MPs show support for an immediate arms embargo outside parliamentPhoto: Jess Hurd
CROSS-PARTY MPs demanded action from the government today to put a halt to Israel’s onslaught in Gaza.
MPs debated petitions signed by over 100,000 people, calling for the immediate revocation of all arms export licences to Israel and 283,000 calling for the recognition of a Palestinian state, which were delivered before the general election
Since last October, at least 45,000 in Gaza have been murdered by Israel, in which Britain has been complicit through supplying arms.
In September, the Labour government eventually banned 30 out of 361 licences in a move labelled “tokenistic” by campaigners.
During the debate, Labour MP John McDonnell said: “I think history will judge us all for not doing enough to stop this.”
The former shadow chancellor said that while he was pleased that the petition is taking place “there’s a level of frustration now I don’t think we can contain any more.”
He asked: “Why isn’t democracy being exercised here to stop this?”
UK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWREGenocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
Pro-Palestinian activists from the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, supported by members of left-wing parties including People Before Profit and the Socialist Party and students, participate in the ‘National March for Palestine’ from the Garden of Remembrance to O’Connell Street and Leinster House, on May 18, 2024, in Dublin, Ireland. (Photo by Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“Ireland will always speak up for human rights and international law. Nothing will distract from that.”
Ireland’s Taoiseach Simon Harris on Sunday responded to charges by the Israeli government—which earlier in the day shuttered its embassy in Dublin—by saying the Irish government has not been “anti-Israel” in its positions over the war in Gaza, but rather “pro-peace, pro-human rights, and pro-international law.”
In a statement explaining the official closure of the diplomatic outpost, Israeli foreign minister Gideon Saar said the “decision to close the Israeli embassy in Dublin was made in light of the extreme anti-Israel policy of the Irish government.”
The ministry’s statement noted that “the Israeli ambassador in Dublin was returned to Israel at the time following Ireland’s decision to unilaterally recognize a ‘Palestinian state’,” which took place in May of this year.
Saar said Ireland had used “antisemitic rhetoric” against Israel, though did not specify what language he was referring to, and also accused the country of “crossing every red line in its relations with Israel.”
In addition to formally recognizing a Palestinian state, the government of Ireland has also backed South Africa in its genocide case against Israel, brought before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) earlier this year.
In his Sunday response to Israel’s decision, Harris said he was “deeply disappointed” in the move even as he “utterly rejected” Israeli assertions.
“Ireland’s foreign policy is founded on our deep commitment to dialogue and to the peaceful resolution of disputes,” Harris said, adding that embassies worldwide “play a very important role” in maintaining that commitment.
“Ireland wants a two-state solution and for Israel and Palestine to live in peace and security,” he concluded. “Ireland will always speak up for human rights and international law. Nothing will distract from that.”
In a separate reaction to Israel’s decision, Micheál Martin, the Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs, said there were no plans to retaliate diplomatically or reciprocate by closing the Irish embassy in Israel.
“The continuation of the war in Gaza and the loss of innocent lives is simply unacceptable and contravenes international law,” Martin said. “It represents the collective punishment of the Palestinian people in Gaza. We need an immediate ceasefire, the release of all hostages and a surge of humanitarian aid into Gaza.”
“Ireland and Israel will continue to maintain diplomatic relations,” he added. ” Inherent in that is the right to agree and disagree on fundamental points.”
Bodies of Palestinian, who lost their lives in Israeli attacks on the family home of journalist Mohammed al-Qirrawi in the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, are taken from Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital for burial in Deir al-Balah, Gaza on December 15, 2024. (Photo by Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images)
A relentless series of assaults in central and northern Gaza by Israeli forces, according to reports on the ground, have killed numerous civilians—including children, rescue workers, and journalist—in recent days with no end in sight.
Rescue workers, children, and journalists are among the civilians killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza on Sunday, as the death toll continues to mount in a military campaign Amnesty International earlier this month said has all the markings of an active and ongoing genocide.
