 12 News on Saturday that a deal with Hamas to release all hostages was a non-starter for the Israeli government, because it would require a commitment to lasting peace.

    “At the moment, there can’t be one deal since Hamas isn’t saying: ‘Come get your hostages and that’s that,’ it’s demanding an end to the war,” Dostri said in the interview.

    This comes as Hamas offers to return all hostages, stop digging tunnels, and put away its weapons in exchange for a permanent ceasefire. This is what Israel is dismissing as unacceptable.

    The Gaza holocaust was never about freeing the hostages. This has been clear ever since Israel began aggressively bombing the place where the hostages are living, and it’s gotten clearer and clearer ever since. Last month Netanyahu made it clear that Israel intends to carry out Trump’s ethnic cleansing plans for the enclave even if Hamas fully surrenders.

    When Washington’s podium people say the “war” in Gaza can end if Hamas releases the hostages and lays down their arms, they are lying. They are lying to ensure that the genocide continues.

    When Israel apologists say “Release the hostages!” in response to criticisms of Israeli atrocities, they are lying. They know this has never had anything to do with hostages. They are lying to help Israel commit more atrocities.

    It was never about the hostages. It was never about Hamas. What it’s really about was obvious from day one: purging Palestinians from Palestinian land. That’s all this has ever been.

    *****

    After executing 15 medical workers in Gaza and getting caught lying about it, the IDF has investigated itself and attributed the massacre to “professional failures” and “operational misunderstandings”, finding no evidence of any violation of its code of ethics.

    It’s crazy to think about how much investigative journalism went into exposing this atrocity only to have Israel go “Yeah turns out we did an oopsie, no further action required, thank you to our allies for the latest shipment of bombs.”

    *****

    The death toll from Trump’s terrorist attack on a Yemen fuel port is now up to 80, with 150 wounded. Again, the US has not even tried to claim this was a military target. They said they targeted this critical civilian infrastructure to hurt the economic interests of the Houthis.

    Those who are truly anti-war don’t support Trump. Those who support Trump aren’t truly anti-war.

    I still get people telling me I need to be nicer to Trump supporters because they’re potential allies in resisting war, which to me is just so silly. What are they even talking about? Trump supporters, per definition, currently support the one person who is most singularly responsible for the horrific acts of war we are seeing in the middle east right now. Telling me they’re my allies is exactly as absurd as telling me Biden supporters were my allies last year would have been, except nobody was ever dumb enough to try to make that argument.

    If you still support Trump in April 2025 after seeing all his monstrous behavior in Gaza and Yemen, then we are on completely opposite sides. You might think you’re on the same side as me because you oppose war in theory, but when the rubber meets the road it turns out you’ll go along with any acts of mass military slaughter no matter how evil so long as they are done by a Republican. We are not allies, we are enemies. You side with the most egregious warmonger in the world right now, and I want your side to fail.

    *****

    People say “It’s the Muslims!” or “It’s the Jews!”

    No, it’s the Americans. The US-centralized empire is responsible for most of our world’s problems.

    It says so much about the strength of the imperial propaganda machine that this isn’t more obvious to more people.

    The post The Pope Has Died, and the Palestinian People Have Lost an Important Advocate first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • De Facto Occupation: Israel’s Security Zone Strategy

    In recent months, the Israeli Defense Forces have been much taken by a term that augurs poorly for peaceful accord in the Middle East. “Security zones” are being seized in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon and Syria. Land is, for claimed reasons of self-defence, being appropriated with brazen assuredness. It is hard, however, to see this latest turn as anything other than a de facto military occupation, a situation that will prolong the crisis of vulnerability the Jewish state so wishes to overcome. Israel’s insecurities are much the result of various expansions since 1948 that have only imperilled it to future attack and simmering acrimony. The pattern threatens to repeat itself.

    In Syria, Israel rapidly capitalised on the fall of the Assad regime by shredding the status quo. Within a matter of 11 days after the fleeing of the former President Bashar Al-Assad to Moscow, and again on February 1 this year, satellite images showed six military sites being constructed within what is nominally the UN-supervised demilitarised zone, otherwise known as the Area of Separation. A seventh is being constructed outside the zone and in Syria proper. Such busy feats of construction have also accompanied Israeli encroachment on the land of Syrian civilians, coupled with vexing housing raids, road closures and unsanctioned arrests.

    All this has taken place despite undertakings from Syria’s transitional President Ahmed al-Sharaa that he would recognise the 1974 agreement made with Israel, one which prohibits Israel from crossing the Alpha Line on the western edge of the Area of Separation. “Syria’s war-weary condition, after years of conflict and war, does not allow for new confrontations,” admitted the new leader on December 14, 2024. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was only scornful, regarding the 1974 agreement between the two countries as a dead letter buried by history. “We will not allow any hostile force to establish itself on our border,” he snottily declared.

    Lebanon is also facing a stubborn IDF, one that refuses to abide by the Israel-Hezbollah agreement last November which promised the withdrawal of both forces from southern Lebanon, leaving the Lebanese army to take over the supervising reins. Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, who faces the herculean task of removing Hezbollah’s weapons while potentially integrating members of its group into the Lebanese army, has found his task needlessly onerous. In recent discussions with US deputy Mideast envoy Morgan Ortagus, the Lebanese leader reasoned “that Israel’s presence in the five disputed points gives Hezbollah a pretext to keep its weapons.”

    On April 16, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz promised that such security zones would provide relevant buffers to shield Israeli communities. Ominously, the IDF would “Unlike in the past [not evacuate] areas that have been cleared and seized”. They would “remain in the security zones as a buffer between the enemy and [Israeli] communities in any temporary or permanent situation in Gaza – as in Lebanon and Syria.”

    In Gaza, it is becoming increasingly clear that any prospect of Palestinian autonomy or political independence is to be strangled and snuffed out. Israel has already arbitrarily created the “Morag Corridor”, which excises Rafah from the Strip, and the Netzarim Corridor, which severs Gaza in half. Katz has also promised that the policy of blocking all food, medicine and other vital supplies to Gaza implemented on March 2 will continue, as it “is one of the main pressure levers preventing Hamas from using it as a tool with the population”.

    Displacement orders, euphemised as “evacuation orders”, have become the staple of operating doctrine, the means of creating buffers of guns and steel. On April 11, Israeli authorities issued two such orders, effectively “covering vast areas in northern and southern Gaza”, according to UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric. “Together, these areas span more than 24 square kilometres – roughly the size of everything south of Central Park here in Manhattan.” Within these zones of military seizure lie medical facilities and storage sites filled with vital supplies.

    The UN Human Rights office also expressed its concerns about Israel seemingly “inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life increasingly incompatible with their continued existence as a group in Gaza.” The population was being “forcibly transferred into ever shrinking spaces with little or no access to life-saving services, including water, food, and shelter, and whey they continue to be subject to attacks.” Engaging in such conduct against a civilian population within an occupied territory, the office pointedly observes, satisfies the definition of a forcible transfer, being both a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute of 1998.

    The latest doctrine of appropriation and indeterminate occupation adopted by Katz and the IDF has not impressed the Hostages and Missing Families Forum in Israel, long advocating for the release of Israeli hostages still being held in Gaza by Hamas. “They promised that the hostages come before everything,” came the organisation’s aggrieved observation. “In practice, however, Israel is choosing to seize territory before the hostages.” In doing so, the prerogatives of permanent conflict and habitual predation have displaced the more humane prerogatives of peace.

