Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. Israel continued to battle Hamas fighters on October 10 and massed tens of thousands of troops and heavy armour around the Gaza Strip after vowing a massive blow over the Palestinian militants’ surprise attack. Photo by Naaman Omar apaimages. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
16 days ago, Israel imposed a total blockade on Gaza, preventing any humanitarian aid of any description from getting in – food, medicine, you name it. That’s caused the price of some staple foods to surge by 200%.
This is a straightforward crime. Indeed, Israel had already repeatedly deliberately starved Gaza and prevented the essentials of life from entering and then from getting to the people who need it – but kept claiming otherwise. This time, they just went and said it – boasting of their criminal violation of international law. Indeed the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister centre on the crime of starvation.
This criminality was apparently finally recognised by the British government. When asked about this siege, British Foreign Secretary David Lammy told Parliament that Israel is “in breach of international law”.
You might be relieved that, after all this time, the British government has said the obvious.
Not so fast with any kudos for Lammy. The government came out and promptly rebuked him and instead said that Israel was only “at risk” of violating international law. Lammy – a self-aggrandiser devoid of principle or backbone – declared he “could have have been clearer”, backtracking on the truth.
But this was nonetheless a confession. Lammy admitted Israel is violating the law, something he obviously knows is true, which means continued arms sales and diplomatic support for Israel constitute willing and knowing complicity in Israel’s crimes.
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
Protesters demonstrate demanding justice for drug war victims, after the arrest of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, in Quezon City on March 11, 2025. (Photo: Earvin Perias / AFP)
“Duterte’s arrest on an ICC warrant… shows that suspected perpetrators of the worst crimes, including government leaders, can and will face justice,” said one human rights advocate.
On Tuesday, former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was arrested by local authorities at Manila’s international airport after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant accusing him of crimes against humanity. News of his arrest prompted some observers to urge the arrest of another public figure who faces ICC charges: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Duterte case will pose a test for the court, according to The New York Times. In the past six months, the ICC has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Min Aung Hlaing, the head of the military junta in Myanmar.
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote “Perhaps Netanyahu and Gallant will be next…” in response to the news. Danny Shaw, a professor at City University of New York, posted a video of Duterte’s arrest and wrote: “Why don’t they arrest Netanyahu?”
Wim Zwijnenburg, a project leader at the Dutch peace organization PAX, wrote, “now do Netanyahu.”
On Tuesday night, Duterte was placed on a plane that was bound for The Hague, where the court is headquartered, per the Times, citing two people with knowledge of the matter.
The ICC has accused Duterte of crimes against humanity during his time as president and when he was the mayor of the city of Davao. During his tenure as president, from 2016 to 2022, Duterte’s security forces carried out thousands of killings that his government cast as drug-related cases. In a 2017 report, Human Rights Watch described his “war on drugs” as effectively “a campaign of extrajudicial execution in impoverished areas of Manila and other urban areas.” Philippine National Police officers and unidentified “vigilantes” killed over 7,000 people between the start of his term and the release of that Human Rights Watch report, according to the group.
In 2017, Duterte earned praise from U.S. President Donald Trump, who told him in a phone call that he was doing “an unbelievable job on the drug problem,” according to reporting at the time.
“Duterte’s arrest on an ICC warrant is a hopeful sign for victims in the Philippines and beyond. It shows that suspected perpetrators of the worst crimes, including government leaders, can and will face justice, wherever they are in the world,” said Agnes Callamard, secretary general of the human rights group Amnesty International, in a statement Tuesday. “At a time when too many governments renege on their ICC obligations while others attack or sanction international courts, Duterte’s arrest is a huge moment for the power of international law.”
Duterte’s former chief legal counsel and presidential spokesperson, Salvador Panelo, said that the “ICC has no jurisdiction in the Philippines,” in part because “the country withdrew as an ICC member state in 2018,” according to a post on social media.
According to the Times, the court says the case only considers alleged crimes from the time when the country was still part of the court.
According to a copy of he warrant, which was obtained by the Times, three judges of the ICC said they believed Duterte “was responsible for the drug war killings that took place when he was president and mayor of Davao, and that there were reasonable grounds to believe that these attacks were ‘both widespread and systematic.'”
The government itself, in 2022, said that over 6,200 “drug suspects” were killed during Duterte’s war on drugs starting in 2016. Rights groups put the total number of people who died much higher, in the tens of thousands, according to PBS.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
A United Nations vehicle accompanies aid convoys in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, during the delivery of humanitarian aid after a ceasefire, January 22, 2025 [SAEED JARAS/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images]
International law is fighting for relevance. The outcome of this fight is likely to change the entire world’s political dynamics, which were shaped by World War II and sustained through the selective interpretation of the law by dominant countries.
