Bi-Weekly Brief – January 6, 2025
Gaza has become a graveyard for its people and international law
Genocide is President Biden’s legacy, with repercussions that will haunt the globe for years to come.
As Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov told Democracy Now!, “the entire edifice of international law that was put into place in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust in order to prevent genocide ever happening again….has been shown as meaningless if a country like Israel, supported by its Western allies, can act with impunity. And the result of this is that all other rogue states in the world could now say, ‘Well, if Israel can get away with it, why should we not?’ And so, in that sense, this is a total moral, ethical failure by the very countries that claim to be the main protectors of the civil rights, democracy, human rights around the world. And apart from the regional catastrophe that is happening right now, this has much larger ramifications for what we will see in the future.”
A year after South Africa made the case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that Israel was violating the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 14 other countries have submitted interventions to the ICJ backing South Africa, and numerous reports - among them Amnesty International’s You Feel Like You are Subhuman, Human Rights Watch’s Crime of Extermination, Acts of Genocide in Gaza, Doctors Without Borders’ Gaza: Life in a Death Trap, Forensic Architecture’s huge Cartography of Genocide platform and several by UN bodies – have amassed evidence demonstrating that what is taking place in Gaza is not just ‘plausibly’ genocide (as the ICJ had ruled on Jan. 26, 2024) but actual genocide.
Building on Forensic Architecture’s work, Al-Haq’s How to Hide a Genocide details how the forced evacuation of residents to shrinking ‘safe zones’ accelerates the extermination of Gaza’s population, which, between killing and migration, has declined by six percent since the war began. The Israeli historian Lee Mordechai, an associate professor at Hebrew University and former fellow at Princeton, has compiled evidence of genocide in a report, Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War, and an extensive online database. Visualizing Palestine’s INTENT: the road to genocide presents the material in a graphically compelling way. Ha’aretz has featured articles about Israeli soldiers committing war crimes. “What is striking, and horrific,” writes Hebrew University professor emeritus David Shulman in the New York Review of Books, “is the fact that Israel has embraced cruelty and atrocity as a normative mode of waging war.”
That “normative mode” – spurred by a drastic loosening of a “system of safeguards meant to protect civilians,” as the New York Times reported, has been described by the Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy as “killing and killing and killing for the sake of killing.” The 250- square-mile Gaza Strip was pulverized by more than 85,000 tons of explosives by early Nov. 2024 and 88,000 tons by the end of the year – dwarfing the Hiroshima atomic bomb with its explosive yield of 15,000 metric tons. The statistics related to the carnage and apocalyptic destruction published by the Palestinian Government Media Office on Dec. 30 are a staggering testament to Israel’s genocidal practices. In December, the Israeli air force reported it had carried out more than 1,400 air strikes on Gaza in that single month, the equivalent of some 45 per day. Bombing has continued to be relentless in January 2025, and eight members of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee have demanded that the army should kill anyone in northern Gaza not carrying a white flag and destroy all water, food and energy sources. Two hundred people, mostly women and children, were slaughtered during Jan. 3-5, bringing the known number of those killed in military attacks to over 45,850, or 2.2 percent of Gaza’s population (the equivalent of 7.6 million Americans). Some 11,000 are missing. By Jan. 5, eight babies had died of hypothermia in flooded tented encampments drenched by winter rain. The number who have perished from deliberately engineered starvation and disease is unknown.
On Jan. 3, the UN Security Council debated Israel’s war on Gaza’s hospitals, which Israel said Hamas had turned into “tools of terror.” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk declared that there had been “at least 136 strikes on at least 27 hospitals and 12 other medical facilities in Gaza, which caused significant death and injury among doctors, nurses, medical staff and other civilians and damaged or destroyed many of the buildings targeted.” At the end of 2024 his office had released a detailed report of Israel’s attacks on hospitals from the start of the war to June 30, 2024, including a description of the ruthless siege of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza in Dec. 2023.
On Dec. 27, 2024, after a three-month siege accompanied by constant bombardments, Kamal Adwan Hospital was stormed by the Israeli army which forcibly evicted some 75 patients and as many as 180 medical staff, leaving the north of the Gaza Strip without a functioning hospital. The army killed at least five staff members while setting the hospital buildings on fire. As many as fifty people were killed when a nearby building was bombed. According to Gideon Levy in Haaretz, dozens of men were stripped nearly naked and held that way for hours in the winter cold, before being forced to march towards Gaza City, still unclothed, with their arms raised. Euro-Med Monitor described soldiers forcing women to undress and beating those who refused to do so, while subjecting some of them to sexual harassment. Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the hospital’s director who worked for Chicago-based MedGlobal, had for months refused to leave his patients and repeatedly appealed to the international community to end the siege. He was badly beaten by soldiers before being arrested and sent to prison, and reportedly endied up in the Sde Teiman torture camp. After initially confirming Dr. Abu Safiya’s arrest, the army later said they had no knowledge of his whereabouts. According to Jessica Montell, director of the Israeli human rights group HaMoked, “Hundreds of people have disappeared after ending up in IDF custody.” Many are known to have died in detention.
