Palestine

Lawsuit Accuses German Leaders of Complicity in Gaza Genocide

Spread the love

Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (L) shakes hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) during an October 17, 2023 press conference in Tel Aviv. (Photo: Michael Kappeler/picture alliance via Getty Images)

“This lawsuit sends a clear message to German officials: You cannot continue to remain accomplices of such crime without consequences.”

Lawyers in Germany representing Palestinian families announced Friday that they are suing senior German officials, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz, for “aiding and abetting” Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The criminal complaint, filed Thursday with federal prosecutors in Karlsruhe in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg, accuses Scholz, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, and Economy Minister Robert Habeck of “complicity in the genocide in Gaza” by approving the export of approximately $350 million worth of military aid to Israel.

The suit also lists the German government’s diplomatic support for Israel and its suspension of payments to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East—even as Israeli forces have killed and maimed over 100,000 Palestinians, forcibly displaced around 90% of the besieged strip’s 2.3 million people, obliterated the territory’s infrastructure, and pushed hundreds of thousands of Gazans to the brink of starvation.

“We Palestinians in the diaspora will not stand by and watch a genocide being committed against our families and our people.”

“Our governments in Europe have a legal obligation not to provide Israel any support in perpetrating the current genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. This has to stop and this is what we hope to achieve by going to court,” Nadija Samour, a Palestinian German lawyer who co-filed the suit, said Friday at a Berlin press conference.

“This lawsuit sends a clear message to German officials: You cannot continue to remain accomplices of such crime without consequences,” she added. “We want accountability.”

Last month, a provisional International Court of Justice ruling that found Israel is “plausibly” perpetrating genocide in Gaza and ordering the country’s government and military to “take all measures within its power” to prevent genocidal acts.

Noting that German law requires initial suspicion for such lawsuits to proceed, Samour said that the ICJ’s interim ruling “clearly showed that there is such ground for initial suspicion when it comes to the crime of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.”

Germany staunchly opposes the South Africa-led ICJ case. Berlin’s stance has infuriated much of the Global South, including Namibia, which was colonized by Germans who perpetrated the 20th century’s first genocide in the African nation.

Namibian President Hage Geingob, who died earlier this month, said in January that “Germany cannot morally express commitment to the United Nations convention against genocide, including atonement for the genocide in Namibia, whilst supporting the equivalent of a holocaust and genocide in Gaza.”

Legal experts, genocide scholars, human rights campaigners, world leaders, and others have accused Israel of genocide in Gaza. Raz Segal, one of Israel’s leading Holocaust scholars, has repeatedly said his country is perpetrating a “textbook case of genocide” against the people of Gaza.

Nora Ragab, a Palestinian German migration scholar and plaintiff in the lawsuit whose uncle was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza, said in a statement that “we Palestinians in the diaspora will not stand by and watch a genocide being committed against our families and our people.”

“We will use all means at our disposal… to hold the German government accountable for its complicity in the genocide in Gaza,” she added.

Advocacy groups supporting the German lawsuit include the European Legal Support Center (ELSC), the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy, and Law for Palestine.

Germany “is one of the countries that has shown some of the strongest political and material support to Israel in its assault on the Gaza Strip and the Palestinians, with many German officials also inciting to genocide in their statements,” ELSC said in a statement.

German arms export approvals to Israel soared last year, especially after the October 7 Hamas-led attacks. Reuters reported in November that 2023 military export authorizations through the first week of that month rose tenfold from 2022 levels, with the majority of export permits issued after October 7. German weapons and support sales to Israel totaled over $320 million last year.

Although that amount pales in comparison to the billions of dollars in annual armed aid and sales the United States provides to Israel, it does not affect the legality of such transfers. On Friday, a group of United Nations experts asserted that “any transfer of weapons or ammunition to Israel that would be used in Gaza is likely to violate international humanitarian law and must cease immediately.”

Earlier this month, a Dutch court blocked the proposed export of F-35 fighter jet parts to Israel, finding a “clear risk” that those parts would be used to commit war crimes.

Many observers contend that Germany’s actions are driven by historical guilt over the Holocaust. Numerous critics claim the German government is weaponizing that guilt in order to demonize Palestinians and their defenders.

“Since October 7, 2023, the Palestinian community in Germany, especially in Berlin, has been subjected to intense suppression of their protests, cultural symbols, voices, and narratives,” Ragab wrote last week. “This crackdown has significantly hindered their ability to publicly express grief and outrage against the state of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.”

