Original article republished from Middle East Monitor under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
An inside view of International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands on July 23, 2018 [Abdullah Asiran/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images]
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will hold public hearings in proceedings launched by South Africa against Israel over the Gaza war on 11 and 12 January, it said on Wednesday, Reuters reports.
South Africa had asked the ICJ on Friday for an urgent order declaring that Israel was in breach of its obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention in its crackdown against Hamas.
Israel had said it would appear before the Court to contest the accusations.
The Court usually takes one or two weeks to issue a decision on emergency measures after the hearings.
The Court’s rulings are final but it has no authority to enforce them.
DOZENS of Welsh peace activists shut down one of Britain’s largest arms factories today.
Wales Peace Coalition campaigners held banners saying “stop arming genocide” and “UK weapons kill” as they blockaded BAE Systems’s factory in Glascoed, near Pontypool.
They said they wanted to highlight the company’s “complicity in the … unfolding genocide” against Palestinians by Israel, “including the suspected white phosphorous rounds” for the state.
A spokesman for Cardiff Stop the War, which supported the action, said: “We cannot rely on our local elected MPs or our unelected prime minister to take any action.
“Britain is an active collaborator and participant in the war crimes committed against Palestinians.
“We say no to selling arms and supporting atrocious war crimes, not in our name.”
Cardiff UCU said that it stood against the “use of British weapons in war crimes,” urging the British and Welsh governments “to act so that citizens do not have to feel the need to put themselves on the line to stop our country’s involvement in such crimes.”
The UK has the worst safety net for the unemployed in north-west Europe
Viewers have taken issue with a statement by Tory MP Chris Philp who claimed that the UK’s benefits system is ‘very generous’, in an interview this morning.
Speaking to Sky News on the steep rise of shoplifting, the Policing Minister was asked if he had any sympathy for people stealing for food. He argued that there was “no excuse” because the UK’s benefits system is “very generous”.
Philp said: “We have a very generous benefits system, we’re spending well over £100 billion on working-age benefits, they went up by 10% in April this year they’ll go up by another 6 or 7%. National Minimum Wage has just gone up by around 10%. There is no excuse at all for any criminal activity, including shoplifting.”
However, people were not impressed at being told by a politician, who’s current net worth is around £3 million, that the benefits system is ‘very generous’. One X user responded: “Here is a challenge for Chris Philp – try living on ‘generous’ UK benefits for a month and then report back.”
Another wrote: “Clearly living in his own bubble. How disconnected from reality. The rental prices, bills have risen to unmanageable levels, the benefit system is completely inadequate.”
The Tory Party has spent an “unprecedentedly large figure” in the last month on advertising for Rishi Sunak’s Facebook page leading to a huge surge in followers, a transparency organisation has found.
Political transparency group Who Targets Me said Rishi Sunak’s spending on his own Facebook page in December was an “unprecedentedly large figure for a UK politician outside of an election period”.
Sunak appeared to buy more adverts in the last three months than Keir Starmer has in the three years and eight months he’s been Labour leader, which Who Targets Me stressed was a reminder of how digital campaigns are set to influence general elections in 2024.
Spending on Rishi Sunak’s Facebook page topped £42,000 in two weeks, with just over £9,000 spent on Meta adverts on 30th December alone and an additional £11,000 on New Year’s Eve.
According to Who Targets Me, the advertisements brought Sunak’s page a total of roughly 6 million impressions from December 25th to 31st. This has led to the page growing by nearly 100k in followers in the last month, making it now bigger than the main Conservative page, and Keir Starmers. However the official Labour Party page still has a fair hundred thousand followers more.
Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. Israel continued to battle Hamas fighters on October 10 and massed tens of thousands of troops and heavy armour around the Gaza Strip after vowing a massive blow over the Palestinian militants’ surprise attack. Photo by Naaman Omar apaimages. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Expect the UK to intervene on Israel’s side in the South African case against Israel for Genocide at the International Court of Justice. If Israel loses, British ministers, civil servants and military personnal could end up in the dock for genocide – not only in the Hague, but in the UK.
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What has the UK government done to aid and abet the genocide? It has:
1) Actively encouraged and incited genocide, including by the systematic obstruction of ceasefire resolutions at the UN Security Council; 2) Provided military equipment to Israel, with dozens of flights from RAF Akrotiri to Israel during the course of the genocide itself; 3) Provided communications intelligence to Israel to assist in genocide; 4) Provided aerial surveillance to Israel to assist in genocide.
These are for certain. It is also widely rumoured that UK Special Forces have participated directly in the genocide. That is something the prosecution will have to determine.
There has been a great sense of impunity among the zionist-controlled political classes: they have believed that they were in no danger of any personal retribution for their part in the brutal destruction of thousands and thousands of young children. In fact they felt able to turn the power of the state against anybody protesting that destruction.
There has been no legal jeopardy to anybody supplying, inciting or cheering on Israel’s monstrous atrocities. The jeopardy has all been felt by those opposing the atrocities.
That all changed with South Africa’s reference to the International Court of Justice. A determination of genocide by the International Court of Justice must be respected by the International Criminal Court and it will be impossible even for the odious Karim Khan to avoid bringing prosecutions against the perpetrators. Similarly in the UK, the fact of genocide being legally established, a police investigation will be obliged simply to focus on whether the UK aided and abetted it.
Quite simply, if you ask the police to investigate Sunak for aiding and abetting genocide today, they will laugh at you and say there is no genocide. After an ICJ judgment they can no longer do that