    The post De Facto Occupation: Israel’s Security Zone Strategy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Should Iran Bend Knee to Donald Trump?

    Former UNSCOM weapons inspector Scott Ritter usually provides excellent analysis of geopolitical events and places them in a morally centered framework. However, in a recent X post, Ritter defends a controversial stance blaming Iran for US and Israeli machinations against Iran.

    Ritter opened, “I have assiduously detailed the nature of the threat perceived by the US that, if unresolved, would necessitate military action, as exclusively revolving around Iran’s nuclear program and, more specifically, that capacity that is excess to its declared peaceful program and, as such, conducive to a nuclear weapons program Iran has admitted is on the threshold of being actualized.”

    Threats perceived by the US. These threats range from North Korea, Viet Nam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iran, China, and Russia. Question: Which of the aforementioned countries is about to — or ever was about to — attack the US? None. (Al Qaeda is not a country) So why does Ritter imply that military action would be necessitated? Is it a vestige of military indoctrination left over from his time as a marine? In this case, why is Ritter not focused on his own backyard and telling the US to butt out of the Middle East? The US, since it is situated on a continent far removed from Iran, should no more dictate to Iran what its defense posture should be in the region than Iran should dictate what the US’s defense posture should be in the northwestern hemisphere.

    Ritter: “In short, I have argued, the most realistic path forward regarding conflict avoidance would be for Iran to negotiate in good faith regarding the verifiable disposition of its excess nuclear enrichment capability.”

    Ritter places the onus for conflict avoidance on Iran. Why? Is Iran seeking conflict with the US? Is Iran making demands of the US? Is Iran sanctioning the US? Moreover, who gets to decide what is realistic or not? Is what is realistic for the US also realistic for Iran? When determining the path forward, one should be aware of who and what is stirring up conflict. Ritter addresses this when he writes, “Even when Trump alienated Iran with his ‘maximum pressure’ tactics, including an insulting letter to the Supreme Leader that all but eliminated the possibility of direct negotiations between the US and Iran…” But this did not alter Ritter’s stance. Iran must negotiate — again. According to Ritter negotiations are how to solve the crisis, a crisis of the US’s (and Israel’s) making.

    Iran had agreed to a deal — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and Germany — collectively known as the P5+1 — with the participation of the European Union. The JCPOA came into effect in 2016. During the course of the JCPOA, Iran was in compliance with the deal. Nonetheless, Trump pulled the US out of the deal in 2018.

    Backing out of agreements/deals is nothing new for Trump (or for that matter, the US). For example, Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement on climate, the Trans-Pacific Partnership on trade, the United Nations cultural organization UNESCO, and the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was subsequently renegotiated under Trump to morph into the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement, which is now imperilled by the Trump administration’s tariff threats, as is the World Trade Organization that regulates international trade.

    Should Iran, therefore, expect adherence to any future agreement signed with the US?

    Ritter insists that he is promoting a reality-based process providing the only viable path toward peace. Many of those who disagree with Ritter’s assertion are lampooned by him as “the digital mob, comprised of new age philosophers, self-styled ‘peace activists’, and a troll class that opposes anything and everything it doesn’t understand (which is most factually-grounded argument), as well as people I had viewed as fellow travelers on a larger journey of conflict avoidance—podcasters, experts and pundits who did more than simply disagree with me (which is, of course, their right and duty as independent thinkers), traversing into the realm of insults and attacks against my intelligence, integrity and character.”

    Ritter continued, “The US-Iran crisis is grounded in the complexities, niceties and formalities of international law as set forth in the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT), which Iran signed in 1970 as a non-nuclear weapons state. The NPT will be at the center of any negotiated settlement.”

    Is it accurate to characterize the crisis as a “US-Iran crisis”? It elides the fact that it is the US imposing a crisis on Iran. More accurately it should be stated as a “US crisis foisted on Iran.”

    Ritter argues, “… the fact remains that this crisis has been triggered by the very capabilities Iran admits to having—stocks of 60% enriched uranium with no link to Iran’s declared peaceful program, and excessive advanced centrifuge-based enrichment capability which leaves Iran days away from possessing sufficient weapons grade high enriched uranium to produce 3-5 nuclear weapons.”

    So, Ritter blames Iran for the crisis. This plays off Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has long accused Iran of seeking nukes. But it ignores the situation in India and Pakistan. Although the relations between the two countries are tense, logic dictates that open warring must be avoided lest it lead to mutual nuclear conflagration. And if Iran dismantles its nuclear program? What happened when Libya dismantled its nuclear program? Destruction by the US-led NATO. As A.B. Abrams wrote, Libya paid the price for

    … having ignored direct warnings from both Tehran and Pyongyang not to pursue such a course [of unilaterally disarming], Libya’s leadership would later admit that disarmament, neglected military modernisation, and trust in Western good will proved to be their greatest mistake–leaving their country near defenceless when Western powers launched their offensive in 2011. (Immovable Object: North Korea’s 70 Years at War with American Power, Clarity Press, 2020: p 296)

    And North Korea has existed with a credible deterrence against any attack on it since it acquired nuclear weapons.

    Relevant background to the current crisis imposed on Iran

    1. The year 1953 is a suitable starting point. It was in this year that the US-UK (CIA and MI6) combined to engineer a coup against the democratically elected Iranian government under prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Mossadegh had committed the unpardonable sin of nationalizing the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
    1. What to replace the Iranian democracy with? A monarchy. In other words, a dictatorship because monarchs are not elected, they are usually born into power. Thus, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi would rule as the shah of Iran for 26 years protected by his secret police, the SAVAK. Eventually, the shah would be overthrown in the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
    1. In an attempt to force Iran to bend knee to US dictate, the US has imposed sanctions, issued threats, and fomented violence.
    1. Starting sometime after 2010, it is generally agreed among cybersecurity experts and intelligence leaks that the Iranian nuclear program was a target of cyberwarfare by the US and Israel — this in contravention of the United Nations Charter Article 2 (1-4):

    1. The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.

    2. All Members, in order to ensure to all of them the rights and benefits resulting from membership, shall fulfill in good faith the obligations assumed by them in accordance with the present Charter.

    3. All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.

    4. All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

    1. The Stuxnet virus caused significant damage to Iran’s nuclear program, particularly at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility.
    1. Israel and the United States are also accused of being behind the assassinations of several Iranian nuclear scientists over the past decade.
    1. On 3 January 2020, Trump ordered a US drone strike at Baghdad International Airport in Iraq that assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani as well as Soleimani ally Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a top Iraqi militia leader.
    1. On 7 October 7 2023, Hamas launched a resistance attack against Israel’s occupation. Since then, Israel has reportedly conducted several covert and overt strikes targeting Iran and its proxies across the region.
    1. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused Iran of seeking nukes for nearly 30 years, long before Iran reached 60% enrichment in 2021. In Netanyahu’s book Fighting Terrorism (1995) he described Iran as a “rogue state” pursuing nukes to destroy Israel. Given that a fanatical, expansionist Zionist map for Israel, the Oded-Yinon plan, draws a Jewish territory that touches on the Iranian frontier, a debilitated Iran is sought by Israel.

     

    Oded Yinon Plan

    Says Ritter, “This crisis isn’t about Israel or Israel’s own undeclared nuclear weapons capability. It is about Iran’s self-declared status as a threshold nuclear weapons state, something prohibited by the NPT. This is what the negotiations will focus on. And hopefully these negotiations will permit the verifiable dismantling of those aspects of its nuclear program the US (and Israel) find to present an existential threat.”