None of this has persuaded the Biden Administration that they should have pursued a different policy on the war. Instead, in a Jan. 4 New York Times interview, Secretary of State Blinken insisted that they had followed the right course, and were motivated by the need to make sure nothing like the Oct. 7 attack on Israel would happen again. Unstinting US support is, he maintained, “absolutely vital to making sure that Israel is able to defend itself.” US ambassador to Israel Jacob Yew and USAID have forced the Famine Early Warning System, which the US funds, to withdraw its latest Gaza famine report, calling it “irresponsible,” a move sharply criticized by famine expert Alex de Waal in Haaretz. And far from regretting the extent to which US weapons are fueling what the rest of the world is increasingly viewing as a genocide, President Biden recently told Congress that he wants to supply Israel with another $8 billion arms package, on top of the $20 billion for armaments and subsequent $680 million pledged over the last two months.
As the Hind Rajab Foundation and other pro-Palestinian groups hunt down individual Israeli soldiers who have posted photos of themselves committing war crimes and urge that action be taken against them in the International Criminal Court (ICC) and when they visit foreign countries, the US has threatened the ICC with harsh reprisals. Meanwhile, the US has joined Israel in bombing Syria and Yemen, where Israel has vowed to kill Houthi leaders rather than to stop their offensive actions by agreeing to a ceasefire in Gaza. On Dec. 26, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, and other UN staff were nearly killed by an Israeli airstrike on the international airport in Sana’a, Yemen. In Lebanon, Israel continues to block residents from returning to their villages south of the Litani River, and shows no sign of withdrawing its forces from the area. It has repeatedly bombed Damascus and taken over the six most important water resources in southern Syria, including the Al-Mantara Dam near Quneitra and the Al-Wahda Dam in the Yamouk River Basin. The Cradle cites reports that “Israel now controls 30 percent of Syria’s water supply and 40 percent of Jordan’s.”
If Israel continues to operate with total impunity and refuses to withdraw from its newly occupied Syrian and Lebanese territory, Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, a cornerstone of the international legal structure barring the acquisition of territory by force, could prove as ineffectual as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, with dire implications for the entire world order.
Nancy Murray, Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
Why Congress Members Face a Lawsuit for Funding Israel’s War on Gaza
On the last day of 2024, the deputy general counsel for the House of Representatives formally accepted delivery of a civil summons for two congressmembers from Northern California. More than 600 constituents of Jared Huffman and Mike Thompson have signed on as plaintiffs in a class action accusing them of helping to arm the Israeli military in violation of “international and federal law that prohibits complicity in genocide.”
Whatever the outcome of the lawsuit, it conveys widespread anger and anguish about the ongoing civilian carnage in Gaza that taxpayers have continued to bankroll.
By a wide margin, most Americans favor an arms embargo on Israel while the Gaza war persists. But Huffman and Thompson voted to approve $26.38 billion in military aid for Israel last April, long after the nonstop horrors for civilians in Gaza were evident.
Read the rest of article here.
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
With Gaza war and Trump’s return...
With Gaza war and Trump’s return, Silicon Valley embraces a military renaissance
At Israel’s first DefenseTech Summit, corporate leaders and army officials openly touted their partnership in AI-driven warfare and surveillance.
By Sophia Goodfriend December 31, 2024
“Partnerships between Israel’s military and American venture capitalists and corporate heads are expected to ramp up under the Trump administration. Trump’s planned “government efficiency drive,” overseen by Elon Musk, champions joint projects between big defense contractors and smaller tech firms, especially in areas like AI and drone warfare. As Palantir’s Noam Perski put it in his speech on Tuesday morning, “All these people who used to be tech bros are now defense tech bros.”
Many American proponents of the overhaul are hardcore defenders of Israeli military strategy in Gaza over the last year. They cite Israel’s rapidly spinning door between the military and start-up sector as a model to be emulated — and a handful traveled to Ramat Aviv for the occasion. “
Read the article here. Thanks to +972 magazine.