Palestinians inspect the damage caused by an Israeli airstrike on Khan Younis on 7 January. Photograph: Mohammed Dahman/AP
Experts say submission to international court of justice on Myanmar six weeks ago makes stance ‘wholly disingenuous’
The UK is facing accusations of double standards after formally submitting detailed legal arguments to the international court of justice in The Hague six weeks ago to support claims that Myanmar committed genocide against the Rohingya ethnic group through its mass mistreatment of children and systematically depriving people of their homes and food.
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Tayab Ali, the head of international law at Bindmans, said the significance of the UK’s submission on Myanmar “lay in showing the importance the UK attaches to adherence to the [UN] Genocide Convention and in showing the UK took a wide, and not a narrow, definition of acts of genocide, and the intent to commit genocide. It also made clear that the court should take into account risks to life after a ceasefire caused by disabilities, inability to reside in their homes and wider injustices.
“It would be wholly disingenuous if the UK, six week after advancing such a significant and broad definition of genocide in the case of Myanmar, now adopts a narrow one in the case of Israel.”
South Africa is likely to highlight the UK’s arguments about Myanmar, submitted in conjunction with Canada, Germany, Denmark, France and the Netherlands, when it makes its high-stakes accusation of genocide against Israel.
Victim of repeated smears and even a discredited prosecution is planning a bid at the next Ilford North parliamentary election, say locals
Syed Siddiqi, the former Labour member repeatedly abused, harassed and smeared by right-wing Labour figures in Ilford in north London, is planning to stand against right-winger Wes Streeting in the next Ilford North parliamentary election, according to local sources.
In 2018, Streeting also launched a ‘disgraceful’ and ‘disgusting’ tirade in the face of Diane Abbott, Britain’s first Black woman MP, leaving Abbott ‘shell-shocked’. If he stands, Syed Siddiqi can expect considerable support from outraged former Labour supporters around the country who would be delighted to see Streeting ejected.
Image of UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak reads 1% RICHEST 100% CLIMATE DENIER
Hopefully soon an article looking at what it means to be a climate denier. There aren’t any real climate deniers anymore – the science is so clear and easy to understand. It’s a simple message, humans create climate-destroying gases, mostly Carbon Dioxide CO2 through burning (using) fossil-fuels that destroy the planet. There’s also the alternative that using renewable energy resources – the Sun, Wind, water and tidal, etc does not create the climate-destroying gases and so does not destroy the planet. That’s so simple and straightforward that even Nigel Farage can understand it.
So if there’s no problem understanding that, how and why do we still have climate deniers and what does it mean to be a climate denier? What does it mean for Rishi Sunak to say that he’ll take every last drop of oil from the North Sea?
Why does the government, newspapers and Tory TV attack climate activists? It’s because they’re climate deniers which raises the further question why are they climate deniers intent on damaging the planet?
A survivor of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza makes her way through the rubble of the al-Zahra neighborhood on October 19, 2023. (Photo: Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history,” said a U.S. military historian as Israel’s use of arms including 2,000-pound “bunker-buster” bombs pushed the Palestinian death toll over 20,000.
As the Palestinian death toll from Israel’s 10-week annihilation of the Gaza Strip passed 20,000, warfare experts said this weekend that the retaliatory campaign ranks among the deadliest and most destructive in modern history.
Gaza health officials said Friday that 390 Palestinians were killed and 734 others wounded in the besieged strip over the previous 48 hours, driving the death toll from 77 days of near-relentless Israeli attacks to 20,057, with another 53,320 people injured. More than 6,000 women and over 8,000 children have been killed—approximately 70% of all fatalities.
That’s more than twice the number of civilians—and over 14 times as many children—as Russian forces have killed in Ukraine since February 2022.
Thousands more Palestinians are missing and feared buried beneath the rubble of the hundreds of thousands of buildings destroyed or damaged by Israeli bombardment.
“The scale of Palestinian civilian deaths in such a short period of time appears to be the highest such civilian casualty rate in the 21st century,” Michael Lynk, who served as the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories from 2016 to 2022, told The Washington Post on Saturday.
In 75 days, Israel killed 20,000 Palestinians and obliterated 308,000 homes in Gaza. That's 70% of the residential buildings in Gaza.
To put it in perspective, it's as if over 100 million homes in the USA were destroyed.
Robert Pape, a U.S. military historian and University of Chicago professor, told The Associated Press that “Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history.”
“It now sits comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever,” he added.
By comparison, the 2017 U.S.-led coalition battle for Mosul, Iraq during the war against the so-called Islamic State—widely viewed as among the most intense urban assaults in recent decades—killed approximately 10,000 civilians, around a third of them from aerial bombardment.
Pape said that by some measures, Israel’s bombing of Gaza is surpassing the Allied “terror bombing” of German cities during World War II.