    Why isn’t it about Israel’s nuclear weapons capability? Why does the US and Ritter get to decide which crisis is preeminent?

    It is important to note that US intelligence has long said that no active Iranian nuclear weapon project exists.

    It is also important to note that Arab states have long supported a Middle East Zone Free of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDFZ), particularly nuclear weapons, but Israel and the US oppose it.

    It is also important to note that, in 2021, the U.S. opposed a resolution demanding Israel join the NPT and that the US, in 2018, blocked an Arab-backed IAEA resolution on Israeli nukes. (UN Digital Library. Search: “Middle East WMDFZ”)

    As far as the NPT goes, it must be applied equally to all signatory states. The US as a nuclear-armed nation is bound by Article VI which demands:

    Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.

    Thus, hopefully negotiations will permit the verifiable dismantling of those aspects of the Iranian, US, and Israeli nuclear programs (as well as the nuclear programs of other nuclear-armed nations) that are found to present an existential threat.

    Ritter warns, “Peace is not guaranteed. But war is unless common sense and fact-based logic wins out over the self-important ignorance of the digital mob and their facilitators.”

    A peaceful solution is not achieved by assertions (i.e., not fact-based logic) or by ad hominem. That critics of Ritter’s stance resort to name-calling demeans them, but to respond likewise to one’s critics also taints the respondent.

    Logic dictates that peace is more-or-less guaranteed if UN member states adhere to the United Nations Charter. The US, Iran, and Israel are UN member states. A balanced and peaceful solution is found in the Purposes and Principles as stipulated in Article 1 (1-4) of the UN Charter:

    The Purposes of the United Nations are:

    1. To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace;

    2. To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;

    3. To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and

    4. To be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.

    It seems that only by refusing to abide by one’s obligations laid out the UN Charter and NPT that war looms larger.

    In Ritter’s reality, the US rules the roost against smaller countries. Is such a reality acceptable?

    It stirs up patriotism, but acquiescence is an affront to national dignity. Ritter will likely respond by asking what god is dignity when you are dead. Fair enough. But in the present crisis, if the US were to attack Iran, then whatever last shred of dignity (is there any last shred of dignity left when a country is supporting the genocide of human beings in Palestine?) that American patriots can cling to will have vanished.

    By placing the blame on Iran for a crisis triggered by destabilizing actions of the US and Israel, Ritter asks for Iran to pay for the violent events set in motion by US Israel. If Iran were to cave to Trump’s threats, they would be sacrificing sovereignty, dignity, and self-defense.

    North Korea continues on. Libya is still reeling from the NATO offensive against it. Iran is faced with a choice.

    The Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata knew his choice well: “I’d rather die on my feet, than live on my knees.”

    The post Should Iran Bend Knee to Donald Trump? first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Exterminator Netanyahu In Washington, DC Again

    The chief of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, Exterminator-in-Chief, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu jumped on his plane and jetted from one International Criminal Court denier, authoritarian leader, Victor Orban of Hungary, to another ICC denier in Washington, DC, Donald Trump.

    Trump is the second U.S. president to give Netanyahu the green light for the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.  Biden was guilty of 17 months of complicity in the Israeli genocide of Gaza, while Trump is 2.5 months and counting.

    The post Exterminator Netanyahu In Washington, DC Again appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Hungary, Europe, and the International Criminal Court

    Europe seems to be suffering paroxysms of withdrawal, notably when it comes to international conventions. Many states on the continent seem to have decided that international law is a burden onerous and in need of lightening. Poland, Finland and the three Baltic states, for instance, have concluded that using landmines, despite their indiscriminately murderous quality, somehow fits their mould of self-defence against the Russian Bear. That spells the end of their obligations under the Anti-Personnel Landmines Convention. Lithuania’s government has thought it beneath it to continue abiding by the Convention on Cluster Munitions, withdrawing last month.

    The International Criminal Court now promises to be one member short. Hungary, under the rule of its pugilistic premier, Viktor Orbán, timed the announcement to wounding perfection. Knowing full well that Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, faces an ICC arrest warrant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, and also knowing, full well, Hungary’s obligations as a member state to arrest him, Orbán preferred to do the opposite. That was an international institution both men could rubbish and bash with relish.

    As far back as November, when the warrant was issued, the Hungarian leader had already promised that the order would not run in his country. An invitation to Netanyahu to visit was promptly issued. Spite was in the air. In February this year, Orbán ruminated on his country’s continued membership of the ICC. “It’s time for Hungary to review what we’re doing in an international organization that is under US sanctions!” he bellowed in a post on the X platform. “New winds are blowing in international politics. We call it the Trump-tornado.”

    On the arrival of the Israeli leader for a four-day visit, there was a conspicuous absence of any law officer or police official willing to discharge the duties of the Rome Statute. The reception for Netanyahu featured a welcoming ceremony at the Lion Courtyard in Buda Castle.

    Alongside Netanyahu at a press conference, Orbán trotted out the thesis that has long been used against any international court, or body, that behaves in a way contrary to the wishes of a government. “This very important court has been diminished to a political tool and Hungary wishes to play no role in it.” The abandonment of impartiality was evident by “it’s decisions on Israel.”

    Netanyahu, who conveniently described the warrant for his arrest as “absurd and antisemitic”, brimmed with glee, calling the withdrawal “bold and principled” while directing his usual bile upon the organisation. (Judges, Israeli or international, are not esteemed in the Israeli PM’s universe.) “It’s important for all democracies,” he declared. “It’s important to stand up to this corrupt organisation.” Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar concurred. “The so-called International Criminal Court lost its moral authority after trampling the fundamental principles of international law in its zest for harming Israel’s right to self-defence.” A right, seemingly, to be exercised with defiant impunity.

    Orbán should at least be credited for a certain unvarnished, vulgar honesty. Open contempt is its own virtue. Other European member states of the ICC have been resolutely mealy mouthed in whether they would execute their obligations under the Rome Statute were Netanyahu to visit them. France, for instance, claims that Netanyahu has immunity from prosecution before the ICC, a rather self-defeating proposition if you are in the international justice business. Italy, for its part, expressed doubts on the legal situation.

    Germany, with its obstinate pro-Israeli stance, is one member state deeming the whole idea of arresting an Israeli leader unappetising, raising questions on whether its own membership of the court is valid. “We have spoken about this several times,” stated the country’s outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz at a very recent press conference in Berlin, “and I cannot imagine that an arrest would occur in Germany.”

    Scholz’s successor, Friedrich Merz, has confirmed this blithe attitude to ICC regulations, having promised Netanyahu “that we would find ways and means for him to be able to visit Germany and leave again without being arrested. I think it is a completely absurd idea that an Israeli prime minister cannot visit the Federal Republic of Germany”. As absurd, implicitly, as an international justice system moored in The Hague.

    This made the hypocrisy of Germany’s own criticism of Hungary’s withdrawal from the Rome Statute sharp and tangy, with Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock lamenting the event as “a bad day for international criminal law”. Europe had “clear rules that apply to all EU member states, and that is the Rome Statute.” No mirror, it would seem, was on hand for Baerbock to reconsider the hollowness of such observations before the stance of her own government.

    The response from the Presidency of the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute, delivered in diplomatic if cool language, expressed “regret” at Hungary’s announcement. “When a State Party withdraws from the Rome Statute, it clouds our shared quest or justice and weakens our resolve to fight impunity.” The statement goes on to make the fundamental point: “The ICC is at the centre of the global commitment to accountability, and in order to maintain its strength, it is imperative that the international community support it without reservation.” Hungary’s exit, and European qualifications and niggling subversions of the Court, show that reservations are all the rage, and justice a nuisance when applied inconveniently.

