A demonstrator is seen marching while holding a placard criticizing BP in London on November 16, 2024. (Photo: David Tramontan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
“By facilitating the transport of oil that fuels military operations in Gaza, BP has contributed to the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in the region,” said the director of the organization backing the claimants.
A group of Palestinians whose family members have been killed in Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip over the past 14 months have initiated legal action in the United Kingdom against the British fossil fuel giant BP, arguing the company is aiding the assault on the enclave via its ownership of a pipeline that provides Israel with crude oil.
In a 36-page letter before claim, the group contends that BP’s role in supplying oil to Israel violates the company’s stated commitments to human rights, including its expressed support for the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
“Israel relies heavily on crude oil and refined petroleum imports to run its large fleet of fighter jets, tanks, and other military vehicles and operations, as well as the bulldozers implicated in clearing Palestinian homes and olive groves to make way for unlawful Israeli settlements,” the letter notes. “Some fuel from refineries goes directly to the armed forces, while much of the rest appears to go to ordinary gas stations where military personnel can refuel their vehicles under a government contract.”
The group demands from BP an “immediate cessation of oil supply to Israel and facilitation through” the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline as well as an “admission liability and a commitment to mediation for assessing damages.”
“Our clients seek justice for the profound suffering and loss they have endured and call on BP to act responsibly by immediately halting its involvement.”
Tayab Ali, head of international law at Bindmans LLP and director of the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP)—which is supporting the group of claimants—said in a statement Monday that “this legal action marks a new phase in accountability for those that are complicit in alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
“The evidence against BP demonstrates a clear failure to adhere to its own human rights policies and international law,” said Ali. “By facilitating the transport of oil that fuels military operations in Gaza, BP has contributed to the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in the region. Our clients seek justice for the profound suffering and loss they have endured and call on BP to act responsibly by immediately halting its involvement.”
According to ICJP, the claimants include “a British citizen of Palestinian origin who lost 16 family members to Israeli airstrikes,” “a second British Palestinian claimant whose relatives in Gaza have suffered fatalities and displacement,” and “additional claimants who have endured catastrophic physical and psychological harm including amputations and loss of family members.”
The group sent its legal letter just over a month after a coalition of environmental groups published a report identifying BP as one of the “top corporate suppliers of oil to Israel.”
“The major international oil companies, including BP, Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies, may be linked to 35% of the crude oil supplied to Israel since October [2023],” the report states. “These companies, as well as state-owned entities and other private and publicly traded oil producers, profit from supplying oil to Israel’s refineries, where a proportion is likely refined into fuels for Israel’s war machine.”
Last week, the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations argued that “foreign governments have an obligation” under international law “to end the supply of fuel to Israel unless they can guarantee it will only be used for nonmilitary purposes.”
“This includes both a ban on the export of crude oil, military jet fuel, and other fuels, as well as a prohibition on the transport of these commodities through their territory,” the group said.
People check the damage outside the Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip, following Israeli strikes around the medical complex on December 6, 2024, as the war between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas militant group continues. (Photo: -/AFP via Getty Images)
“If Kamal Adwan Hospital is decommissioned, there will be no way of preserving conditions of life to the remaining 75,000+ civilians in north Gaza,” the hospital’s director said.
The Israel Defense Forces on Saturday ordered one of the last partly operating hospitals in northern Gaza to shutter and evacuate, even as hospital staff say there are not enough ambulances to do so safely and persistent firing on the facility makes people afraid to leave.
Israel launched bomb, artillery, and sniper attacks on the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia beginning Saturday, as the Wafa news agency reported. The attacks killed three people in the area and wounded several, according to Wafu. On Sunday, an Israeli drone strike on the hospital’s fuel tanks and power generator shut off its electricity, the AnadoluAgencyreported.
“We currently have nearly 400 civilians inside the hospital, including babies in the neonatal unit, whose lives depend on oxygen and incubators,” hospital director Dr. Husam Abu Safiya said in a statement on Sunday. “We cannot evacuate these patients safely without assistance, equipment, and time.”