He noted that U.S. and U.K. airstrikes obliterated about 40-50% of the urban areas of the 51 German cities bombed between 1942-45, and that around 10% of all buildings in Germany were destroyed. In Gaza, approximately 1 in 3 buildings have been destroyed. In northern Gaza, over two-thirds of all buildings have been leveled.
“Gaza is now a different color from space. It’s a different texture,” Corey Scher, who studies natural disasters and wars using satellite remote sensing at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, told the AP.
Parts of Gaza look like a wasteland from space: Before and after | AP News https://t.co/7r1p6lA67p
Experts point to the types of munitions being used by Israeli forces as a major reason why so many Gazans are being killed and injured. These include U.S.-supplied 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound guided “bunker-buster” bombs, which Israel says are necessary to target Hamas’ underground tunnels.
These massive bombs turn “earth to liquid,” Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon defense official and war crimes investigator for the United Nations, told the AP. “It pancakes entire buildings.”
Garlasco said that 2,000-pound bombs mean “instant death” for anyone within about 100 feet of the blast, with shrapnel posing a deadly danger for people up to 1,200 feet away.
Sometimes 2,000-pound bombs leave craters in the ground where they strike that are approximately 40ft in diameter. Leveraging this fact, we trained an object detection AI algorithm to find craters visible in satellite imagery of south Gaza pic.twitter.com/JjGdZsFBkI
In a separate interview with CNN, Gerlasco said that the intensity of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has “not been seen since Vietnam,” when U.S. airstrikes killed up to hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians. The U.S. dropped more bombs on tiny, non-belligerent Laos than all sides combined unleashed during World War II.
“You’d have to go back to the Vietnam War to make a comparison,” Garlasco added. “Even in both Iraq wars, it was never that dense.”
The use of such heavy ordnance in close proximity to critical civilian infrastructure like hospitals has alarmed observers.
“What we have been witnessing is a campaign that was planned, it was a plan, definitely, to close down all the hospitals in the north,” Léo Cans, head of mission for Palestine with Doctors Without Borders, told the Post.
The Israeli army published footage of them bombing an entire neighbourhood in Gaza.
Satellite images from the first month of the conflict reveal over 500 impact craters, each with a diameter exceeding 12 meters, consistent with the marks left by 2,000-pound bombs pic.twitter.com/ihH3XJByEA
Aided by AI-based target selection systems, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) commanders are approving bombings they know will cause large numbers of civilian casualties. In a bid to assassinate a single Hamas commander, the IDF dropped at least two 2,000-pound bombs on the densely populated Jabalia refugee camp on October 31, killing more than 120 civilians.
Although the United States—which has killed more foreign civilians this century than any other armed force in the world—provides Israel with thousands of 1,000 and 2,000-pound bombs, its own military avoids using such massive ordnance in civilian areas due to the devastation they cause.
“It certainly appears that [Israel’s] tolerance for civilian harm compared to expected operational benefits is significantly different than what we would accept as the U.S.,” Larry Lewis, research director at the Center for Naval Analyses and a former U.S. State Department senior adviser on civilian harm, told CNN.
That includes the risk of killing Israel’s own citizens and others held hostage by Hamas in Gaza.
Another Israeli who was released from captivity in Gaza says she thought she would be killed by Israeli bombing, not by Hamas.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu lies to the public and says more bombing will compel Hamas to release captives. pic.twitter.com/B1ikrp6dk8
Lewis added that the Jabalia strike was “something we would never see the U.S. doing.”
That isn’t entirely true; during the 1991 Gulf War the U.S. dropped a pair of 2,000-pound Raytheon GBU-27 Paveway III laser-guided bombs on the Amiriyah air raid shelter in Baghdad, killing at least 408 Iraqi civilians in one of the deadliest single airstrikes in modern history. U.S. officials claimed they thought the shelter, which was used during the Iraq-Iran war, was no longer a civilian facility.
“The use of 2,000-pound bombs in an area as densely populated as Gaza means it will take decades for communities to recover,” John Chappell, advocacy and legal fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Center for Civilians in Conflict, told CNN.
Even more concerning for some experts is Israel’s use of unguided, or “dumb” bombs, against civilian targets in Gaza.
While IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said that “we choose the right munition for each target so it doesn’t cause unnecessary damage,” the death and destruction in Gaza—and Israeli officials’ own words—tell an entirely different story.
Early in the war, Hagari declared that “Gaza will never return to what it was,” clarifying that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”
Meanwhile, numerous Israeli officials advocated the complete destruction of Gaza, with more than a few government figures—including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Cabinet members—making statements supporting genocide against the Palestinian people.
U.S. President Joe Biden—who has affirmed his “unwavering” support for Israel and is seeking $14.3 billion in additional military aid for the country, which already gets almost $4 billion annually from Washington—has implored Israeli leaders to stop the “indiscriminate” bombing of Gaza, even as his administration thwarts international cease-fire efforts and restocks the IDF’s arsenal.
