UN
Starmer STILL silent on ICJ genocide judgment against Israel
Friend of war crimes just ignoring damning order against murderous regime
‘What judgment?’: Keir Starmer
Keir Starmer’s reaction to the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) damning judgment yesterday, which put Israel formally on trial for genocide – with even the Israeli judge agreeing on two of the points – and ordered the occupier regime to stop killing Palestinians in Gaza and take a list of measures to protect them, has been deafening silence.
Starmer, who has previously declared himself an unconditional Zionist, has supported Israel’s ‘right’ to commit war crimes and has helped the Tories (blue version) to defeat parliamentary efforts to call for a ceasefire. And as Israel ranted and raved and most of the world applauded South Africa’s stand for humanity and against mass murder, Starmer’s social media account hasn’t even acknowledged the existence of the court’s findings, some thirty hours after they were announced.
But he has found time, as Israel continued to slaughter and maim hundreds of civilian women and children, to tweet about Holocaust Memorial Day and blether repeatedly about anti-social behaviour (especially in ‘hotpots’):
Starmer’s latest nauseating post is a claim that it is a ‘privilege to reaffirm Labour’s commitment to “Never Again”’ – clearly that should end with ‘unless you’re Palestinian’. Coward and genocide enabler.
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South Africa’s formal statement on ICJ genocide ruling
South Africa puts UK, US and others on warning of complicity in genocide
South Africa’s formal statement following the findings of the ICJ that have put Israel formally on trial for its genocide in Gaza and have made the occupier state legally responsible for a list of measures to prevent further genocide:
26 January 2024
Today marks a decisive victory for the international rule of law and a significant milestone in the search for justice for the Palestinian people. In a landmark ruling, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has determined that Israel’s actions in Gaza are plausibly genocidal and has indicated provisional measures on that basis. For the implementation of the international rule of law, the decision is a momentous one. South Africa thanks the Court for its swift ruling.
The United Nations Security Council will now be formally notified of the Court’s order pursuant to Article 41(2) of the Court’s Statute. The veto power wielded by individual states can not be permitted to thwart international justice, not least in light of the ever-worsening situation in Gaza brought about by Israel’s acts and omissions in violation of the Genocide Convention.
Third States are now on notice of the existence of a serious risk of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. They must, therefore, also act independently and immediately to prevent genocide by Israel and to ensure that they are not themselves in violation of the Genocide Convention, including by aiding or assisting in the commission of genocide. This necessarily imposes an obligation on all States to cease funding and facilitating Israel’s military actions, which are plausibly genocidal.Above all else, the provisional measures are directly binding on Israel, which is required pursuant to the Court’s order and to the Genocide Convention itself, to stop all acts by it that are plausibly genocidal, such as those raised by South Africa in its Application and request for the indication of provisional measures. There is no credible basis for Israel to continue to claim that its military actions are in full compliance with international law, including the Genocide Convention, having regard to the Court’s ruling.
South Africa sincerely hopes that Israel will not act to frustrate the application of this Order, as it has publicly threatened to do, but that it will instead act to comply with it fully, as it is bound to do.
South Africa will continue to act within the institutions of global governance to protect the rights, including the fundamental right to life, of Palestinians in Gaza – which continue to remain at urgent risk including from Israeli military assault, starvation and disease – and to obtain the fair and equal application of international law to all, in the interest of our collective humanity. Notably, South Africa will continue to do everything within its power to preserve the existence of the Palestinian people as a group, to end all acts of apartheid and genocide against the Palestinian people and to walk with them towards the realisation of their collective right to self-determination, for, as Nelson Mandela momentously declared, “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians”.
The indication by this Court of provisional measures pursuant to the Genocide Convention marks a significant historical step towards that goal.
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Video: South Africa lawyer’s devastating speech to ICJ on Israel’s ‘genocidal acts’
South African lawyer Adila Hassim has made a devastating case on the genocidal nature of Israel’s actions in Gaza:
Ms Hassim’s colleague Dembeka Ngcukaitobi made a similarly blistering case on Israel’s genocidal intent. Watch here.