In principle, international law should always have been relevant, if not paramount, in governing the relationships between all countries, large and small, to resolve conflicts before they turn into outright wars. It should also have worked to prevent a return to an era of exploitation that allowed Western colonialism practically to enslave the Global South for hundreds of years.
Unfortunately, international law, which was in theory supposed to reflect global consensus, was hardly dedicated to peace or genuinely invested in the decolonisation of the South.
From the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan to the war on Libya and numerous other examples, past and present, the UN was often used as a platform for the strong to impose their will on the weak. And whenever smaller countries fought back collectively, as the UN General Assembly often does, those with veto power in the Security Council and military and economic leverage used their advantage to coerce the rest based on the maxim “might is right”.
It should, therefore, hardly be a surprise to see many intellectuals and politicians in the Global South arguing that, aside from paying lip service to peace, human rights and justice, international law has always been irrelevant.
This irrelevance was put on full display through 15 months of a relentless Israeli genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza that killed and wounded over 160,000 people, a number that, according to several credible medical journals and studies, is expected to rise dramatically.
Yet, when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) opened an investigation into “plausible genocide” in Gaza on 26 January, 2024, followed by a decisive ruling on 19 July regarding the illegality of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the international system began showing a pulse, however faint. The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrants issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant in November were more proof that West-centred legal institutions are capable of change.
The angry American response to all of this was predictable.
Washington has been fighting against international accountability for many years. The US Congress under the George W Bush administration passed a law as early as 2002 that shielded US soldiers “against criminal prosecution” by the ICC, to which the US is not a party. The so-called Hague Invasion Act authorised the use of military force to rescue American citizens or military personnel detained by the ICC.
Naturally, many of Washington’s measures to pressure, threaten or punish international institutions have been linked to shielding Israel under various guises. The global outcry and demands for accountability following Israel’s genocide in Gaza, however, have once again put Western governments on the defensive. For the first time, Israel has been facing the kind of scrutiny that has rendered it, in many respects, a pariah state.
Instead of reconsidering their approach to Israel, and refraining from feeding the war machine, many Western governments lashed out at civil society merely for advocating the enforcement of international law.
Those targeted included UN-affiliated human rights defenders.
On 18 February, German police descended on the Junge Welt venue in Berlin as if they were about to apprehend a notorious criminal. They surrounded the building in full gear, sparking a bizarre drama that should have never taken place in a country that perceives itself as democratic. The reason behind the security mobilisation was none other than Francesca Albanese, an Italian lawyer and an outspoken critic of the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Ms Albanese also happens to be the current UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. If it were not for the UN’s intervention, she could have been arrested simply for demanding that Israel must be held accountable for its crimes against Palestinians.
Germany, however, is not an exception. Other Western powers, lead amongst them the US, are taking part in this moral crisis. Washington has taken serious and troubling steps, not only to protect Israel and itself from accountability to international law, but also to punish the very international institutions, its judges and officials for daring to question Israel’s behaviour.
Indeed, as recently as 13 February, the US sanctioned the ICC’s chief prosecutor due to his stance on Israel. After some hesitance, Karim Khan did what no other ICC prosecutor had done before when he issued those arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. They are currently wanted for “crimes against humanity and war crimes”.
The moral crisis deepens when the judges become the accused, as Khan found himself at the receiving end of endless Western media attacks and abuse, in addition to US sanctions.
As disturbing as all of this is, there is a silver lining.
There is an opportunity for the international legal and political system to be fixed, based on new standards, justice that applies to all and accountability that is expected from and for all.
Those who continue to support Israel have practically disowned international law altogether. The consequences of their decisions are dire. But for the rest of humanity, the Gaza war can spark a global reckoning, and provide the opportunity to reconstruct a more equitable world, one that is not moulded by those who are powerful militarily, but by the need to stop senseless killings of innocent children, women and the elderly.
News outlets often preferred euphemisms like “displacing” or “resettling” to the more accurate “ethnic cleansing, as in this CBC headline (2/4/25).
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump said that the US will “take over the Gaza Strip” and “own” it for the “long-term” (AP, 2/5/25), and that its Palestinian inhabitants will be “permanently” exiled (AP, 2/4/25). Subsequently, when reporters asked Trump whether Palestinians would have the right to return to Gaza under his plan, he said “no” (BBC, 2/10/25).
After Trump’s remarks, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (Reuters, 2/5/25) said “it is essential to avoid any form of ethnic cleansing.”
Navi Pillay (Politico, 2/9/25), chair of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, said that
Trump is woefully ignorant of international law and the law of occupation. Forcible displacement of an occupied group is an international crime, and amounts to ethnic cleansing.
