Palestinians walk through dust by the rubble of houses, destroyed by Israeli strikes in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, July 22, 2024
AN INTERNATIONAL human rights group issued a fresh warning on Tuesday over the complicity of the United States in alleged Israeli war crimes.
The warning from Amnesty International came as protests mounted over the visit of Israel’s far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Amnesty demanded a “comprehensive arms embargo on Israel, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups.”
The rights group said the embargo should remain in place “until there is no longer a substantial risk that arms could be used to commit or facilitate serious violations of international human rights or humanitarian law.”
Amnesty International US executive director Paul O’Brien said: “Enough is enough. The US government has been presented with ample evidence from experts around the world that US-origin arms have been used in war crimes and unlawful killings by the Israeli government.
Palestinian children injured in Israeli attacks on Al-Maghazi refugee camp are brought to al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, Gaza on November 5, 2023. (Photo: Ashraf Amra/Anadolu Agency)
“It took a genocide that killed 15,000 children and maimed and scarred thousands more but the U.N. has finally and rightly added Israel to its List of Shame,” said one Palestinian observer.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres informed Israel on Friday that, for the first time, it is being added to the so-called “List of Shame” of countries that kill and injure children during wars and other armed conflicts, a decision that infuriated Israeli officials but was welcomed by human rights defenders as long overdue.
The Secretary-General Office’s annual Children and Armed Conflict report—which is likely to be released publicly later this month—has included countries and militant groups such as Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, Iraq, Islamic State, Myanmar, Russia, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. This is believed to be the first time the list has included a nation hailed by Western governments as a democracy.
“It took a genocide that killed 15,000 children and maimed and scarred thousands more but the U.N. has finally and rightly added Israel to its List of Shame,” Palestinian political analyst Nour Odeh said on social media. “Arms embargo NOW!”
Israel to be listed on the UNSG's list of shame of armed forces & groups committing grave violations of children's rights.
Historic, but so, so late. So many Palestinian children might still be alive if world leaders had the courage to speak up earlier. https://t.co/mvvKywwO3o
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “the U.N. has put itself on the blacklist of history today when it joined the supporters of the Hamas murderers.”
“The IDF is the most moral army in the world and no delusional decision by the U.N. will change that,” added the prime minister, who International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan is seeking to arrest along with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes including extermination.
This year’s 2024 List of Shame will also include Hamas, which led the October 7 attack that left more than 1,100 Israelis and others dead, including 38 children. Around 30 minors were also kidnapped by Hamas, all of whom are believed to have been freed. Khan wants to arrest three leaders of Hamas, whose members are accused of extermination, rape, and other crimes.
In retaliation, Israel launched an assault and siege on theGaza Strip—now on its 244th day—killing more than 36,700 Palestinians including at least 15,000 minors, according to Palestinian and international agencies. Some children have allegedly been sexually abused and executedby Israeli troops.
More children were killed in Gaza in the first four months of the war than in four years of conflict worldwide, in what Philippe Lazzarini, who heads the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, called a “war on children… their childhood, and their future.”
There are also tens of thousands of children among the more than 83,000 Palestinians wounded by Israeli bombs and bullets in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands of children have been forcibly displaced by Israel’s bombardment and invasion, but there’s no safe place for them to go.
The Israeli blockade of Gaza and obliteration of its healthcare infrastructure have exacerbated what the U.N.’s top food official has called a “full-blown famine” in the north and widespread starvation throughout the strip. Dozens of children have starved to death.
Israel’s conduct in the war is under investigation by the International Court of Justice in The Hague in a genocide case brought by South Africa and supported by more than 30 other nations and regional blocs.
The U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) calls Gaza the most dangerous place in the world for children. The perils are not only physical; the annihilation of Gaza has also wrought tremendous psychological damage upon its children, many of whom have survived multiple Israeli campaigns.
