AN ISRAELI arms factory in Kent was under siege today [yesterday] after Palestine supporters blockaded its entrance roads.
The Instro Precision factory is part of Israeli-owned Elbit Systems, which is believed to manufacture military drones, pilotless aircraft and other weapons for Israel.
Palestine Action mounted the blockade and vehicles were used to block the entrances.
Activists also covered the premises in red paint, symbolising “Palestinian bloodshed.”
Palestine Action said the factory’s products were not affected by last week’s government announcement that 50 [dizzy:30] out of 320 arms export licences were being suspended.
Protestors take part in a National March for Gaza on September 7, 2024 in London, England. (Photo: Leon Neal/Getty Images).
“We demand our government completely stop arming Israel and push for a cease-fire now,” said the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
Thousands of people gathered at London’s Picadilly Circus Saturday for the city’s latest march against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the United Kingdom’s continued support for the Israel Defense Forces, following what organizers called “a major victory in defense of the democratic right to protest.”
The Metropolitan Police on Friday dropped its restrictions on the march, which was the first pro-Palestinian protest since last October to proceed to the Israeli embassy in London.
The police had attempted to stop campaigners from gathering before 2:30 pm, conflicting with plans to begin the rally preceding the march at noon.
“They never provided any convincing explanation or evidence for this delay, and it has caused enormous, unnecessary difficulty to the organization of a large-scale demonstration,” Ben Jamal, who leads the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, one of the groups organizing the march, told Middle East Eye on Friday.
“It has unfortunately been part of a pattern of obstruction, delay, and lack of communication on the part of the Met which we will press them to review and reflect on for future demonstrations,” he added. “For tomorrow, we call on our supporters to turn out in their hundreds of thousands to show we will not be deterred from seeking an end to Israel’s genocide and justice for Palestine!”
Jamal said the police “saw sense and abandoned their unjustified and impractical attempt to delay the start of the march by two hours on Saturday,” allowing the march to begin at 1:30 pm.
During previous marches in which hundreds of thousands of people have demonstrated in solidarity with Palestinians since last October, police have blocked off the area surrounding the Israeli embassy in Kensington, threatening anyone who protested in the vicinity with arrest.
Marching to the embassy, demonstrators made a “renewed call to end the ongoing genocide in Gaza” and demanded an “immediate and full cessation of arms supplies to Israel.”
Earlier this week, the U.K. government announced it was suspending approximately 30 of its 350 arms export licenses for Israel, saying that “there does exist a clear risk that they might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law.”
Human rights advocates, medical professionals working in Gaza, and legal experts have for months demanded that Israel’s top international funders, including the U.S. and U.K., stop providing military aid as Israel has blocked humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza and waged attacks on civilian infrastructure, killing more than 40,000 people.
The country has also been accused of carrying out genocide in a case led by South Africa at the International Court of Justice; the court has ordered Israel to end its blockade on humanitarian aid and to prevent genocide in Gaza.
“We demand our government completely stop arming Israel and push for a cease-fire now,” said the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
As Londoners marched on Saturday, the Gaza Health Ministry announced that at least 61 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces in the last two days. Four people were killed in a strike on Halimah al-Saadiyah school in Jabaliya, where displaced Palestinians have been sheltering, and three were killed in a bombing at Amr Ibn al-As school in Gaza City.
Media outlets in Palestine reported that a baby named Yaqeen al-Astal had become the 37th child in Gaza to die of malnutrition since Israel began its near-total aid blockade.
International outrage also grew on Saturday regarding the killing of a Turkish American activist, Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, in the West Bank on Friday. Local media and eyewitnesses said Eygi had been deliberately shot in the head by Israeli forces at a protest over the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements.
The U.S. called on Israel to investigate the killing on Friday, but Eygi’s family said in a statement that such a probe would not be “adequate.”
“We call on President [Joe] Biden, Vice President [Kamala] Harris, and Secretary of State [Antony] Blinken to order an independent investigation into the unlawful killing of a U.S. citizen and to ensure full accountability for the guilty parties,” said the family.
Stéphane Dujarric, spokesperson for the United Nations, called for “a full investigation of the circumstances” and said that “people should be held accountable. And again, civilians must be protected at all times.”
A Palestinian woman surveys the destruction by Israeli forces of her home and neighborhood in Khuza’a, which is located near Gaza’s border with Israel, on November 25, 2023. (Photo: Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“The creation of any ‘buffer zone’ must not amount to the collective punishment of the Palestinian civilians who lived in these neighborhoods,” warned one Amnesty campaigner.