“Every bomb that slams into Kamal Adwan Hospital, every nurse forced to watch a child slip away, every life lost from denied treatment indicts us all.”
Abu Safiya described the onset of what he called an “unprecedented” attack in a message Saturday evening local time:
The Israeli military has targeted the Kamal Adwan Hospital with different types of weapons without prior warning. We are being directly attacked, the ICU unit, along with the maternity and nursing departments, are coming under fire.
The bombing is being conducted with tank fire and quadcopters, directly targeting us while we are present inside the hospital departments. We don’t know why we are being targeted at this hour.
Several people were wounded in attacks on the hospital’s laboratory and mechanical department,according to Al Jazeera.
“What we are seeing now is a deliberate attack on the health facility,” Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud reported from Deir el-Balah. “The Israeli military has ordered evacuations from the hospital, but they have also created an intimidating environment that makes people feel it’s unsafe to leave.”
Mahmoud said he lost contact with the hospital Saturday night.
Footage shared on social media and verified by Al Jazeera also showed patients sheltering in hallways to avoid the Israeli attack.
Responding to reports from the hospital on Saturday, World Health Organization (WHO) director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for a cease-fire around the hospital and for the protection of patients and staff.
“Tonight’s reports of bombardment near Kamal Adwan Hospital and order to evacuate the hospital are deeply worrisome,” Ghebreyseus wrote on social media. “The hospital has been in the midst of fighting for too long, and the lives of patients are at risk.”
Also on Saturday, the Palestine Mental Health Networks and Doctors Against Genocide issued a statement in support of Abu Safiya and Kamal Adwan, demanding that the international community act to open a humanitarian corridor in Gaza, protect healthcare facilities and staff, and end the blockade on the besieged enclave.
Arguing that the “relentless assaults on Kamal Adwan Hospital—a sanctuary meant to save lives in northern Gaza—are part of a deliberate genocidal campaign,” they wrote:
Humanity cannot pretend not to see. Neutrality in the face of genocide is complicity. Every bomb that slams into Kamal Adwan Hospital, every nurse forced to watch a child slip away, every life lost from denied treatment indicts us all.
The world is watching. Will it once again stand idly by as another hospital crumbles, another child’s breath is silenced, another fragile hope is extinguished? Or will it finally rise to restore the sanctity of life and the universal right to health?
In a video message shared by Drop Site News early Sunday morning Gaza time, Abu Safiya said that he had been ordered to evacuate patients to the Indonesian Hospital, but that this would be “impossible” since the hospital needs ambulances to transport the wounded and would need to move supplies as well. He said a successful evacuation would take days.
In a second message on Sunday, he linked the IDF’s attacks on Kamal Adwan to similar attacks on hospitals throughout Gaza. In October, a report from the United Nation’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory concluded that “Israel has perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system,” carrying out nearly 500 attacks on healthcare facilities between October 7, 2023 and July 30, 2024.
Abu Safiya said that the IDF did not provide hospitals with the support they needed when it ordered evacuations, such as equipment and safe passage:
We call on the world to witness this pattern once again. We have repeatedly requested assistance and have openly invited the occupation to see for themselves the internal workings of our hospitals so that we may continue to serve our population without fear of attack and death. These calls were rejected.
We also call on the world to witness, that if Kamal Adwan Hospital is decommissioned, there will be no way of preserving conditions of life to the remaining 75,000+ civilians in north Gaza.
We call on the world to witness these crimes of extermination and act now.
Abu Safiya also said the IDF was targeting the hospital’s fuel tanks, which would explode if hit, causing “mass casualties.”
Gaza’s Government Media Office urged the WHO to visit the hospital on Sunday, saying the attack was part of a concerted attempt to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system.
“These attacks are ongoing and have not stopped for nearly 80 days since the ground aggression on the northern Gaza Strip Governorate began, which has claimed the lives of thousands of martyrs, left many missing, wounded, or detained,” the statement said.