According to UNICEF, more than 17,000 Gazan children are now orphans, with some having lost their entire families to Israeli attacks. International medical workers have coined a new acronym for these children: WCNSF, or, wounded child, no surviving family.
The UN has a “List of Shame” to publicly names those who harm children in war
After more than 15,000 children have been murdered in Gaza 🇵🇸, Israel 🇮🇱 has been put on that ‘shame list’
Between 2000 and the start of the Gaza war, Israeli forces killed more than 2,300 children throughout Palestine, according to Defense for Children International-Palestine. Prior to the current war, the highest number of Palestinian children killed in one year was 546 in 2014, when Israel carried out its Operation Protective Edge invasion of Gaza.
Despite all this killing, Israel was perennially given a pass from the List of Shame.
“Including Israel in the List of Shame is an urgent necessity to put an end to its severe and horrific violations and to protect the rights of Palestinian children. It is also crucial for maintaining the integrity and credibility of U.N. mechanisms, which are at risk of erosion due to double standards,” said Radhya Al-Mutawakel, who heads the Yemen-based group Mwatana for Human Rights.
Al-Mutawakel asserted that blacklisting Israel sends “a clear message that the U.N. stands firmly for the protection of children’s rights worldwide and will not tolerate violations against them” and also conveys “that the U.N. deals uniformly with all parties involved in grave violations against children, regardless of the perpetrators’ identities or the children’s backgrounds.”
Numerous Palestine advocates said Israel’s inclusion on the list of shame underscores the urgency of halting shipments of weapons used to kill Palestinian children.
“Israel is a terrorist nation,” said British union leader Howard Beckett. “Arms embargo. Sanctions. Hague.”
Relatives of Palestinians killed by an Israeli airstrike are pictured at El-Najar Hospital in Rafah, Gaza on April 21, 2024. (Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“Members of Congress should understand that approving more military aid could subject them to personal liability for aiding and abetting an ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
Hours after the U.S. House approved legislation that would send billions of dollars in additional military aid to Israel, the country’s forces killed nearly two dozen people in Rafah, the southern Gaza city where more than half of the enclave’s population is sheltering.
Gaza health officials said Sunday that the weekend strikes on Rafah—a former “safe zone” that Israel has been threatening to invade for weeks—killed 22 people, including 18 children. The Associated Press reported that the first of the Israeli strikes “killed a man, his wife, and their 3-year-old child, according to the nearby Kuwaiti Hospital, which received the bodies.”
“The woman was pregnant and the doctors saved the baby, the hospital said,” AP added. “The second strike killed 17 children and two women from an extended family.”
Israeli forces have killed more than 14,000 children in Gaza since October, but the Biden administration and American lawmakers have refused to back growing international calls to cut off the supply of weaponry and other military equipment even as U.S. voters express support for an arms embargo.
The measure the House approved on Saturday includes $26 billion in funding for Israel, much of which is military assistance.
“Just a day after the House voted to send $14 billion in unconditional military funding to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s campaign of death and destruction, he bombed the safe zone of Rafah AGAIN, killing 22 Palestinians, of which 18 were CHILDREN!” U.S. Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), one of the 58 House lawmakers who voted against the legislation, wrote on social media late Sunday.
“History books will write about today and the past seven months, and how our nation’s leaders lacked the courage and moral clarity to stand up to a tyrant,” she added. “Shameful.”
The military aid package for Israel now heads to the U.S. Senate, which is set to consider the bill early this week. U.S. President Joe Biden, who has continued to greenlight arms sales to Israel amid clear evidence of war crimes, is expected to sign the measure if it reaches his desk.
“Rather than sending more weapons to Israel, Congress should declare an immediate arms embargo on Israel.”
U.S. law prohibits “arms transfers that risk facilitating or otherwise contributing to violations of human rights or international humanitarian law,” according to a White House memo issued in February. The U.S. State Department has said repeatedly that it has not found Israel to be in violation of international law, a position that runs directly counter to the findings of leading humanitarian organizations and United Nations experts.