Ragab called bans or restrictions on pro-Palestine demonstrations—sometimes enforced through police violence—”notably severe.”

“By banning protests, the German state not only negates Palestinians their right to free expression and peaceful assembly, but also seeks to control the public narrative and visibility of Palestine and Palestinian life in Germany,” she wrote. “Although the intensity of this suppression escalated on October 7, it is part of a historical politics of erasure, diminishing, and eradicating the collective existence and identity of Palestinians in Germany, through repression, censorship, and discrimination.”

Dave Braneck, a freelance journalist in Berlin, called Germany’s stance on the Gaza genocide “truly repugnant.”

“You don’t need a Ph.D in Middle East studies to acknowledge that children in Gaza are human,” Braneck asserted. “Yet Germans fail to see the sickening irony of sanctioning the mass death of innocents and leveling of entire communities as a necessary act of atonement for the Holocaust.”

He added that “if Germany had real interest in learning lessons from its appalling history, it would recognize that categorizing entire nations of people as inhuman and unworthy of sympathy or safety must be made untenable—regardless of who it’s happening to.”

Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue ReadingLawsuit Accuses German Leaders of Complicity in Gaza Genocide

Demonising Peaceful Protest Demonstrates the Level of Political and Moral Bankruptcy in Parliament

Spread the love

https://www.stopwar.org.uk/article/demonising-peaceful-protest-demonstrates-the-level-of-political-and-moral-bankruptcy-in-parliament/

Sir Lindsay Hoyle MP was elected Speaker of the House of Commons in November 2019.

The fact that Westminster is content to play cynical games while Palestinians suffer is beneath contempt writes Lindsey German

The shameful scenes in parliament where Labour manoeuvred to stop a principled motion calling for immediate ceasefire in Gaza are bad enough. But even worse is the justification of many Labour MPs for the coercion of the Speaker: that they were fearful of intimidation and violence from demonstrators over Gaza.

Firstly, this is a lie: the protests that take place at MPs’ offices are overwhelmingly peaceful and no threat to MPs or their staff. They are a longstanding and valid form of expressing disagreement and concern over issues in a democracy. But such is the state of politics in Britain that they are now equated with intimidation of MPs. Perhaps these MPs – highly salaried and privileged in comparison with most of their constituents – should have reflected when they stood for office that being involved in politics of necessity involves disagreement and controversy at certain times.

There is a huge movement in support of the Palestinians across Britain and real anger that politicians have for the most part stood by as we witness a genocide in Gaza. None of these protests would take place if the MPs concerned had taken the very minimal step of backing an immediate ceasefire.

But there is also a second and more important question: why MPs are so self-centred to highlight the minimal inconvenience to them while people are starving in Gaza, while over 12,000 children have been killed and where the population is being ethnically cleansed? And why did the Labour leadership refuse to accept an amendment which talked about the collective punishment of the people of Gaza? The Labour position on Gaza has been a disgrace from the beginning and this is why they are facing a wave of protest.

The fact that they are trying to demonise protestors and to paint them as violent extremists shows their political and moral bankruptcy. The fact that they are content to play their cynical and pathetic games while the Palestinians suffer is beneath contempt.

22 Feb 2024

https://www.stopwar.org.uk/article/demonising-peaceful-protest-demonstrates-the-level-of-political-and-moral-bankruptcy-in-parliament/

Continue ReadingDemonising Peaceful Protest Demonstrates the Level of Political and Moral Bankruptcy in Parliament

Malnourishment could lead to even more deaths among children in Gaza

Spread the love

Original article republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Displaced Palestinians wait for food at Al-Shaboura camp, in Rafah. Photo: WHO via UN Photo

A new report found that that over 15% of children under the age of 2 in northern Gaza are acutely malnourished, with 3% of them suffering from wasting. The World Food Programme has warned that without a ceasefire, a famine may ravage Gaza by May

Nutrition indicators among children in Gaza have been declining at an unprecedented rate since the beginning of Israeli attacks on October 7, 2023. Without a ceasefire, there will be a famine ravaging through the region by May, warned the World Food Programme (WFP).

In a new report based on data collected by the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF, the Global Nutrition Cluster found that over 15% of children under the age of 2 in northern Gaza are acutely malnourished, with 3% of them suffering from wasting. 