    The post Hungary, Europe, and the International Criminal Court first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Netanyahu’s War on Israeli Institutions


    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is waging a war on many fronts. He has ended the tense ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza in spectacularly bloody fashion and resumed bombing of Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon. Missiles fired at Israel from the Houthi rebels in Yemen also risk seeing a further widening of hostilities.

    Domestically, he has been conducting a bruising, even thuggish campaign against Israeli institutions and their representatives, an effort that is impossible to divorce from his ongoing trial for corruption. He has, for instance, busied himself with removing the attorney journal, Gali Baharav-Miara, a process that will be lengthy considering the necessary role of a special appointments committee. On May 23, the cabinet passed a no-confidence motion against her, prompting a sharp letter from the attorney general that the Netanyahu government had ventured to place itself “above the law, to act without checks and balances, and even at the most sensitive of times”.

    High up on the Netanyahu hit list is the intelligence official Ronen Bar, the Shin Bet chief he explicitly accuses of having foreknowledge of the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. “This is a fact and not a conspiracy,” a statement from the prime minister’s office bluntly asserted. At 4.30am that morning “it was already clear to the outgoing Shin Bet head that an invasion of the State of Israel was likely.”

    The PMO failed to mention Netanyahu’s self-interest in targeting Bar, given that Shin Bet is investigating the office for connections with the Qatari government allegedly involving cash disbursements to promote Doha’s interests.

    While Bar has been formally sacked, a measure never undertaken by any government of the Israeli state, the Israeli High Court has extended a freeze on his removal while permitting Netanyahu to consider replacement candidates.

    It is the judiciary, however, that has commanded much attention, pre-dating the October 7 attacks. Much of 2023 was given over to attempting to compromise the Supreme Court of its influence and independence. Some legislation to seek that process had been passed in July 2023 but the Supreme Court subsequently struck down that law in January 2024 in an 8-7 decision. The relevant law removed the Court’s means to check executive power through invalidating government decisions deemed “unreasonable”. In the view of former Chief Justice Esther Hayut, the law was “extreme and irregular”, marking a departure “from the foundational authorities of the Knesset, and therefore it must be struck down.”

    Even in wartime, the Netanyahu government’s appetite to clip the wings of an active judiciary remained strong. In January 2025, it made a second attempt, with a new, modified proposal jointly authored by Israeli Justice Minister Yariv Levin and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar. The law, passed by the Knesset in its third and final reading on March 27, alters the committee responsible for appointing judges. The previous nine-member judicial selection committee had been composed of three judges, two independent lawyers and four politicians, equally divided between government and opposition. Now, the relevant lawyers will be government and opposition appointees, intended to take effect after the next elections.

    The convulsions in Israeli politics have been evident from various efforts to stall, if not abandon the legislation altogether. The law changing the judicial appointments committee had received 71,023 filed objections. While it passed 67-1, it only did so with the opposition boycotting the vote. Benny Gantz, the chair of National Unity, wrote to Netanyahu ahead of the readings pleading for its abandonment. “I’m appealing to you as someone who bears responsibility for acting on behalf of all citizens of this country.” He reminded the PM that Israeli society was “wounded and bleeding, divided in a way we have not seen since October 6 [2023]. Fifty-nine of our brothers and sisters are still captive in Gaza, and our soldiers, from all political factions, are fighting on multiple fronts.”

    The warning eventually came. To operate in such a manner, permitting a parliamentary majority to “unilaterally approve legislation opposed by the people, will harm the ability to create broad reform that appeals to the whole, will lead to polarization and will increase distrust in both the legislative and executive branches.”

    Before lawmakers in a final effort to convince, Gantz, citing former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, issued a reminder that “democracies fall or die slowly when they suffer from a malignant disease called the disease of the majority”. Such a disease advanced gradually till “the curtain of darkness slowly [descended] on society.”

    Gantz also tried to press Levin to abandon the legislation ahead of the two Knesset plenum readings. In a report from Channel 12, he called it a “mistake” to bring the legislation forward. The response from Levin was that the legislation was a suitable compromise that both he and Sa’ar had introduced as a dilution on the previous proposal that would have vested total control in the government over judicial appointments. The revision was “intended to heal the rift of the nation”.

    Healing for Netanyahu is a hard concept to envisage. His authoritarian politics is that of the supreme survivalist with lashings of expedient populism. Sundering the social compact with damaging attacks on various sacred cows, from intelligence officials to judges, is the sacrifice he is willing to make. That this will result in a distrust in Israeli institutions seems to worry him less than any sparing from accountability and posterity’s questionable rewards.

    The post Netanyahu’s War on Israeli Institutions first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Would It be Okay for Hamas to Strike a Hospital Treating Benjamin Netanyahu?

    Israel has justified bombing a Gaza hospital, killing civilians, because an injured Hamas politician was there. The laws of war only ever seem to be forgotten when it is Israel violating them.

    Israel and its genocide cheerleaders are claiming Israel’s air strike on the Nasser Hospital in Gaza last night – which killed several patients and staff – was justified because a Hamas politician was being treated there for injuries from an earlier Israeli strike.

    Israel has also seized on the fact that a Hamas official was in the hospital to retroactively rationalise its destruction of Gaza’s entire health sector, leaving more than 2 million Palestinians with barely functioning medical care in the midst of Israel’s genocidal bombing campaign.

    At the weekend, the Israeli army blew up the entire Turkish Hospital in Gaza and did so without any possible military justification. Its soldiers had been occupying the hospital, using it as a military post, for much of the past year.

    The hospital had served its purpose for Israel – and Israel sees no purpose for Palestinian hospitals actually serving the Palestinian population. After all, Israel’s goal is to drive Palestinians out of Gaza, and that is made easier if Palestinians have no surviving medical facilities in the enclave.

    Once again, Israel’s “justification” for the latest attack on Nasser Hospital doesn’t even bother to suggest it accords with any known principle of international law.

    Here are a few reminders about the long-established laws of war that only ever seem to be forgotten when it is Israel violating them.

    Even fighters are considered non-combatants – that is, not legitimate targets for military attack – when they are injured and no longer engaged in combat. That rule applies even more obviously to politicians.

    All Israel’s hospitals, such as Rambam in Haifa, regularly treat Israeli soldiers injured in combat. Israeli hospitals are doing so right now – Israel makes no secret of this.

    No one, least of all the people defending last night’s attack on Nasser Hospital in Gaza, would for one moment consider it legitimate for Hamas to bomb Rambam Hospital, killing patients and staff there, to hit an injured soldier being treated at the facility.

    But what Israel did is even more clearly a violation of the laws of war because it bombed the hospital to hit an injured Hamas politician, not a fighter.

    That is the equivalent of Hamas striking a hospital in Israel, killing Israeli staff and patients, to assassinate an Israeli politician.

    Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently spent several days in the Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem for a prostate operation.

    Had Hamas hit the hospital, can one imagine Israel and its supporters – or western politicians and media – accepting that as legitimate grounds for a military attack? The question doesn’t even need asking.

    The only reason it is okay for Israel to attack a Palestinian hospital, killing Palestinian civilians, to assassinate a Palestinian politician is because the western political and media class are out-and-out anti-Palestinian racists.

    Palestinian life is meaningless to them. Israel calls Palestinians ‘human animals’ – and western leaders secretly concur.