The investigative outlet ProPublicareported last week that a “special State Department panel recommended months ago that Secretary of State Antony Blinken disqualify multiple Israeli military and police units from receiving U.S. aid after reviewing allegations that they committed serious human rights abuses” prior to the October 7 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel.
“But Blinken has failed to act on the proposal in the face of growing international criticism of the Israeli military’s conduct in Gaza, according to current and former State Department officials,” ProPublica noted.
Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), said in a statement Sunday that senators “should reject sending additional weapons to Israel not only because our laws prohibit military aid to abusive regimes, but because it’s extremely damaging to our national interests.”
DAWN’s advocacy director, Raed Jarrar, added that “at a time when Israel is bracing for International Criminal Court arrest warrants against its leaders, members of Congress should understand that approving more military aid could subject them to personal liability for aiding and abetting an ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
“Rather than sending more weapons to Israel,” said Jarrar, “Congress should declare an immediate arms embargo on Israel.”
Public ICJ hearing on Nicaragua’s case against Germany. Photo: ICJ
The German MP writes that the response of Germany to Nicaragua’s charges of aiding and abetting genocide in Gaza has been to downplay its role in supplying arms and question the premise that genocide is already taking place
The German government’s appearance before the International Court of Justice in the proceedings for aiding and abetting genocide and violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza is a lesson in Western double standards. On April 8 and 9, Germany sat in the dock in The Hague after Nicaragua filed a case at the highest UN judicial body.
The 43-page document accuses Germany of failing to fulfill its obligations under the Genocide Convention to prevent genocide. Essentially, Germany is accused of aiding and abetting genocide and violating international humanitarian law with its political, financial, and military support for Israel as well as by ceasing to fund the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). In view of the urgency of the situation, Nicaragua requested five interim measures to prevent the facilitation of genocide. These include the demand that Germany stop supplying arms to Israel and resume payments to UNRWA to ensure sufficient humanitarian aid for the Palestinian population.
Does arming a state committing genocide make you an accomplice?
The arguments put forward by the German government in its defense were unconvincing. With a flood of PowerPoint slides, the German representation initially tried to play down the significance of Germany’s arms deliveries to Israel. It argued that the majority of the arms export licenses issued after October 7 were for so-called “other military equipment” (“sonstige Rüstungsgüter”) and only a relatively small proportion for so-called “weapons of war” (“Kriegswaffen”). This was an attempt to deceive the court and the public. For what the German defense failed to mention was the fact that this invented distinction between “other military equipment” and “weapons of war” is a specific feature of German arms export control. Contrary to what the terminology suggests, the category of “other military equipment” can also include weapons that can be used for warfare.
Germany is Israel’s second largest arms supplier after the USA. According to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), German weapons have accounted for 30% of Israeli arms imports in the last five years. Licenses for new arms exports also increased in 2023. In total, the German government approved the export of weapons to Israel worth EUR 326.5 million – a tenfold increase compared to the previous year. These licenses, most of which were issued after October 7, 2023, include war weapons worth 20 million euros. While the German government tried to justify the approval of 500,000 rounds of ammunition for machine guns with the difficult-to-verify claim that they had been supplied for training purposes, it could not deny the possible use of the approved 3,000 portable anti-tank weapons in war.
Instead, the German government attempted to justify this by arguing that these and the majority of other export licenses had been issued in October 2023, before the war and the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza had come to a head. This argument ignores the fact that it must have been clear to the world public – and therefore also to the German government – just a few days after October 7 that the partially far-right Israeli government under Prime Minister Netanyahu would use the horrific attack by Hamas as an opportunity to wage a ruthless war against the Palestinian civilian population, committing numerous war crimes that go far beyond any right to self-defense.