“Due to the rising Israeli bombings and killings in northern Gaza, we have run out of body bags to bury the dead,” said Palestinian journalist Hossam Sabath, reporting from northern Gaza on Sunday. “Now we resort to using any piece of clothing or a blanket for their burial.”
On the ground in the town of Beit Hanoun, where Israeli troops reportedly killed at least 20 people—including civilians—in a series of raids in the area on Sunday, Sabath said the the “scenes of charred bodies are too distressing for us to broadcast. However, they are part of the documented evidence of genocide involving the burning of people alive. We are ready to hand them over to any human rights organization.”
Israeli troops killed at least 22 Palestinians, most of them in the northern Gaza Strip, on Sunday in airstrikes and other attacks on targets that included a school sheltering displaced Gazans, medics and residents said.
They said at least 11 of the dead were killed in three separate Israeli airstrikes on Gaza City houses, nine were killed in the towns of Beit Lahiya, Beit Hanoun and Jabalia camp and two were killed by drone fire in Rafah.
Residents said clusters of houses were bombed and some set ablaze in the three towns. The Israeli army has been operating in the towns for over two months.
In Beit Hanoun, Israeli forces besieged families sheltering in Khalil Aweida school before storming it and ordering them to head towards Gaza City, the medics and residents said.
Al Jazeera‘s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, quoted witnesses who reported “severe injuries” among those who survived the attacks further north.
“They have nowhere to go because the Israeli military forces are encircling the area with tanks and armored vehicles, and hammering the school with heavy artillery,” Mahmoud reported.
A family of four were among those killed, including two children, after the classroom where they were sheltering took a “direct hit” from Israeli artillery fire that arrived without prior warning, the outlet reported.
“Many of the injured are in the courtyard of the school and inside the other classrooms,” according to Mahmoud. “They can’t get any treatment because none of the hospitals in Beit Hanoon are operational.”
Separately, Al-Jazeera reports Sunday that an Israeli bombing killed three members of the Palestinian civil defense search-and-rescue team in central Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp. The new agency also reported that one of its own staff, cameraman Ahmed al-Louh, was killed in the same attack.
In its first response to the incident, Gaza’s government media office condemned the killing of al-Louh and called on the international community to act against the systematic crimes against Palestinian journalists. “The number of martyred journalists has now risen to 195 with the martyrdom of colleague Ahmed al-Louh,” the office stated.
Al Jazeera reiterated its condemnation of the attack, describing al-Louh’s death as part of a broader assault on press freedom in Gaza. “Ahmed al-Louh was dedicated to documenting the realities of the ongoing conflict under the most dangerous conditions,” the network said.
“The unprecedented killing of journalists by the Israeli military continues with impunity,” said fellow reporter Sharif Kouddous.
On Dec. 5, Amnesty International released a 296-page report—featuring interviews with survivors and witnesses of Israel’s large-scale campaign of bombing, displacement, arbitrary detention, and destruction of Gaza’s agricultural land and civilian infrastructure—that conclude what Israel has been doing in Gaza amounts to genocide.
“Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty’s secretary-general, upon release of the document. “Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now.”
As the weekend’s latest catalog of death and injuries suggests, it has not stopped.
On the first day of the hearing at The International Court of Justice aka ICJ, which has been asked by South Africa to consider whether Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, an advertising van drives around Westminster displaying the definition of genocide on 11th of January 2024 in London, United Kingdom. [Kristian Buus/In Pictures via Getty Images]
It was bound to happen. With continuing operations in Gaza and increasingly violent acts against Palestinians in the occupied territories, human rights organisations are making progressively severe assessments of Israel’s warring cause. While the world awaits the findings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on whether Israel’s campaign, as argued by South Africa, amounts to genocide, Amnesty International has already reached its conclusions.