    Once Jews were seen that way – as human animals. Their lives were worthless. They were killed on an industrial scale across Europe.

    Today’s Europe is no different, nor is the US. It’s just that Jews are no longer the objects of the West’s institutional racism and its structural violence. Palestinians are.

    The West’s racism that led to the Holocaust is still with us. We have not learnt from history. Our politics has not evolved beyond that of our great-grandparents’ generation. The Gaza genocide is our generation’s Holocaust. And we are equally complicit.

    The post Would It be Okay for Hamas to Strike a Hospital Treating Benjamin Netanyahu? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Chris Hedges: The last chapter of the Gaza Strip genocide

    Israel has begun the final stage of its genocide. The Palestinians will be forced to choose between death or deportation. There are no other options, writes Chris Hedges

    ANALYSIS: By Chris Hedges

    This is the last chapter of the genocide. It is the final, blood-soaked push to drive the Palestinians from Gaza. No food. No medicine. No shelter. No clean water. No electricity.

    Israel is swiftly turning Gaza into a Dantesque cauldron of human misery where Palestinians are being killed in their hundreds and soon, again, in their thousands and tens of thousands, or they will be forced out never to return.

    The final chapter marks the end of Israeli lies. The lie of the two-state solution. The lie that Israel respects the laws of war that protect civilians. The lie that Israel bombs hospitals and schools only because they are used as staging areas by Hamas.

    The lie that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, while Israel routinely forces captive Palestinians to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings ahead of Israeli troops. The lie that Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) are responsible — the charge often being errant Palestinian rockets — for the destruction of hospitals, United Nations’ buildings or mass Palestinian casualties.

    The lie that humanitarian aid to Gaza is blocked because Hamas is hijacking the trucks or smuggling in weapons and war material. The lie that Israeli babies are beheaded or Palestinians carried out mass rape of Israeli women. The lie that 75 percent of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza were Hamas “terrorists.”

    The lie that Hamas, because it was allegedly rearming and recruiting new fighters, is responsible for the breakdown of the ceasefire agreement.

    Israel’s naked genocidal visage is exposed. It has ordered the evacuation of northern Gaza where desperate Palestinians are camped out amid the rubble of their homes. What comes now is mass starvation — the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said on March 21 it has six days of flour supplies left — deaths from diseases caused by contaminated water and food, scores of killed and wounded each day under the relentless assault of bombs, missiles, shells and bullets.

    Nothing will function, bakeries, water treatment and sewage plants, hospitals — Israel blew up the damaged Turkish-Palestinian hospital on March 21 — schools, aid distribution centers or clinics. Less than half of the 53 emergency vehicles operated by the Palestine Red Crescent Society are functional due to fuel shortages. Soon there will be none.

    Israel’s message is unequivocal: Gaza will be uninhabitable. Leave or die.

    Since last Tuesday, when Israel broke the ceasefire with heavy bombing, over 700 Palestinians have been killed, including 200 children. In one 24 hour period 400 Palestinians were killed.

    This is only the start. No Western power, including the United States, which provides the weapons for the genocide, intends to stop it. The images from Gaza during the nearly 16 months of incessant attacks were awful.

    But what is coming now will be worse. It will rival the most atrocious war crimes of the 20th century, including the mass starvation, wholesale slaughter and leveling of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 by the Nazis.

    October 7 marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the brutalisation and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine. What we are witnessing is the historical equivalent of the moment triggered by the annihilation of some 200 soldiers led by George Armstrong Custer in June 1876 at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

    After that humiliating defeat, Native Americans were slated to be killed with the remnants forced into prisoner of war camps, later named reservations, where thousands died of disease, lived under the merciless gaze of their armed occupiers and fell into a life of immiseration and despair.

    Expect the same for the Palestinians in Gaza, dumped, I suspect, in one of the world’s hellholes and forgotten.

    “Gaza residents, this is your final warning,” Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz threatened:

    “The first Sinwar destroyed Gaza and the second Sinwar will completely destroy it. The Air Force strikes against Hamas terrorists were just the first step. It will become much more difficult and you will pay the full price. The evacuation of the population from the combat zones will soon begin again…Return the hostages and remove Hamas and other options will open for you, including leaving for other places in the world for those who want to. The alternative is absolute destruction.”

    The ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas was designed to be implemented in three phases. The first phase, lasting 42 days, would see an end to hostilities. Hamas would release 33 Israeli hostages who were captured on Oct. 7, 2023 — including women, those aged above 50, and those with illnesses — in exchange for upwards of 2,000 Palestinian men, women and children imprisoned by Israel (around 1,900 Palestinian captives have been released by Israel as of March 18).

    Hamas has released a total of 147 hostages, of whom eight were dead. Israel says there are 59 Israelis still being held by Hamas, 35 of whom Israel believes are deceased.

    The Israeli army would pull back from populated areas of Gaza on the first day of the ceasefire. On the seventh day, displaced Palestinians would be permitted to return to northern Gaza. Israel would allow 600 aid trucks with food and medical supplies to enter Gaza daily.

    The second phase, which was expected to be negotiated on the 16th day of the ceasefire, would see the release of the remaining Israeli hostages. Israel would complete its withdrawal from Gaza maintaining a presence in some parts of the Philadelphi corridor, which stretches along the 13 km border between Gaza and Egypt.

    It would surrender its control of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt.

    The third phase would see negotiations for a permanent end of the war and the reconstruction of Gaza.

    Israel habitually signs agreements, including the Camp David Accords and the Oslo Peace Agreement, with timetables and phases. It gets what it wants — in this case the release of the hostages — in the first phase and then violates subsequent phases. This pattern has never been broken.

    Israel refused to honour the second phase of the deal. It blocked humanitarian aid into Gaza two weeks ago, violating the agreement. It also killed at least 137 Palestinians during the first phase of the ceasefire, including nine people, — three of them journalists — when Israeli drones attacked a relief team on March 15 in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza

    Israel’s heavy bombing and shelling of Gaza resumed March 18 while most Palestinians were asleep or preparing their suhoor, the meal eaten before dawn during the holy month of Ramadan. Israel will not stop its attacks now, even if the remaining hostages are freed — Israel’s supposed reason for the resumption of the bombing and siege of Gaza.

    The Trump White House is cheering on the slaughter. They attack critics of the genocide as “antisemites” who should be silenced, criminalised or deported while funneling billions of dollars in weapons to Israel.

    Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is the inevitable denouement of its settler colonial project and apartheid state. The seizure of all of historic Palestine — with the West Bank soon, I expect, to be annexed by Israel — and displacement of all Palestinians has always been the Zionist goal.

    Israel’s worst excesses occurred during the wars of 1948 and 1967 when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized, thousands of Palestinians killed and hundreds of thousands were ethnically cleansed. Between these wars, the slow-motion theft of land, murderous assaults and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, continued.

    That calibrated dance is over. This is the end. What we are witnessing dwarfs all the historical assaults on Palestinians. Israel’s demented genocidal dream — a Palestinian nightmare — is about to be achieved.

    It will forever shatter the myth that we, or any Western nation, respect the rule of law or are the protectors of human rights, democracy and the so-called “virtues” of Western civilisation. Israel’s barbarity is our own. We may not understand this, but the rest of the globe does.

    Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This article is republished from his X account.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Nationwide Protests In India Condemn Israel’s Crimes

    Progressive groups in India held a national day of protest against Israel’s grave violations of the ceasefire in Gaza. The protestors also demanded the Indian government take a more assertive stand on the issue and stop indirectly aiding Israel’s criminal activities. The day of action was organized by the Palestine Solidarity Organization, a platform with participation from most of the left parties as well as student, women, and trade union organizations.