Amnesty International said Thursday that the Israeli military should be investigated for the “war crimes of wanton destruction and of collective punishment” over its destruction of entire communities along Gaza’s border with Israel.
“Using bulldozers and manually laid explosives, the Israeli military has unlawfully destroyed agricultural land and civilian buildings, razing entire neighborhoods, including homes, schools, and mosques,” the London-based rights group said in a new investigation.
Amnesty analyzed satellite imagery, as well as photos and videos posted online by invading Israel Defense Forces troops between October and May, and found that the IDF has cleared wide swathes of land up to 1.2 miles (1.8 km) wide along Gaza’s eastern border.
“In some videos, Israeli soldiers are seen posing for pictures or toasting in celebration as buildings are demolished in the background,” the report states.
The Israeli military’s campaign to significantly expand a “buffer zone” along the eastern perimeter of #Gaza should be investigated as the war crimes of wanton destruction and collective punishment.
Israeli forces laid waste to much of Khuza’a in Khan Younis governate, under the pretext that Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel from the town on October 7.
Salem Qudeih, a teacher who lived in Khuza’a about a mile from the border, told Amnesty that “around my family home we had a three dunam (0.7 acre) orchard full of fruit trees. They were all destroyed. Only an apple tree and a rose were left.”
“I had bees and produced honey. All of it is gone now,” he added. “Out of the 222 houses of my relatives in the area, only about a dozen remain. My home—where I lived with my wife, my five daughters, and one son—was completely destroyed.”
Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty’s senior director for research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns, said in a statement: “The Israeli military’s relentless campaign of ruin in Gaza is one of wanton destruction. Our research has shown how Israeli forces have obliterated residential buildings, forced thousands of families from their homes, and rendered their land uninhabitable.”
“Our analysis reveals a pattern along the eastern perimeter of Gaza that is consistent with the systematic destruction of an entire area,” she continued. “These homes were not destroyed as the result of intense fighting. Rather, the Israeli military deliberately razed the land after they had taken control of the area.”
“The creation of any ‘buffer zone’ must not amount to the collective punishment of the Palestinian civilians who lived in these neighborhoods,” Guevara-Rosas added. “Israel’s measures to protect Israelis from attacks from Gaza must be carried out in conformity with its obligations under international law, including the prohibition of wanton destruction and of collective punishment.”
“The Israeli military deliberately razed the land after they had taken control of the area.”
Other experts—including United Nations officials and scholars—have previously highlighted what Robert Pape, a U.S. military historian and University of Chicago professor, described as “one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history.”
In the 335 days since October 7, Israeli forces have killed or maimed more than 145,000 Palestinians in Gaza while forcibly displacing almost all of the embattled strip’s 2.3 million people and destroying hundreds of thousands of homes and other structures, according to Palestinian and international officials. Rebuilding after Israel’s obliteration of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure is expected to cost over $18.5 billion, or nearly Palestine’s entire annual gross domestic product.
Israel is currently on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Meanwhile, International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan has applied for warrants to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leaders for alleged war crimes including extermination.
“International humanitarian law, which applies in situations of armed conflict, including during military occupation, is comprised of rules whose central purpose is to limit, to the maximum extent feasible, human suffering in times of armed conflict,” Amnesty explained Thursday.
The group noted that under the Fourth Geneva Convention, “extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly,” is a war crime.
Additionally, the treaty bans collective punishment of civilians, stating that “no protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed.”
Amnesty has repeatedly accused Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza and has urged the ICC to open investigations into multiple “indiscriminate” and “disproportionate” IDF massacres, as well as torture and other alleged human rights violations.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks at a press conference in Jerusalem on September 4, 2024. (Photo: Abir Sultan/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
Israel’s far-right government is “cynically exploiting our collective trauma” to “violently advance its project of cementing Israel’s control” over Palestinian land, said B’Tselem CEO Yuli Novak.
The head of a leading Israeli human rights organization told the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday that Israel’s far-right government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, obviously “does not want” to reach a hostage-release and cease-fire agreement with Hamas.
Yuli Novak, the CEO of B’Tselem, said in an address to the U.N. body that the Netanyahu government is “cynically exploiting our collective trauma” in the wake of the October 7 Hamas-led attack to “violently advance its project of cementing Israel’s control” over Palestinian land.
“To do that, it is waging war on the entire Palestinian people, committing war crimes almost daily,” said Novak. “In Gaza, this has taken the form of expulsion, starvation, killing, and destruction on an unprecedented scale.”
Watch Novak’s full speech:
Listen to the full speech of our executive director, Yuli Novak, yesterday at the UNSC.