In a 296-page report sporting the ominous title “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman”, the human rights body, after considering the events in Gaza between October 2023 and July 2024, identified a “pattern of conduct” indicating genocidal intent. These included, among other things, persistent direct attacks on civilians and objects; “deliberately indiscriminate strikes over the nine-month period, wiping out entire families repeatedly launched at times when these strikes would result in high numbers of casualties”; the nature of the weapons used; the speed and scale of destruction to civilian objects and infrastructure (homes, shelters, health facilities, water and sanitation infrastructure, agricultural land); the use of bulldozing and controlled demolitions and the use of incomprehensible, misleading and arbitrary evacuation orders.
The report does much to focus on statements from the highest officials to the common soldiery to reveal the mental state necessary to reveal genocide. One hundred two statements made by members of the Knesset, government officials and high-ranking commanders: “Dehumanised Palestinians, or called for, or justified genocidal acts or other crimes under international law against them.” The report also examined 62 videos, audio recordings and photographs posted online featuring gleeful Israeli soldiers rejoicing in the: “Destruction of Gaza or the denial of essential services to people in Gaza, or celebrated the destruction of Palestinian homes, mosques, schools and universities, including through controlled demolitions, in some cases without apparent military necessity.”
From its alternative universe, the Israeli public relations machine drew from its own agitprop specialists, working on mangling the language of the report. The formula is familiar: attack the authors first, not their premises. “The deplorable and fanatical organisation Amnesty International has once again produced a fabricated response that is entirely based on lies,” came the howl from Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson Oren Marmorstein.
Other methods of repudiation involve detaching Hamas and its war with Israel from any historical continuum, not least the fact that it was aided, supported and backed by Israel for years as a counter to Fatah in the West Bank. Isolating Hamas as a terrorist aberration also serves to treat it as alien, artificially foreign and not part of any resistance movement against suffocating Israeli occupation and strangulation. They, so goes this argument, are genocidal, and countering such a body can never be, by any stretch, genocidal. The pro-Israeli group NGO Monitor abides by this line of reasoning, calling allegations of genocide against Israel: “A reversal of the actual and clearly established intent of Hamas and its allies (including its patron, Iran) to wipe Israel off the map.”
Israel’s closest ally and sponsor, the US, proved predictable in rejecting the findings while still claiming to respect the humanitarian line. The US State Department’s principal deputy spokesperson, Vedant Patel, expressed disagreement with: “The conclusions of such a report. We had said previously and continue to find that the allegations of genocide are unfounded.” Patel did, however, pay lip service to the: “Vital role that civil society organisations like Amnesty International and human rights groups and NGOs play in providing information and analysis as it relates to Gaza and what’s going on.” Vital, but only up to a point.
Far less guarded assessments can be found in the US pro-Israeli chatter sphere. These follow the usual pattern. Orde Kittrie, senior fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a name that can only imply that crimes committed in such a cause are bound to be justifiable, offers a neat illustration. Amnesty, he argues: “Systematically and repeatedly mischaracterises both the facts and the law.” Kittrie suggests his own mischaracterisation by parroting the Israel Defense Forces’ line that Hamas had: “Increased casualty counts by illegally using Palestinian civilian shields and by hiding weapons and war fighters in and below homes, hospitals, mosques, and other buildings.” This conveniently ignores the point that the numbers are not necessarily proof of genocidal intent, though it helps.
The report also notes that, even in the face of such tactics by Hamas, Israel was still: “Obligated to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians and avoid attacks that would be indiscriminate or disproportionate.”
Amnesty International’s report is yet another addition to the gloomy literature on the subject. Human Rights Watch, in November, pointed to violations of the laws of war, crimes against humanity and the provisional measures of the ICJ issued urging Israel to abide by the obligations imposed by the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948. The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem stated in no uncertain terms in October that: “Israel intends to forcibly displace northern Gaza’s residents by committing some of the gravest crimes under the laws of war.”