    The central protest was organized in New Delhi where participants carried posters and banners denouncing Israel’s continued genocide in Gaza.

    The post Nationwide Protests In India Condemn Israel’s Crimes appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Nationwide Protests In India Condemn Israel’s Crimes

    Progressive groups in India held a national day of protest against Israel’s grave violations of the ceasefire in Gaza. The protestors also demanded the Indian government take a more assertive stand on the issue and stop indirectly aiding Israel’s criminal activities. The day of action was organized by the Palestine Solidarity Organization, a platform with participation from most of the left parties as well as student, women, and trade union organizations.

    The central protest was organized in New Delhi where participants carried posters and banners denouncing Israel’s continued genocide in Gaza.

    The post Nationwide Protests In India Condemn Israel’s Crimes appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Netanyahu Gifts Silver Beeper to Fetterman, Who Praised Explosions in Lebanon

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has gifted U.S. Senator John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania) a “silver-plated beeper” — a reference to Israel’s horrific attack on Lebanon and parts of Syria last year in which Israel rigged pagers reportedly used by alleged Hezbollah members to spontaneously explode, killing dozens of people and injuring thousands. Israel’s September 17 pager attack…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • “Where was the UN?” Asks Freed Israeli Captive. Its Staff Were Busy Being Killed

    Sympathy for Israeli former captive Eli Sharabi must not obscure the bigger picture: he has allowed himself to be recruited to Israel’s propaganda campaign for genocide.

    Israel has found a captive recently released from Gaza willing to regurgitate some of its most nonsensical talking points on the stage of the United Nations. Predictably, those talking points are already being exploited to justify Israel intensifying its slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza – and further bully the United Nations into even greater timidity.

    Eli Sharabi has every reason to feel aggrieved. After all, he not only spent 490 days in captivity in terrifying conditions before his release last month, but emerged to find his family had been killed during Hamas’ break-out from Gaza on 7 October 2023.

    Nonetheless, sympathy for his plight should not obscure the bigger picture: he has allowed himself to be recruited to the Israeli government’s propaganda campaign for genocide.

    He has echoed Israeli politicians in claiming that Palestinians in Gaza – all 2.3 million of them, apparently – are “involved” in the mistreatment of the Israeli captives. In other words, he has given succour to the Israeli government’s efforts to justify the extermination of Gaza’s entire population, half of whom are children.

    He has also claimed that Hamas stole aid that entered Gaza to eat “like kings”, while he and the captives starved. In other words, he is bolstering the argument of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel is justified in blocking food and water to Gaza – a crime against humanity for which Netanyahu is being sought by the International Criminal Court.

    But perhaps most ludicrously of all, Sharabi asks of the two largest bodies involved in humanitarian operations on behalf of the destitute, decimated people of Gaza: “Where was the Red Cross when we [the Israeli captives] needed them? Where was the UN?”

    Sharabi, more than anyone, ought to know the answer to his own question.

    Local staff of the UN and Red Cross – or Red Crescent as it is known in Gaza – have spent the past year and a half living under constant and ferocious air strikes, like everyone else in the enclave. Large numbers have been killed and maimed by the US-supplied bombs Israel has been dropping continuously.

    They have certainly not been idle, as Sharabi suggests. When they have not been killed themselves, they have been dealing with the many tens of thousands of dead and the hundreds of thousands of wounded.

    And all the while, they have been desperately struggling to help feed a population that Israel has spent the past 18 months actively starving through its strict blockade of food and water into the tiny territory.

    The job of the UN and Red Cross has been to save life. That is what they have been doing. Their job is not to go on a wild goose chase, trying to find Israeli captives that Israel itself, with all its technological know-how and military might, has been unable to locate.

    Where was the UN?

    Did Sharabi’s Israeli government handlers – led by Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the UN – forget to explain to him that Israel has formally banned the UN from Gaza? Israel both bars the UN from the enclave, specifically targeting local staff with its weapons, and yet also expects those same staff to track down the Israeli captives held there. How can one even begin to take Israel’s position – or Sharabi’s – seriously?

    Where was the Red Cross?

    Did Sharabi’s Israeli government handlers forget to mention that, also, the Red Cross has not been able to visit a single one of the thousands of Palestinians who have been abducted by Israel from Gaza, including doctors, women and children?

    Unlike the Israeli captives, the location of the Palestinian captives is known. They are being held in what the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem calls “torture camps” inside Israel, where sexual assaults and rapes are commonplace.

    Israel has refused the Red Cross access for a simple reason: because it doesn’t want the world to know what it is doing to Palestinians inside those torture camps. And the western media is complying, barely reporting the horrors unearthed by human rights groups and UN investigators.

    Yes, the Israeli captives have gone through a horrific experience. And their greatest trauma – though Sharabi, unlike his fellow Israeli captives, fails to mention it – was living under Israel’s constant bombs: the equivalent so far of six Hiroshimas. None knew from one day to the next whether they would be vaporised by one of the 2,000lb bombs supplied by the US and dropped all over the enclave.

    It is important to hear Sharabi’s account of his captivity on a stage as visible as the UN’s. But it is equally important for the UN to hear from the thousands of Palestinians abducted by Israel and held in even more horrifying conditions, as repeatedly documented by human rights groups.

    Yet those Palestinian victims, victims of Israeli barbarism, have not been provided with the platform offered to Sharabi. Why? Because Israel gets to decide who speaks at the UN, for both Israelis and Palestinians.

    Unlike Hamas, Israel holds its captives permanently prisoner, even after they have been released from its torture camps. It holds them in a giant open-air concentration camp called Gaza. And they won’t find themselves on a stage at the UN – not unless Israel allows it.

    The post “Where was the UN?” Asks Freed Israeli Captive. Its Staff Were Busy Being Killed first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Back to Tried Failures: The New Offensive on Gaza

    If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your only option. This is proving very much to be the case with the resumption of savagely lethal strikes on Gaza by the Israeli Air Force on March 19. In a matter of hours, over 400 Palestinians were slaughtered. The resumption of the attacks by Israel terminated a fragile, often qualified cease-fire that had seen the first phase hold, for the most part, through March. Attempts to negotiate the freeing of the surviving Israeli hostages, and further Palestinian prisoners, and concluding the conflict with a lasting ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, however, proved fruitless.

    Israel and the United States have justified the resumption of hostilities on Hamas’ reluctance to release more hostages prior to commencing negotiations on ending the war. This consisted of a US proposal in which Hamas would release half the remaining Israeli hostages in return for a seven-week prolongation of the truce, with a nebulous undertaking to launch negotiations over a more durable ceasefire. This did not form the basis of the original ceasefire agreement, though it did lead to Hamas offering to return the bodies of four hostages and the American-Israeli soldier, Edan Alexander. Rather predictably, Israel has also accused Hamas of readying itself for further attacks, though evidence of this is scanty at best.

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has always been lukewarm to any notion of a durable ceasefire agreement. “We are committed,” he explained in an interview last June, “to continuing the war after a pause, in order to complete the goal of eliminating Hamas. I’m not willing to give up on that.” On January 18, just as the guns were meant to fall silent, Netanyahu was adamant that Israel reserved “the right to return to war if necessary with the backing of the United States.”