In response to the reports from the hospital, the IDF told The Washington Post that it had not targeted Kamal Adwan on Saturday to its knowledge. It also said separately that it was operating in Beit Lahia. Israel has intensified military operations in northern Gaza over the past three months, according to Reuters. The IDF further told Reuters on Friday that it had helped to evacuate more than 100 patients from Kamal Adwan and provided fuel and food to the hospital. It did not respond to a request for comment about Saturday’s attacks.
Also on Sunday, the Gaza Health Ministry reported that Israeli attacks had killed 32 people and wounded 54 in the last 24 hours. At least eight people, including children, were killed in a strike on a school-turned-shelter in Gaza City.
“We came out to see the scale of destruction, with dead bodies, blood, and body parts all over the place. Israeli warplanes fired three missiles on this school. The explosion was huge and frightening to us and to our children,” witness Um Aref Ahel, who has been displaced by the war, told Al Jazeera. “We appeal to the whole world to bring this war to an end.”
The official Gaza Health Ministry death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza, which began October 7, 2023 in response to a deadly Hamas attack on Southern Israel, stands at over 45,000, though many remain unaccounted for beneath the rubble. This month, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch issued reports labelling Israel’s assault a genocide.
People gather with banners and Israeli flags to protest against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government for not signing the ceasefire agreement with Gaza and to demand hostage swap deal in Tel Aviv, Israel on September 28, 2024. [Nir Keidar – Anadolu Agency]
Israel opposition leader and Chairman of National Unity camp, Benny Gantz, has accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of “sabotaging” prisoner swap deal negotiations with Hamas, Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported.
According to the outlet, Gantz criticised Netanyahu’s address to foreign press about the deal. “We are in sensitive days – life and death are truly controlled by the tongue,” he said.
Gantz’s statements came two days after the Wall Street Journal published an interview with Netanyahu in which he said: “I will not agree to end the war [in Gaza] before eliminating Hamas.”
Gantz said: “As Netanyahu himself said just a week ago, the less we talk, the better, while the negotiators are working, Netanyahu is sabotaging the negotiations again.”
Netanyahu, Gantz explained, “does not have a mandate to thwart the return of our hostages again for political reasons. Their return is the right thing to do.”
In response, Netanyahu’s office said Gantz, can not preach “about the need to eliminate Hamas and the sacred mission of returning our captives.”
“It is no coincidence that since Gantz left the government for political reasons, the prime minister has led painful blows against Hamas, the destruction of Hezbollah, and direct operations against Iran – steps that led to the fall of the Assad regime in Syria.”
Yedioth Ahronoth quoted Einav Tsinguker, mother of the detained occupation soldier Matan Tsinguker, as saying that the soldiers’ families’ greatest fear is that the “Israeli government will leave the kidnapped behind.”
“The prime minister is being blackmailed by extremists in his government who want to build settlements on the backs of those kidnapped. We need to end the war in exchange for reaching a comprehensive deal,” she added.
STARMERISM is an attempt to turn the clock back. It isn’t working, cannot work and tolerating it risks disaster for the working-class movement.
It has always been an attempt to turn the clock back. The entire Starmer project was, from his election as Labour leader on a false prospectus, an attempt to undo Corbyn: to drag the unruly Labour Party back to a supposed “middle ground” of support for neoliberal economics and imperialist war.
It has been a project pursued with total ruthlessness: Labour members were, and are, broadly supportive of Corbyn’s manifesto commitments to greater public ownership and redistribution of wealth through progressive taxation, and certainly weren’t happy with the former leader being portrayed as the devil incarnate and cast out of the party, so Starmer had to smash Labour democracy.
His regime has banned debate in constituency parties, suspended those in their entirety when they wouldn’t play ball, and expelled anyone who dared to object. Since coming to power, MPs have found themselves excluded from the parliamentary party for backbench rebellion against child poverty — an authoritarian intolerance for dissent far harsher than anything Tony Blair ever expressed.