Human Rights Watch (2/5/25) said that, if Trump’s plan were implemented, it would “amount to an alarming escalation of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.”
Clarity in the minority
Amnesty International (2/5/25) called Trump’s proposal to forcibly transfer the population of Gaza a flagrant violation of international law”—but the phrase “international law” was usually missing from news reports on the plan.
I used the news media aggregator Factiva to survey coverage of Trump’s remarks from the day that he first made them, February 4 through February 12. In that period, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post combined to run 145 pieces with the words “Gaza” and “Trump.” Of these, 19 contained the term “ethnic cleansing” or a variation on the phrase. In other words, 87% of the articles these outlets published on Trump’s plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza chose not to call it ethnic cleansing.
A handful of other pieces used language that captures the wanton criminality of Trump’s scheme reasonably well. Three articles used “forced displacement,” or slight deviations from the word, while five others used “expel” and another nine used “expulsion.” Two of the articles said “forced transfer,” or a minor variation of that. In total, therefore, 38 of the 145 articles (26 percent) employ “ethnic cleansing” or the above-mentioned terms to communicate to readers that Trump wants to make Palestinians leave their homes so that the US can take Gaza from them.
Furthermore, the term “international law” appears in only 27 of the 145 articles, which means that 81% failed to point out to readers that what Trump is proposing is a “flagrant violation of international law” (Amnesty International, 2/5/25).
A ‘plan to free Palestinians’
A Wall Street Journal op-ed (2/5/25) hailed “Trump’s Plan to Free Palestinians From Gaza”—in the same sense that the Trail of Tears “freed” the Cherokee from Georgia.
Several commentators in the corporate media endorsed Trump’s racist fever dream, in some cases through circumlocutions and others quite bluntly. Elliot Kaufman (Wall Street Journal, 2/5/25) called Trump’s imperial hallucination a “plan to free Palestinians from Gaza.”
While the Journal’s editorial board (2/5/25) called what Trump wants to do “preposterous,” the authors nonetheless put “ethnic cleansing” in scare quotes, as if that’s not an apt description. The paper asked, “Is his idea so much worse than the status quo that the rest of the world is offering?”
Sadanand Dhume (Wall StreetJournal, 2/12/25) wondered why “If Indians and Pakistanis Can Relocate, Why Can’t Gazans?” To bolster his case, Dhume noted that 2 million people died as a result of the India-Pakistan partition, and cited other shining moments in 20th century history, such as Uganda’s expulsion of Indians in the 1970s. That these authors implicitly or explicitly advocate Trump’s plan for mass, racist violence demonstrates that they see Palestinians as subhuman impediments to US/Israeli designs on Palestine and the region.
Bret Stephens (New York Times, 2/11/25) wrote that
Trump also warned Jordan and Egypt that he would cut off American aid if they refused to accept Gazan refugees, adding that those refugees may not have the right to return to Gaza. The president’s threats are long overdue.
Ethnically cleansing the West Bank
Al Jazeera (2/26/24): “Settler violence is a central part of the Israeli state’s policy and plan to ethnically cleanse the occupied Palestinian territory.”
A similar pattern exists in coverage of the West Bank, where evidence of ethnic cleansing is hard to miss, but corporate media appears to be finding ways to do just that.
Legal scholars Alice Panepinto and Triestino Mariniello wrote an article for Al Jazeera (2/26/24) headlined “Settler Violence: Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing Plan for the West Bank”:
Supported by the Israeli security forces and aided and abetted by the government, settler violence is a central part of the Israeli state’s policy and plan to ethnically cleanse the occupied Palestinian territory in order to establish full sovereignty over it and enable settlement expansion.
The authors noted that, at the time they wrote their article, 16 Palesti nian communities in the West Bank had been forcibly transferred since October 7, 2023.
In October 2024, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese found that throughout the Gaza genocide, “Israeli forces and violent settlers” have “escalated patterns of ethnic cleansing and apartheid in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.” In the first 12 months after October 7, Albanese reported, “at least 18 communities were depopulated under the threat of lethal force, effectively enabling the colonization of large tracts” of the West Bank.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (2/10/25) said that Israel’s “latest ethnic cleansing efforts” entail “forcibly uproot[ing] thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank,” accompanied by
the bombing and burning of residential buildings and infrastructure, the cutting off of water, electricity and communications supplies, and a killing policy that has resulted in the deaths of 30 Palestinians…over the course of 19 days.
According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) (2/10/25), Israeli military operations in Jenin camp, which expanded to Tulkarm, Nur Shams and El Far’a, displaced 40,000 Palestinian refugees between January 21 and February 10.