"During this week, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets. They feel angry, desperate and betrayed by their government. They have understood, perhaps for the first time,… pic.twitter.com/aMRf9rTOD9
Novak’s remarks came days after Israelis poured into the streets en masse over the weekend following their government’s announcement that Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers recovered the bodies of six hostages in Gaza, heightening outrage over Netanyahu’s obstruction of cease-fire talks.
In a speech on Monday, Netanyahu doubled down on his new hardline demands that have dampened hopes of a deal to end Israel’s U.S.-backed assault on Gaza and free the more than 60 living hostages still in captivity in the besieged Palestinian enclave.
Hamas has rejected the prime minister’s demand that any deal include indefinite Israeli military control of the Philadelphi Corridor—a narrow strip of land along Gaza’s border with Egypt—leaving cease-fire talks at a standstill as the war on Gaza nears the 11-month mark.
Gershon Baskin, a longtime Israeli hostage negotiator who has engaged in back-channel talks with Hamas since the October 7 attack, told Democracy Now! on Wednesday that the Philadelphi Corridor demand “is a made-up issue by Netanyahu to create… a new excuse for Israel to remain in Gaza.”
“It’s very clear that Netanyahu doesn’t want to end the war,” Baskin said.
In a social media post earlier this week, Baskin accused Netanyahu of “sacrificing the hostages on an altar of his own personal political survival.”
Israeli activist @gershonbaskin has served as a backchannel negotiator with Hamas for many years and secured a historic 2011 prisoner exchange. He says the group has agreed to a ceasefire deal that would release all the Israeli hostages currently held in Gaza, but that Prime… pic.twitter.com/Q2sBtzVz3k
The view that Netanyahu is deliberately sabotaging hostage-release talks is hardly fringe: As Jacobin‘s Branko Marcetic observed Wednesday, that assessment has become commonplace across Israeli society, including inside Netanyahu’s government.
Marcetic cited recent reports from dozens of mainstream Israeli and U.S. media outlets casting Netanyahu—who faces corruption charges in his country—as the primary obstacle to a cease-fire agreement.
One unnamed Israeli official, identified as a senior member of the country’s government, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz over the weekend that the blood of hostages “is on [Netanyahu’s] hands.”
“He knew the hostages are living on borrowed time, that the sand in their hourglass was running out,” said the senior official, referring to the six hostages who, according to the Israeli Ministry of Health, were shot at close range sometime around last Thursday.
“He knew there were orders to kill them if there’d be rescue attempts. He understood the significance of his orders and acted in cold blood and cruelly,” the Israeli official continued. “They all knew he is corrupted, a narcissist, a coward, but his lack of humanity was fully revealed in all its ugliness in recent months.”
Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak in parliament. (Photo: Alberto Pezzali / Alamy)
Britain’s new government admits Israel could use UK weapons for war crimes in Gaza. So will their Conservative predecessors be investigated for complicity?
This week, the UK government finally decided to suspend some arms export licences to Israel, almost 11 months after the fighting began.
Speaking in parliament, foreign secretary David Lammy announced that “around 30 from a total of approximately 350” arms export licences to Israel had been frozen due to a “clear risk that they might be used to commit” war crimes.
The restrictions include equipment that could be used “in the current conflict in Gaza, such as important components which go into military aircraft, including fighter aircraft, helicopters and drones, as well as items which facilitate ground targeting”.
By contrast, the previous Conservative government did not cancel any licences for military goods to be sent to Israel between 7 October and the general election.
The latest restrictions consequently indicate that former ministers including Rishi Sunak and David Cameron, as well as Conservative leadership contenders James Cleverly and Kemi Badenoch, were complicit in Israel’s atrocities.
In particular, there is mounting evidence that Lammy’s predecessor, Lord Cameron, “sat on advice” he received that Israel was breaching international humanitarian law (IHL) in Gaza.
‘So obvious’
In January, the Conservative government had 28 extant “high-risk” licences with Israel marked as “most likely to be used by the IDF in offensive operations in Gaza” – a strikingly similar number to that which Lammy has suspended.
And back in March a senior Conservative MP, Alicia Kearns, was secretly recorded telling a Tory fundraiser that the Foreign Office’s legal advice “would mean the UK has to cease all arms sales to Israel without delay”.
A Foreign Office source has now come forward to expose how Cameron was in receipt of “similar” legal advice to that currently being used by Lammy “from at least February onwards”.
“The advice being sent through to the Foreign Office was clear that the breaches of IHL by Israel as the occupying power were so obvious that there was a danger of UK complicity if the licences were not withdrawn”, the source told the Guardian.
Zionist Keir Starmer is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