It’s not genocide, yet
It was striking that the German government did not even attempt to dispute Nicaragua’s presentation of facts about the extensive violations of international humanitarian law by Israel. Apparently, it also realized that the terrible humanitarian catastrophe caused by Israel’s war, which has killed more than 33,000 people, including more than 13,000 children, can hardly be denied.
The German defense therefore focused on the formalistic argument that the existence of genocide had not yet been established and that Germany could therefore not be found guilty of aiding and abetting genocide. In doing so, however, the German government fails to recognize the central obligation under international law that arises from the Genocide Convention – namely to prevent genocide. This is all the more significant as the ICJ issued protection orders in the case of South Africa against Israel in order to prevent the danger of genocide, which the court considered plausible. Even Israel’s blatant disregard of these orders to protect the Palestinian civilian population has not led to the German government abandoning its unconditional support for Israel.
This shows the absurdity and hypocrisy of the actions of the German government as well as the governments of numerous other NATO states: On the one hand, they ignore all the findings of the most important bodies of the United Nations about Israel’s most serious war crimes and the danger of genocide and, regardless of this, continue to provide unconditional support for Israel’s war. On the other hand, the German government and other Western donor states decided to stop funding UNRWA solely on the basis of unverifiable insinuations by the Israeli government about the alleged involvement of individual UNRWA employees in the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. The requirements for subjecting 2.2 million people in the Gaza Strip, who depend on UNRWA aid for their daily survival, to collective punishment are apparently lower than for stopping the supply of weapons that could be used to commit genocide. This can hardly be surpassed in terms of cynicism.
Against this backdrop, the German government’s attempt to defend itself before the ICJ by claiming that it had warned Israel of a military offensive on Rafah is hardly credible. In this sense, the German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock boasted to the German Parliament just a few days ago that she had already traveled to the region seven times and called on the Israeli government to respect the humanitarian needs of the Palestinian civilian population.
I asked the Federal Foreign Minister in the plenary session of the German Bundestag whether the Federal Government would consequently now declare a ceasefire on Israel, as the UN Human Rights Council recently called for in a resolution, due to Israel’s blatant disregard for these calls and in view of the announcement of a ground offensive in Rafah and the bloodbath to be expected as a result. The German government representative’s verbose answer can be summarized in one word: No.
Like the Foreign Minister, the German legal representation in The Hague gave the impression that the German raison d’état of unconditionally defending Israel was above international law. Threats from Berlin against the most important judicial body of the United Nations that it would no longer be credible if it ruled against Germany fit into this picture. If the German government only accepts international law when it appears to be advantageous for its own government action, it has finally reached the level of the leading NATO member, the US, which has long understood international law only as an instrument of interest-driven politics.
Regardless of how the court decides, Germany and the West must finally fulfill their obligation to prevent genocide and war crimes in order to lend weight to the demand for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. The consequences of Western double standards, which seem to have reached a temporary climax in the Gaza war, are fatal. Not only does it lead to the West losing its last remnants of credibility in the eyes of the world. Above all, it promotes the erosion of international law, diplomacy and the United Nations as civilizational achievements for the protection of human life and the preservation of peace.
Sevim Dağdelen is a member of the German Bundestag and foreign policy spokesperson for the group “Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht”. She was the only parliamentary observer at the hearings in Nicaragua’s lawsuit against Germany before the ICJ.
The Palestinian ambassador to the UK, Husam Zomlot, has called for the country to impose an arms embargo on Israel ‘immediately’.
Zomlot told Sky News that Britain was not doing enough and that we ‘want to see actions, not words’.
He said: “We are done with words and statements and sympathies…Israel should not have killed the seven aid workers, including three British citizens, these words have been interpreted in Israel as just hollow words, we need action.”
Asked what action he would like to see, Zumlot said: “First the UK has to impose an arms embargo immediately, once the highest court on earth says that it is plausible that Israel has committed genocide and is committing genocide six months on and that Israel is now officially on trial for genocide, the conversation should have been over.