The numbers in the southern regions, including Rafah, where most of Gaza’s population has been displaced to, are somewhat lower, yet still represent a massive increase compared to the situation before October 7. The report indicates that by January, 5% of under-2-year-olds in Rafah were acutely malnourished. Previously, less than 1% of children younger than 5 experienced such circumstances across the entire Strip.

The extent of malnourishment is creating the perfect conditions for the spread of communicable diseases, which could drive the devastating number of children killed by Israeli attacks even higher. As most children can only consume food of low variety, their bodies become more vulnerable to the effects of otherwise treatable conditions, like diarrhea. Additionally, the lack of clean potable water, affecting all households in Gaza, further decreases the chances of treating these conditions.

Children are not the only group affected by the lack of food. Their parents, including pregnant mothers, are choosing to forgo meals to feed their children. Approximately 95% of pregnant and breastfeeding women in Gaza are not getting enough to eat. If they have access to food, it is of low nutritional value, adding to the pre-existing burden of anemia and undermining maternal health.

The WFP has documented much of this situation but stopped delivering aid to northern Gaza as the occupying forces did not ensure conditions for safe delivery. The aid entering southern regions of Gaza remains only a small fraction of what is needed, and the effects of malnutrition are exacerbated by the destruction of the health infrastructure.

Read more: Israel intensifies assault on healthcare in Gaza. Only 11 hospitals are partially functioning

No hospital or health center is spared in this process, and attacks have also been noted against civilian infrastructure where health workers and their families are seeking shelter. In one of the most recent attacks of this kind, the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) targeted a house where 64 Doctors Without Borders (MSF) staff members and their families were staying. The building was clearly marked with an MSF flag, and the IOF were informed of their presence, yet they attacked the house, killing several people inside.

According to MSF, the IOF’s action “shows a complete disregard for human life and a lack of respect for the medical mission. This makes it almost impossible to sustain medical humanitarian activities in Gaza.”

As the IOF persists in its attacks on hospitals, not only the shelling but also the evacuation orders and sieges further jeopardize the health of people who are already sick or wounded. Commenting on recent cases of hospital evacuation in Gaza, Guillemette Thomas from MSF pointed out that patients were forced to leave on foot, in wheelchairs, or even rolled in hospital beds, despite being in no condition to be moved.

Their treatment increases the risk of infection and lowers the chances of recovery, Thomas stated. “This can be extremely dangerous for them. When someone with a severely fractured leg starts to walk, it compromises their possibility to regain mobility and can have life-threatening consequences.”

Even after most patients, medical staff, and forcibly displaced people are evacuated from the hospitals, Israeli forces continue to besiege them. On February 22, after a full month of besieging and targeting Al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis, the IOF damaged the hospital’s communication devices, which are used by the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) for locating and dispatching teams. This is only one in a series of IOF attacks that hit the PRCS, following the kidnapping of several staff members, destroying ambulance vehicles dispatched to rescue children, and raids on Al-Amal, which left behind damaged medical equipment and vehicles.

Read more: Palestinian health workers kidnapped by Israel subjected to torture and humiliation

The situation is far from better in Nasser Hospital. While the WHO and other organizations were finally able to reach the complex to evacuate one part of the patients who had stayed behind following a violent incursion into the buildings by the IOF, over 100 patients who cannot move and about a dozen medical staff providing them care still remain behind.

The UN health agency was granted permission to enter Nasser Hospital only earlier this week, after several attempts were blocked by the Israeli forces. “Prior to the missions, WHO received two consecutive denials to access the hospital for medical assessment, causing delays in urgently needed patient referral. Reportedly, at least five patients died in the Intensive Care Unit before any missions or transfers were possible,” the organization said in a statement.

Upon their return from Nasser, WHO staff said the destruction was indescribable. “Gaza has become a death zone,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Original article republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Continue ReadingMalnourishment could lead to even more deaths among children in Gaza

UN Experts Say Arms Exports to Israel ‘Must Cease Immediately’

Spread the love

Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

A man looks for survivors amid the debris of destroyed houses in the aftermath of Israeli airstrikes in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on February 22, 2024.  (Photo: Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty Images)

“State officials involved in arms exports may be individually criminally liable for aiding and abetting any war crimes, crimes against humanity, or acts of genocide.”

Dozens of United Nations experts on Friday called for an immediate arms embargo on Israel and warned that countries and private companies still sending weapons to the Israeli military during its assault on Gaza could be complicit in crimes against humanity.

The experts—including special rapporteurs on education and the rights of displaced people—said in a joint statement that “any transfer of weapons or ammunition to Israel that would be used in Gaza is likely to violate international humanitarian law and must cease immediately.”