The paranoia reflects an underlying reality: Starmer and his acolytes know the majority are against them and must coerce because they cannot persuade. In this sense, the project is about much more than exorcising Corbyn.
It is part of a wider ruling-class effort to reboot the British system so we are back where we were in 2015 or even 2007 — pre-Corbyn, pre-Brexit, pre-bankers’ crash: when the world was one the liberal elite understood and had mastery over.
It is an impossible task. In foreign policy, the “unipolar moment” is gone: the West is no longer economically strong enough to dictate to the world, and its attempts to do so merely alienate.
In domestic policy, the consensus for privatisation and unfettered corporate domination of the economy can only continue to deliver what it delivers already: worsening services and falling living standards.
The two come together because Establishment liberalism is collapsing in the cockpit of imperialism, the United States. It is already defeated there by hard-right nationalism of the Farage type, but the nature of the US-led “free world” forces the ostensibly liberal leaders of Europe to fawn on the demagogic leader of the counter-revolution, Donald Trump.
Labour members fooled into voting for Starmer on the grounds he might be a polished, media-savvy version of Corbyn misunderstood Establishment hatred of the Corbyn project: it was about content, not form, and any leader threatening real reform would have met the same vitriol.
Similarly, the angst now expressed by liberal commentators from the Guardian to Channel 4 about Starmer not having what it takes to see off Farage is off-piste. Starmer is bad at politics, but that is not the root of a problem that engulfs Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz and Joe Biden too. Liberalism has nothing to offer and populations across the West can no longer be duped.
The labour movement needs to wake up to this. Without a radical change of direction from Labour, Britain will soon be ruled by nasties of the Donald Trump sort, whose hostility to trade unions (see Elon Musk) equals their viciousness towards immigrants.
The Jonathan Freedlands and Robert Pestons wonder if Starmer needs to be replaced. He does, but not because he is incompetent: because his zombie-Blair politics are anachronistic. The political consensus of the 1990s is not coming back.
It’s over a century since Rosa Luxemburg defined the choice facing humanity as socialism or barbarism. It is the choice now, for sure. We can break with Starmer-Labour or we can resign ourselves to Reform UK: there is no middle ground.
Keir Starmer explains that he feels no shame or guilt benefitting personally from gifts from the rich and powerful while insisting on policies of severe austerity causing suffering and death.
Palestinians living in makeshift tents and ruined buildings in Jabalia Camp try to continue their daily lives under Israeli attacks in Gaza Strip on December 18, 2024. [Dawoud Abo Alkas – Anadolu Agency]
The Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip has become a “ghost town” with around 70% of homes and buildings completely destroyed in Israel’s deadly onslaught in the area, Israeli media said on Sunday, Anadolu Agency reports.
“As far as the eye can see lie miles and miles of destroyed homes. It’s hard to look away from the devastated remains of Jabalia’s refugee camp in northern Gaza,” Amos Harel, a military affairs analyst, writes in Haaretz newspaper.
The Israeli army estimates that 70% of the refugee camp’s buildings were completely destroyed.
“I could see that even the few buildings that are still standing were badly damaged,” Harel said.
Israel has launched a large-scale ground operation in northern Gaza since Oct. 5 to allegedly prevent the Palestinian group Hamas from regrouping. Palestinians, however, accuse Israel of seeking to occupy the area and forcibly displace its residents.
Since then, no sufficient humanitarian aid including food, medicine, and fuel has been allowed into the area, leaving the remaining population on the verge of imminent famine.
“The IDF (army) operated here twice before, in December 2023 and May 2024. But this time, the camp was taken apart,” Amos said.
“Jabalia has become a ghost town. Outside, you mainly see pack after pack of stray dogs roaming around and hunting for scraps of food.”
The Israeli onslaught in northern Gaza was the latest episode in a brutal Israeli war on the Gaza Strip that has killed more than 45,200 people, mostly women and children, since Oct. 7, 2023.
Last month, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its war on Gaza.