Unnoteworthy violations
I used Factiva to search New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post coverage and found that, since Panepinto and Mariniello’s analysis was published just under a year ago, the three newspapers have combined to run 693 articles that mention the West Bank. Thirteen of these include some form of the term “ethnic cleansing,” a mere 2%. Nine more articles use “forced displacement,” or a variation on the phrase, 31 use “expel,” 11 use “expulsion” and five use some variety of “forced transfer.”
Thus, 69 of the 693 Times, Journal and Post articles that mention the West Bank use these terms to clearly describe people being violently driven from their homes—just 10%. Many of the articles that address the West Bank are also about Gaza, so the 69 articles using this language don’t necessarily apply it to the West Bank.
Of the 693 Times, Journal and Post pieces that refer to the West Bank, 106 include the term “international law.” Evidently, the authors and editors who worked on 85% of the papers’ articles that discuss the West Bank did not consider it noteworthy that Israel is engaged in egregious violations of international law in the territory.
‘Battling local militants’
The Washington Post (2/2/25) captioned this image of IDF bombing with Israel’s claim that it was “destroying buildings used by Palestinian militants.”
Rather than equip readers to understand the larger picture in which events in the West Bank unfold, much of the coverage treats incidents in the territory discretely. For instance, the Wall Street Journal (1/22/25) published a report on Israel’s late January attacks on the West Bank. In the piece’s 18th paragraph, it cited the Palestinian Authority saying the Israeli operations “displaced families and destroyed civilian properties.” In the 24th paragraph, the article also quoted UNRWA director Roland Friedrich, saying that Jenin had become “nearly uninhabitable,” and that “some 2,000 families have been displaced from the area since mid-December.” Palestinians being driven from their homes are an afterthought for the article’s authors, who do nothing to put this forced displacement in the longer-term context of Israel’s US-backed ethnic cleansing.
A Washington Post report (2/2/25) on Jenin says in its first paragraph that the fighting is occurring “where [Israeli] troops have been battling local militants.” The article then describes Palestinian “homes turned to ash and rubble, cars destroyed and small fires still burning amid the debris.” It cited the Palestinian Health Ministry noting that “at least five people were killed in Israeli strikes in the Jenin area, including a 16-year-old.”
Establishing a “troops vs. militants” frame at the outset of the article suggested that that is the lens through which the death and destruction in Jenin should be understood, rather than one in which a racist colonial enterprise is seeking to ethnically cleanse the Indigenous population resisting the initiative.
The rights of ‘neighbors’
This New York Times piece (2/4/25) acknowledges that Israeli settlements have “steadily eroded the land accessible to Palestinians”—but doesn’t call this process ethnic cleansing.
The New York Times (2/4/25) published an article on Republican bills that would require US government documents to refer to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” the name that expansionist Zionists prefer. The report discusses how Trump’s return to office “has emboldened supporters of Israeli annexation of the occupied territory.”
The piece notes that hundreds of thousands of Israelis have “settled” the West Bank since Israel occupied it in 1967, and that Palestinians living there have fewer rights than their Israeli “neighbors.” The author points out that “the growing number and size of the settlements have steadily eroded the land accessible to Palestinians.”
Yet the article somehow fails to mention a crucial part of this dynamic, namely Israel violently displacing Palestinians from their West Bank homes. Leaving out that vital information fails means that readers are not a comprehensive account of the ethnic cleansing backdrop against which the Republican bills are playing out.
Recent coverage of Gaza and the West Bank illustrates that, while corporate media occasionally outright call for expelling Palestinians from their land, more often the way these outlets support ethnic cleansing is by declining to call it ethnic cleansing.
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Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
An F-35 arriving back at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, June 24, 2019
…
Al-Haq general director Shawan Jabarin said: “F-35 partner nations, including the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, have assessed Israel’s use of these jets and concluded that the risk of violations of international humanitarian law is significant enough to halt direct sales of key components.
“However, components continue to reach Israel indirectly, highlighting the urgent need for the entire F-35 programme to be brought into compliance with international law.”
Human Rights Watch UK director Yasmine Ahmed said: “The government must close the loopholes and end its legal gymnastics — failure to do so displays either a misunderstanding of the government’s legal obligations or a wilful disregard for them.”
Marte Hansen Haugan, president of Norwegian campaign group Changemaker, said: “The unwillingness to halt or pause the production of F-35 components reflects an interpretation of national and international law that excludes Palestinian lives.”
Henry Off, of Canadian Lawyers for International Human Rights said: “In clear violation of its legal obligations, Canada continues to maintain its regulatory loopholes that allow components and parts to reach Israel’s F-35s indirectly through the United States.”
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