“Such transfers are prohibited even if the exporting state does not intend the arms to be used in violation of the law—or does not know with certainty that they would be used in such a way—as long as there is a clear risk,” they said. “State officials involved in arms exports may be individually criminally liable for aiding and abetting any war crimes, crimes against humanity, or acts of genocide.”

The U.N. experts noted that the United States and Germany are “by far” Israel’s largest arms suppliers, though France, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia also export weapons to the Israeli government, which the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled is plausibly committing genocide in the Gaza Strip.

The ICJ’s interim ruling, which Israel has disregarded, has “heightened” the need for an arms embargo, the experts said, noting that compliance with the Genocide Convention of 1948 “requires states parties to employ all means reasonably available to them to prevent genocide in another state as far as possible.”

The experts also said that “arms companies contributing to the production and transfer of arms to Israel and businesses investing in those companies bear their own responsibility to respect human rights, international humanitarian law and international criminal law.”

“They have not publicly demonstrated the heightened human rights due diligence required of them and accordingly risk complicity in violations,” they said.

“All states must not be complicit in international crimes through arms transfers. They must do their part to urgently end the unrelenting humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.”

The statement comes two weeks after a Dutch court ordered the Netherlands’ government to stop exporting jet parts to Israel, citing the “clear risk” that the aircraft might be used to “commit serious violations of international humanitarian law.” The government is appealing the ruling.

Other countries, including Italy and Spain, have said they have suspended arms sales to Israel since its latest assault on Gaza began—though a Spanish newspaper reported earlier this month that the country exported $1.1 million worth of ammunition to Israel in November.

The U.S., meanwhile, is reportedly planning to send additional weaponry to Israel and has refused to attach conditions to its arms exports even as top officials—including President Joe Biden—publicly voice concerns about the rising death toll in Gaza and Israel’s looming ground invasion of Rafah, where more than half of the enclave’s population is currently sheltering.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the latest proposed arms shipment “includes roughly a thousand each of MK-82 bombs, KMU-572 Joint Direct Attack Munitions that add precision guidance to bombs, and FMU-139 bomb fuses.”

“The arms are estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars,” the Journal added. “The proposed delivery is still being reviewed internally by the administration, a U.S. official said, and the details of the proposal could change before the Biden administration notifies congressional committee leaders who would need to approve the transfer.”

Israel has used U.S. weaponry to commit atrocities in the Gaza Strip, including airstrikes on homes full of children. An Amnesty International investigation released earlier this month found that a January 9 Israeli airstrike on a residential building in southern Gaza killed 18 civilians, including 10 children.

Based on ordnance fragments recovered from the rubble, the weapon used in the attack was identified as a GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb—made by the U.S. company Boeing.

On Friday, Gaza’s health ministry said that Israeli airstrikes killed more than 100 people over the past 24 hours and injured at least 160 more. Israeli strikes on the severely overcrowded city of Rafah on Thursday destroyed a mosque and several homes, killing or wounding many people and leaving others trapped under the rubble.

“International law does not enforce itself,” the U.N. experts said Friday. “All states must not be complicit in international crimes through arms transfers. They must do their part to urgently end the unrelenting humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.”

Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Jewish-Led NYC Rally Targets AIPAC, Dem Allies Who Oppose Gaza Cease-Fire

“AIPAC uses money and racist bullying to ensure congressional complicity in the genocide of Gaza,” said Jewish Voice for Peace.

‘People of Gaza Need a Cease-Fire,’ Medical Aid Leader Tells UN Security Council

“This body has failed to effectively address this conflict. We have watched members of this council deliberate and delay while civilians die.”

All of Us Must ‘Confront the Current Siege in Gaza’

As the Nuremberg Tribunal and U.S. law make clear, it is the responsibility of the people to halt crimes that the courts have proved impotent to prevent.

Continue ReadingUN Experts Say Arms Exports to Israel ‘Must Cease Immediately’

Oxfam Rips UK Parliament for ‘Squabbling’ Over Cease-Fire as Israel Pummels Gaza

Spread the love

Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators hold a protest in Parliament Square in London on February 21, 2024.  (Photo: Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images)

“It is a disgrace that there has been so much playground politics in Parliament this evening, while so many lives are at stake.”

What was supposed to be a debate over a motion demanding an immediate cease-fire in the Gaza Strip quickly descended into mayhem and partisan bickering on Wednesday as members of the U.K. Parliament jockeyed for position—all while Israel continued dropping bombs on starving Palestinians.