Battling over the designation of whether a campaign is genocidal can act as a distraction, a field of quibbles for paper-pushing pedants. The “specific intent” in proof must be unequivocally demonstrated and beyond any other reasonable inference. A smokescreen is thereby deployed that risks masking the broader ambit of war crimes and crimes against humanity. But no amount of pedantry and disagreement can arrest the sense that Israel’s lethal conduct, whatever threshold it may reach in international law, is directed at destroying not merely Palestinian life but any worthwhile sense of viable sovereignty. Amnesty Israel, while rejecting the central claim of the parent organisation’s report, did make one concession: the country’s brutal response following 7 October, 2023: “May amount to crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.”
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
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Palestinians carrying empty pots line up to receive meals distributed by charity organizations in Khan Younis, Gaza on December 13, 2024. (Photo: Doaa Albaz/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Lawmakers told the Biden administration they are “deeply troubled by the continued level of civilian casualties and humanitarian suffering in Gaza.”
As Israel continues to decimate the Gaza Strip with American weapons, 77 Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives this week demanded that the Biden administration “provide a full assessment of the status of Israel’s compliance with all relevant U.S. policies and laws, including National Security Memorandum 20 (NSM-20) and Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act.”
Reps. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.), and Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.) spearheaded the Thursday letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, with less than six weeks left in President Joe Biden’s term.
Since Biden issued NSM-20 in February, his administration has repeatedly accepted the Israel government’s assurances about the use of U.S. weapons, despite reports from journalists and human rights groups about how they have helped Israeli forces slaughter at least 44,875 Palestinians and injure another 106,454 people in the besieged enclave over the past 14 months.
“Our concerns remain urgent and largely unresolved, including arbitrary restrictions on humanitarian aid and insufficient delivery routes.”
House Democrats’ letter begins by declaring support for “Israel’s right to self-defense,” denouncing the Hamas-led October 2023 attack, and endorsing the Biden administration’s efforts “to broker a bilateral cease-fire that includes the release of hostages,” noting the deal recently negotiated for the Israeli government and the Lebanese group Hezbollah.
“Further, we condemn the unprecedented Iranian attacks against Israel launched on April 13, 2024, and October 1, 2024,” the letter states, declining to mention the Israeli actions that led to those responses. “We must continue to avoid a major regional conflict—and we welcome the concerted diplomatic efforts by the U.S. and our allies to prevent further escalation.”
“We are also deeply troubled by the continued level of civilian casualties and humanitarian suffering in Gaza,” the lawmakers wrote, citing the administration’s October 13 letter imposing a 30-day deadline for Israel to improve humanitarian conditions in Palestinian territory. “That deadline has expired, and while some progress has been made, we believe the Israeli government has not yet fulfilled the requirements outlined in your letter.”
Asked during a November 12 press conference if the Israeli government has met the administration’s demands, State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said that “we have not made an assessment that they are in violation of U.S. law.”
Shortly after that, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) forced votes on resolutions to block the sale of 120mm tank rounds, 120mm high-explosive mortar rounds, and Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) to Israel, but they didn’t pass.
Progressives and Democrats in Congress have been sounding the alarm about U.S. government complicity in Israel’s armed assault and starvation campaign—which have led to an ongoing genocide case at the International Court of Justice—to varying degrees since October 2023, including with a May letter led by Crow and Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) and signed by 85 others.
Citing that letter on Thursday, the 77 House Democrats wrote that “our concerns remain urgent and largely unresolved, including arbitrary restrictions on humanitarian aid and insufficient delivery routes, among others. As a result, Gaza’s civilian population is facing dire famine.”
“We believe further administrative action must be taken to ensure Israel upholds the assurances it provided in March 2024 to facilitate, and not directly or indirectly obstruct, U.S. humanitarian assistance,” the letter concludes. “We remain committed to a negotiated solution that can bring an end to the fighting, free the remaining hostages, surge humanitarian aid, and lay the groundwork to rebuild Gaza with a legitimate Palestinian governing body. We thank you and the administration for its ongoing work to achieve those shared goals.”