    The approach taken by Netanyahu has therefore been one of bombing while simultaneously negotiating with Hamas. It’s a recipe that is idiosyncratic and irreconcilable, suggesting a holding pattern of failure. While the PM promises that “This is just the beginning,” and that, “We will keep fighting to achieve all of the war’s objectives”, it remains questionable how many of these have been achieved. Hamas, however weakened, continues to operate in the Gaza strip. Palestinian civilians continue to be butchered.

    For Netanyahu, a sense of crisis is important. Peace would be dangerous for him, allowing the wheels of Israeli justice to conclude legal proceedings against him on charges of fraud, bribery and breach of trust. War is his reassurance, instability an antidote. Alon Pinkas, former Israeli ambassador and consul general in New York, reasoned on Al Jazeera that the new round of attacks on Gaza was a matter of “survival politics” and had “zero military significance [and] no political end.”

    Giving him an incentive to resist talks of peace in favour of an annihilatory agenda are also such individuals of the far-right as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. The waspish politician has repeatedly threatened to leave the coalition if further negotiations with Hamas are pursued instead of resuming the war.

    Similarly, Itamar Ben-Gvir of Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) and former national security minister has rejoined the coalition government after exiting in protest at the ceasefire agreement in January. This took place despite concerns at his conduct as cabinet minister, notably expressed by Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara.

    The return of the extreme pro-settler group to the fold prompted a lamentation from from Knesset member Naama Lazimi (The Democrats): “It’s a strange world. A faction resigns from the government because lives are being saved, and the same party returns to the government when they are being abandoned.”

    Netanyahu’s savouring of a good crisis is also evident in his desire to remove Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar, the first instance in Israeli history of a government seeking to fire the head of a security agency. “The prime minister’s expectation of a duty of personal loyalty, the purpose of which contradicts the public interest,” Bar observed in a statement, “is a fundamentally illegitimate expectation. It is contrary to the Shin Bet law and contrary to the patriotic values that guide the Shin Bet and its members.” True to authoritarian form, this effort has been undertaken without the necessary recommendation of the Senior Appointments Advisory Committee. It has also prompted protests across the country.

    In Israel, those seeking the release of the hostages are aggrieved. Yet again, their position remains subordinate to the whim and cynicism of Netanyahu. But beyond that, the basis for an even more murderous phase in the conflict against the Palestinians, one encouraged by the United States, has begun.

    The post Back to Tried Failures: The New Offensive on Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Netanyahu commits a new ‘bloodbath in Gaza’ to save himself

    Asia Pacific Report

    At least 400 people have been killed after a surprise Israeli attack on Gaza in the early hours of Tuesday.

    The Israeli government vows to continue escalating these military attacks, claiming it is in response to Hamas’ refusal to extend the ceasefire, which has been in place since January 19.

    But is this the real reason for pre-dawn attack? Or is there a much more cynical explanation — one tied to the political fate of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?

    This week, New Zealand journalist Mohamed Hassan, host of the Middle East Eye’s weekly Big Picture podcast, speaks to Daniel Levy, the president of the US/Middle East Project and a former Israeli peace negotiator.


    Ceasefire broken: Netanyahu is exposed.   Video: Middle East Eye

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Israel Kills 400 in Gaza, Resuming Bombings After Months of Ceasefire Violations

    Israel has resumed its heavy bombing of civilians in Gaza, killing at least 404 Palestinians over the course of a single day. The attacks are a major violation — and potentially unilateral ending — of the already-fragile ceasefire and captive release deal. On Tuesday, Israel dropped a huge number of bombs across Gaza without any forewarning, with Palestinians reporting intense shelling and…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • PSNA calls on NZ govt to condemn renewed Israel air strikes on Gaza – 350 killed

    Asia Pacific Report

    A national Palestinian advocacy group has called on the Aotearoa New Zealand government to immediately condemn Israel for its resumption today of “genocidal attacks” on the almost 2 million Palestinians trapped in the besieged Gaza enclave.

    Media reports said that more than 350 people had been killed — many of them children — in a wave of predawn attacks by Israel to break the fragile ceasefire that had been holding since mid-January.

    The renewed war on Gaza comes amid a worsening humanitarian crisis that has persisted for 16 days since March 1.

    This followed Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decision to block the entry of all aid and goods, cut water and electricity, and shut down the Strip’s border crossings at the end of the first phase of the ceasefire agreement.

    “Immediate condemnation of Israel’s resumption of attacks on Gaza must come from the New Zealand government”, said co-national chair John Minto of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) in a statement.

    “Israel has breached the January ceasefire agreement multiple times and is today relaunching its genocidal attacks against the Palestinian people of Gaza.”

    Israeli violations
    He said that in the last few weeks Israel had:

    • refused to negotiate the second stage of the ceasefire agreement with Hamas which would see a permanent ceasefire and complete withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza;
    • Issued a complete ban on food, water, fuel and medical supplies entering Gaza — “a war crime of epic proportions”; and
    • Cut off the electricity supply desperately needed to, for example, operate desalination plants for water supplies.

    ‘Cowardly silence’
    “The New Zealand government response has been a cowardly silence when the people of New Zealand have been calling for sanctions against Israel for its genocide,” Minto said.

    “The government is out of touch with New Zealanders but in touch with US/Israel.

    “Foreign Minister Winston Peters seems to be explaining his silence as ‘keeping his nerve’.

    Minto said that for the past 17 months, minister Peters had condemned every act of Palestinian resistance against 77 years of brutal colonisation and apartheid policies.

    “But he has refused to condemn any of the countless war crimes committed by Israel during this time — including the deliberate use of starvation as a weapon of war.

    “Speaking out to condemn Israel now is our opportunity to force it to reconsider and begin negotiations on stage two of the ceasefire agreement Israel is trying to walk away from.

    “Palestinians and New Zealanders deserve no less.”

    A Netanyahu "Wanted" sign at last Saturday'pro-Palestinian rally in "Palestinian Corner", Auckland
    A Netanyahu “Wanted” sign at last Saturday’s pro-Palestinian rally in “Palestinian Corner”, Auckland . . . in reference to the International Criminal Court arrest warrants issued last November against the Israeli Prime Minister and former defence minister Yoav Gallant. Image: APR

    ‘Devastating sounds’
    Al Jazeera reporter Maram Humaid said from Gaza: “We woke up to the devastating sounds of multiple explosions as a series of air attacks targeted various areas across the Gaza Strip, from north to south, including Jabalia, Gaza City, Nuseirat, Deir el-Balah and Khan Younis.”

    “The strikes hit homes, residential buildings, schools sheltering displaced people and tents, resulting in a significant number of casualties, including women and children, especially since the attacks occurred during sleeping hours.

    The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza said at least 232 people had been killed in today’s Israeli raids.

    The Palestinian resistance group Hamas called on people of Arab and Islamic nations — and the “free people of the world” — to take to the streets in protest over the devastating attack.

    Hamas urged people across the world to “raise their voice in rejection of the resumption of the Zionist war of extermination against our people in the Gaza Strip”.

  • After Duterte’s Arrest Under ICC Warrant, Observers Urge Same for Netanyahu

    On Tuesday, former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was arrested by local authorities at Manila’s international airport after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant accusing him of crimes against humanity. News of his arrest prompted some observers to urge the arrest of another public figure who faces ICC charges: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Duterte case will…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Rift Between Trump And Netanyahu Leaves Opening For Arab States

    There was an easy way to determine whether the United States, under both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, was sincerely interested in putting an end to Israel’s onslaught in Gaza. All they needed to do was put together a sensible ceasefire plan and put their political weight behind it.

