Parachutes drop supplies into the northern Gaza Strip as seen from southern Israel, March 28, 2024
‘Arms exports must cease, the occupation and settlement policy must end,’ former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn says
THERE is “nothing natural” about the famine in Gaza and Western pressure on Israel through a total arms embargo is urgent, left MPs and campaigners said today.
They spoke out as the UN’s top human rights official said Tel Aviv could be using starvation as “a weapon of war” in the overcrowded territory as its invasion enters its fifth month.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk told the BBC that if the intent to do this was proven it would amount to a war crime.
Mr Turk condemned the Hamas attack of October 7, during which 1,139 people were killed and about 250 others were taken hostage. But he also said that no side in the war should evade accountability for its actions, including for any attempt to withhold aid supplies from the people who need it in Gaza.
He told the BBC: “All of my humanitarian colleagues keep telling us that there is a lot of red tape. There are obstacles. There are hindrances. Israel is to blame in a significant way.”
“When you put all kinds of requirements on the table that are unreasonable in an emergency that brings up the question, with all the restrictions that we currently see, whether there is a plausible claim to be made that starvation is, or may be used as, a weapon of war.”
Far from ‘standing alone’ Israel is fully supplied with military hardware from various Western and non-Western countries, writes RAMZY BAROUD
…
Though many of Israel’s traditional allies in the West are openly disowning its behaviour in Gaza, weapons from various Western and non-Western countries continue to flow, feeding the war machine as it, in turn, continues to harvest more Palestinian lives.
This compels the question: does Israel truly stand alone when its airports and seaports are busier than ever receiving massive shipments of weapons coming from all directions? Not in the least.
Almost every time a Western country announces that it has suspended arms exports to Israel, a news headline appears shortly afterwards, indicating the opposite. Indeed, this has happened repeatedly.
Last year, Rome had declared that it was blocking all arms sales to Israel, giving false hope that some Western countries were finally experiencing some kind of moral awakening.
Alas, on March 14, Reuters quoted the Italian Defence Minister Guido Crosetto as saying that shipments of weapons to Israel are continuing, based on the flimsy logic that previously signed deals would have to be “honoured.”
Another country that is also “honouring” its previous commitments is Canada, which announced on May 19, following a parliamentary motion, that it had suspended arms exports.
The celebration among those advocating an end to the genocide in Gaza were just getting started when, a day later, Ottawa practically reversed the decision by announcing that it, too, will honour previous commitments.
This illustrates that some Western countries, which continue to impart their unsolicited wisdom about human rights, women’s rights and democracy on the rest of the world, have no genuine respect for any of these values.
Canada and Italy are not the largest military supporters of Israel. The US and Germany are.
London for a Free Palestine activists outside the Department of Business and TradePhoto: Guy Smallman
ACTIVISTS from London for a Free Palestine occupied the Department of Business and Trade today, [yesterday] demanding that the British government stop arming Israel.
The campaigners took over the lobby in the Old Admiralty Building, chanting: “British government you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.”
One protester, Maria, said: “We are going here today because the Department for Business and Trade is where the licences for British arms exports to Israel are signed and approved.
“The UK has been giving Israel diplomatic, military and economic support, which has enabled it to carry out and continue its genocide and long-term colonisation of Palestine.”
Another participant, Cynthia Allett, said: “This department arms genocide.
“As Israel prepares a ground invasion in Rafah, we won’t allow the weapons used to slaughter more Palestinian people to be supplied in our names and funded by our taxes.”
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.”
German lawyers representing Palestinian families from the Gaza Strip have filed a criminal complaint against German officials – including Chancellor Olaf Scholz – for supplying Israel with weapons that they say aid and abet Israel's ongoing genocide in their homeland ⤵
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.
In the wake of the ICJ ruling on Gaza genocide risk, Germany faces legal scrutiny for its arms exports to Israel. With the criminal complaint filed today, the call for accountability echoes loud. #EndGenocide#StopWarCrimes#AccountabilityNow ⚖️/2
— European Legal Support Center (ELSC) (@elsclegal) February 23, 2024
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.”
A must read by Nora Ragab on the suppression of Palestine, and Palestinians, in Germany. And its defiance. For @UntoldMaghttps://t.co/ddu91y0990
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.”
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 Internationalinvestigation 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.”
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.