Wednesday’s debate was started by the Scottish National Party (SNP), which introduced a motion calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, the release of all hostages, and “an end to the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”

The Conservative and Labour parties both put forth amendments aimed at watering down the SNP motion. House of Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle moved to allow a vote on all three motions, angering Tories who said the decision violated convention.

Ultimately, as The Associated Press reported, “many Conservatives and SNP members walked out, and in their absence the Labour version of the cease-fire call passed on a voice vote—by calls of ‘Aye’—without a full formal vote.” The Labour amendment dropped the SNP motion’s call for an end to collective punishment.

Diane Abbott, an MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, said she entered Parliament on Wednesday to support the SNP motion, which she called “the only genuinely meant cease-fire motion on the order paper.”

“Instead things descended into a shambles,” said Abbott. “Meanwhile Israel’s military continues to kill 250 Palestinians a day.”

Jeremy Corbyn, an independent MP for Islington North and the former leader of the Labour Party, wrote Thursday that “yesterday was an appalling day for British Parliament.

“It was much, much worse for the people of Gaza, who are dying slowly and painfully from dehydration, disease, and starvation,” Corbyn added. “We must end this systematic slaughter—the existence of the Palestinian people is at stake.”

“An immediate and permanent cease-fire is the only solution to stop this devastating cycle of bloodshed.”

Oxfam GB’s head of advocacy, Katy Chakrabortty, also voiced outrage over Wednesday’s proceedings, saying in a statement, “It is a disgrace that there has been so much playground politics in Parliament this evening, while so many lives are at stake.”

“The people of Gaza can’t wait for our politicians to stop squabbling,” said Chakrabortty. “Much of the country lies in ruins and Rafah, where many Palestinian families have been forced to flee, is under threat of a full-scale military offensive. Children in the North of Gaza are dying from hunger because no aid can reach them due to Israel’s continued assault and restrictions on access.”

“An immediate and permanent cease-fire is the only solution to stop this devastating cycle of bloodshed, to ensure the safe release of hostages, and to allow urgent aid to reach all of those in desperate need,” Chakrabortty continued. “Many MPs spoke passionately tonight of the horrors in Gaza and we thank those who raised their voices. The government must listen and support U.N. votes for a cease-fire and end the sale of arms to Israel.”

Citing unnamed sources, The Guardian on Wednesday reported that the U.K.’s Tory government “will consider suspending arms export licenses to Israel” if the country’s military goes ahead with a ground invasion of Rafah, a severely overcrowded city near Gaza’s border with Egypt.

The U.K. has licensed more than £474 million worth of military exports to Israel over the past decade, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).

In December, HRW and other rights groups warned that “the U.K. risks being complicit in and facilitating serious violations of international humanitarian law if it fails to halt arms exports to Israel immediately.”

“Our organizations demand an immediate suspension of arms transfers to all parties to the current conflict,” the groups wrote in a joint letter. “For the U.K. government, this requires a halt to the arming of Israel. Failure to do so risks the government breaching its own laws and being complicit in grave abuses.”

Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

dizzy: While this is a very good account of what happened, I’m going to emphasize some extra issues. While the Speaker is supposed to be impartial he is acually an MP, currently a Labour MP. Labour Leader Keir Starmer acted improperly by effectively ‘lobbying’ the Speaker in person yesterday. Starmer has said that he didn’t threaten or impose pressure on the Speaker. I suggest that lobbying him in any way is out of order. The Speaker claims that he was concerned for MPs safety, that they are getting confronted by their constituents.

The winner from yesterday’s events is Keir Starmer since huge numbers – perhaps a hundred – of Labour MPs were expected to vote for the SNP’s motion against their party’s instruction. I consider that the Speaker should not be concerned with MPs’ safety and that they should be expected to be confronted by their constituents. The point here is that if you don’t want to be accused of complicity in genocide don’t be complicit in genocide.

24/2/24 I’ve used the wrong term ‘lobbying’. MPs are whipped by their own parties to follow their party’s chosen course of action.

Zionist Keir Starmer supports Israel's Gaza genocide.
Zionist Keir Starmer supports Israel’s Gaza genocide.

22/2/24 10pm How Keir Starmer placed his political image over the lives of those in Gaza

Continue ReadingOxfam Rips UK Parliament for ‘Squabbling’ Over Cease-Fire as Israel Pummels Gaza