    Instead, Biden came up with a convoluted three-stage plan that contained every opportunity for either side to sabotage it, and Trump ran with it. Hamas, of course, has no reason to sabotage the agreement. The Israeli genocide has essentially leveled most of Gaza, the people are suffering immensely, and Hamas has nothing to gain but still has something to lose by the genocide continuing.

    The post Rift Between Trump And Netanyahu Leaves Opening For Arab States appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • B’Tselem in the Crosshairs

    In early 2023, the most far-right cabinet in Israel’s history launched its war for “judicial reforms” to replace democracy with autocracy. In fall 2023, it began an obliteration war against Gaza. Now it is readying to decimate the last human rights defenders in Israel.

    In view of the Israeli Prime Minister, amid his own corruption trial, the truth about the Israeli-occupied territories seems to be equivalent to treason. Hence, his determination to destroy B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.

    The effort to decimate the last defenders of human rights in Israel cries for effective external intervention.

    Why are Netanyahu’s autocrats after B’Tselem?

    B’Tselem evolved in early 1989, when it was established by a group of Israeli lawyers, academics and doctors with the support of 10 members of Knesset, the Israeli parliament. The name comes from Genesis 1:27, which deems that all mankind was created “b’tselem elohim” (in the image of God); in line with the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

    As Jewish far-right extremism was spreading in Israel, B’Tselem reflected an effort to replace nascent Jewish supremacism doctrines with the original, universalistic spirit of social justice that had marked Judaism for centuries.

    It was founded after two years of the First Intifada, the Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories and in Israel. After two decades of futile struggle for decolonization and increasing Israeli repression, Palestinians resorted to protests, then civil disobedience and eventually violence.

    Instead of taking a hard look at the causes of the uprising, the hard-right Likud government – led by Yitzhak Shamir, Netanyahu’s one-time mentor and ex-leader of the violent pre-state Stern group – deployed 80,000 soldiers in response, which started with live rounds against peaceful demonstrators.

    The brutal repression resulted in over 330 Palestinian deaths (and 12 Israelis killed) in just the first 13 months. The objective of the newly-established B’Tselem became to document human rights violations in both Gaza and the West Bank. Amid a vicious cycle of violence, it sought to serve as the nation’s voice of conscience.

    Today, it is led by human rights activist Yuli Novak who had to leave Israel in 2022 due to mounting death threats, and chaired by Orly Noy, left-wing Mizrahi activist and editor of +972 magazine. Despite mounting threats from the government, the Messianic far-right and the settler extremists, B’Tselem has insistently recorded human rights violations in the occupied territories earning the regard of rights organizations and awards worldwide.

    In early 2021, the NGO released a report describing Israel as an “apartheid” regime, which the Netanyahu cabinets have fervently rejected. Yet, the NGO simply codified, with abundant evidence, Israel’s apartheid rule that had worsened over time. Several Israeli military, intelligence and political leaders had used the same characterization since the 2000s.

    B’Tselem warned that Israeli governance was no longer about democracy plus occupation. It had morphed into “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea” – that is, apartheid. And the kind of military excess that led to the genocidal atrocities in Gaza.

    How is the Netanyahu cabinet undermining B’Tselem?   

    Recently, the Knesset passed a preliminary reading of two bills. They are an integral part of a broader shift from democracy to autocracy. The ultimate objective is to eliminate human rights (and other rights) groups from Israel, including B’Tselem, and to marginalize the autocratic harsh-right’s critics.

    In its efforts, the Netanyahu cabinet is relying on two proposed laws involving NGO taxation and the ICC. In the former case, the proposal slaps an 80% tax on donations from foreign countries, the UN and many international foundations supporting human rights. This will effectively cut off the NGOs’ funding. The proposal was approved in a preliminary reading.

    The second bill, which has now also passed a preliminary reading, seeks to criminalize any cooperation with the International Criminal Court (ICC). It could be seen as the Israeli version of the US Trump administration’s sanctions to undermine the ICC, its activities and members.

    With its diffuse language, the Israeli ICC bill can be exploited to criminalize not only active assistance to the court but the release of any information indicating the government or senior Israeli officials are committing war crimes or crimes against humanity. According to Israeli scholars of international law, “the definitions in this dangerous bill are so broad that even someone sharing on social media a photo or video of a soldier documenting themselves committing what appears to be a war crime could face imprisonment.” More precisely, half a decade in jail.

    If the “ICC law” criminalizes the work of B’Tselem and other human rights NGOs by making human rights defense a punishable offense, the “NGO taxation law” is intended to drain the meager financial resources of these NGOs.

    Whose “foreign subversion”?            

    B’Tselem is an independent, non-partisan organization. It is funded by donations: grants from European and North American foundations that support human rights activity worldwide, and contributions by private individuals in Israel and abroad. These donors do not represent the kind of “subversion” that the Likud governments attribute to human rights NGOs. Nor do they possess major financial resources. Even right-wing NGO critics estimate B’Tselem’s annual funding at most about $3 million per year.

    Things are very different behind the donors of the Kohelet Policy Forum, led by neoconservatives with US-Israeli dual citizenship, and its many spinoffs. These have served as the Netanyahu cabinets’ thinktanks and authored many of their policies, including the “judicial reforms.” Totaling several million dollars, Kohelet in particular benefited from multi-million-dollar donations made anonymously and sent through the U.S. nonprofit, American Friends of Kohelet Policy Forum (AF-KPF).

    For years, these money flows originated mainly from two Jewish-American private equity billionaires and philanthropists, Arthur Dantchik and Jeffrey Yass, the co-founders of Susquehanna International Group (The Fall of Israel, Chapter 6).

    With a net worth of $7.5 billion, Dantchik is an active supporter of neoconservative Israeli causes. And so is Yass, with net worth estimated at $29 billion. Between 2010 and 2020, his Claws Foundation gave more than $25 million to the Jerusalem-based Shalom Hartman Institute, the Kohelet and other right-wing causes. As the publicity-shy Dantchik and Yass began to suffer from Kohelet’s negative PR, they took distance, while other money flows offset the difference.

    By 2021, more than 90% of Kohelet’s $7.2 million income came from the Central Fund of Israel, a family-run nonprofit that gave $55 million to more than 500 Israel-related causes. It was run by Marcus Brothers Textiles on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, which sponsors highly controversial settlement projects in the West Bank, while supporting the far-right activists’ ImTirtzu and Honenu, which is notorious for defending Jewish far-right extremists charged with violence against and killings of Palestinians.

    Toward a unitary, autocratic Jewish state     

    Given the present course, the ultimate demise of human rights in Israel is now a matter of time. The Netanyahu cabinet will decide when to bring the legislative proposals to hearings in the relevant parliamentary committees, to prepare them for final approval.

    There is no doubt about the final objective: the creation of a state “from the river to the water,” but not the two-state model enacted almost eight decades ago. Nor the secular-democratic Jewish state with a vibrant Arab minority. The goal is a Jewish unitary state in which both the rule of law and democracy will be under erosion.

    B’Tselem is the harsh-right’s scapegoat for its own international isolation, but only the first one. There is more to come. Under the watch of and military aid and financing by the Biden and Trump administrations, the protection of human rights in occupied territories will soon be treated as a punishable crime, while the economic resources of the remaining human rights defenders will be decimated.

    In Gaza, the international community failed to halt the genocidal atrocities. If it fails to protect the last defenders of human rights in Israel, it is likely to become complicit in new atrocities in the West Bank.

    • Originally published by Informed Comment.
    The post B’Tselem in the Crosshairs first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.