Chappell stressed that “the devastation that we’ve seen for communities in Gaza is, unfortunately, co-signed by the United States.”
“Too much of it is carried out by bombs that were made in the United States,” he added.
Ahmed Abofoul—a Gaza-born, Netherlands-based attorney with the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq who has lost 60 of his relatives to Israeli bombing— said in Friday interview with Democracy Now! that “the American government is complicit in this genocide.”
“There is blood of Palestinian children on their hands,” he added. [Biden] said Israel is engaged in indiscriminate bombing. This is a war crime. So, the question is: Why do you then send weapons to Israel? The position of the U.S. is quite hypocritical.”
Health activists continue to rally in solidarity with health workers in Palestine, who are being killed, targeted, and threatened by Israeli Occupying Forces
Health activists in the UK organize a mass picket line in front of the office of Palantir. Photo: PHM UK
“There is a real danger that when world leaders return from their Christmas holidays, there will be no health system left in Gaza,” warned Melanie Ward, CEO of Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP). During the last 75 days, Israeli attacks have decimated the health infrastructure in the Gaza Strip, leaving 2.2 million without access to essential care.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are no fully operational hospitals in this part of occupied Palestine left, and those still providing care are hanging by a very thin thread. MAP also reported that over the past 10 weeks of Israeli attacks, more health workers were killed than in any conflict since 2016. The official estimation of the number of health workers’ deaths puts the toll at over 300, and many more have been taken away by Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) during raids in hospitals and health centers.
In a recent briefing organized by No Cold War and the People’s Health Movement (PHM), Mustafa Barghouti from the Palestinian Legislative Council recounted only a shred of their experience based on testimonies given by a recently released first respondent. The health worker told Barghouti and his comrades that approximately 1,000 people were held in a concentration camp in the Negev desert, where they were subjected to torture and inhuman conditions.
The health worker described how they were taken to the camp on trucks, after having been forced to strip naked, and were then beaten and exposed to waterboarding and electrical shocks. The director of Al-Shifa Hospital, Muhammad Abu Salmiya, was reportedly held in the same camp as the first-aid worker whose story Barghouti referred to and was said to be in very bad condition.
In addition to the health workers who have been arrested, the status of many more remains unknown, including Ahmed Muhanna, the director of Al-Awda Hospital in Jabalya.
The targeted detainment and kidnapping of health workers should be taken as a sign that Israel is preparing the ground for staged trials “aimed at maintaining the criminalization of the health system in Gaza,” according to Ghassan Abu Sitta, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon who has been reporting on the situation in Gaza since the beginning of the October 7 attacks.
An indication that this might already be going on was an announcement published by Israel’s security services, saying that Ahmed Al-Kahlout, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, had confirmed the use of the hospital infrastructure by Hamas. Following the announcement, however, the Gaza Ministry of Health pointed out that the statement is extremely likely to have been extracted at gunpoint – either literally or through threats to Al-Kahlout’s life and family.
Considering the testimonies from the prisons and camps where the IOF keeps health workers and other prisoners, it is not difficult to imagine how this could have played out. Only days before, Hani Al-Haitham, the head of Al-Shifa Hospital’s emergency services, was killed in a targeted attack, along with his wife, physician Sameera Ghifari, and their five children.
“Over the past two months, he served fearlessly, among the last doctors out of Shifa as Israel besieged it. He miraculously escaped arrest as he left, which may be why he was assassinated with his family,” his friends wrote on social media.
While the attacks on health care in Gaza continue, the Global North remains complicit in Israel’s actions. The current war on Gaza is not simply an Israeli war, said Mustafa Barghouti, but is also a war in which the United States and the United Kingdom bear direct responsibility. In order to put an end to it, it is necessary to apply pressure on the governments of these countries as well.
This is something that Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) groups in Europe have been steadily working on over the past weeks. Reflecting on their actions, Fiona Ben Chekroun from the Palestinian BDS National Committee stressed that efforts in Europe and the rest of the Global North are now aiming primarily to expose the West’s complicity in the current war on Gaza and ensuring that Israel’s impunity does not last.
Following a similar line of action, health workers in the UK organized a mass picket line in front of the local headquarters of Palantir, a US-based company that specializes in data analytics and surveillance, on December 21. Palantir, which expressed its support for Israel on multiple occasions since the beginning of the latest round of attacks against Gaza, has been awarded a contract for data management by NHS England. The health workers demanded that the contract be annulled and that companies complicit in the ongoing genocide in Gaza are not awarded for their support to the occupation.
At this point, Barghouti said during the briefing, it is essential that the pressure on Israel and on complicit governments does not wind down. “Don’t let the pressure down,” he said. “Reactivate all the solidarity movements and keep them going, especially in countries like Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands.”
People’s Health Dispatchis a fortnightly bulletin published by thePeople’s Health Movementand Peoples Dispatch. For more articles and subscription to People’s Health Dispatch, clickhere.