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Trickett tables motion demanding disclosure of government legal advice on Gaza genocide
Left-wing Labour MP Jon Trickett has tabled a parliamentary ‘Early Day Motion’ (EDM) demanding that the government reveal the advice its legal experts have given it over Israel’s war crimes and South Africa’s powerful and thorough genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
The motion reads:
That this House understands that questions have been raised internationally about the legality of the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza; recognises that in November 2023 UN experts raised the alarm about the risk of genocide in Gaza; highlights the UN General Secretary’s reasons for invoking Article 99 that there is a high risk of total collapse of the humanitarian support system in Gaza, which would have devastating consequences; further highlights his comments to the Security Council that international humanitarian law includes the duty to protect civilians and to comply with the principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution and that the laws of war also demand that civilians’ essential needs must be met, including by facilitating the unimpeded delivery of humanitarian relief; notes the Spanish Prime Minister’s comments that he has serious doubts that Israel is complying with international humanitarian law; further notes the letter signed by prominent Israeli public figures to the Attorney General in December 2023 which said there have been explicit calls to commit atrocious crimes against millions of civilians, providing evidence of the discourse of annihilation, expulsion and revenge; acknowledges the case South Africa has brought to the International Court of Justice claiming Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is tantamount to genocidal actions; and calls on the Government to publish in full the legal advice it has received from its law officers regarding the situation in Gaza, particularly in the run up to UN votes, and the legality of the UK export licensing of arms to the Israel.
Tory MPs have spoken in the Commons to try to dismiss South Africa’s case as having ‘no legal merit’ – farcical when the ICJ, by accepting the case, has already decided that Israel has a case to answer. The disclosure of the government’s legal advice would be expected to reveal that the Tories have been told the same by their own lawyers – which means the government will fight to avoid it and broad support among MPs for the motion is vital to increase pressure.
Since it was tabled yesterday, only eighteen MPs have signed. Use theyworkforyou.com to contact your MP and tell them to support the motion.
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Video: Israel removing anaesthetics from aid supplies to Gaza
More than a thousand children have had one or more limbs amputated without anaesthetic
Doctors in Gaza have accused Israel of removing anaesthetic from aid supplies entering the territory. According to the Grayzone‘s Max Blumenthal, speaking to Andrew Napolitano’s Judging Freedom channel, Israeli officials are targeting anaesthetics during the final inspection before aid – already woefully inadequate quantities – goes through, forcing more than a thousand Palestinian children to undergo limb amputations without pain relief:
At least one surgeon was forced to perform an amputation on his own child, who died in terrible suffering.
This week, South Africa filed a detailed genocide case against Israel with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for its actions in Gaza. As well as depriving children and other hideously wounded civilians of pain relief, Israel has killed more than 30,000 innocents, 70% of them women and children, and has blockaded food, water and energy and targeted homes, schools and hospitals, including UN-run facilities, for bombing and shelling, in what genocide experts say is a ‘textbook case’.
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Fry equated pro-Palestine demo to nazism. In ’08, he said Israel founded on terrorism
Stephen Fry’s ‘alternative’ Christmas message appeared to equate UK protests against the slaughter of Palestinians with ‘1930s Europe’. But fifteen years ago he was prepared to put his name to the most direct condemnation of the very founding of Israel
Stephen Fry has rightly been widely criticised for his supposedly ‘alternative’ Christmas message, produced by a pro-Israel production company, that has been described as minimising the horrific suffering of Palestinian women and children at the hands of the genocidal Israeli regime – and which appears to equate UK protests against the genocide with the rise of nazism in the 1930s.
Fry’s more than six-minute video builds to his claim that:
I’m glad [my Jewish grandparents] aren’t alive now to read newspaper stories that would have reminded them of the 1930s Europe that they left.
As one former ardent fan put it:
To hear him conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism has shocked me… Smashed windows vs carrying your dead child?
By contrast, Jewish comedian Alexei Sayle’s ‘alternative alternative’ Christmas video, standing in solidarity with Palestinians facing genocide – and pointing out that he confidently and safely marches regularly for Palestinian human rights alongside thousands of other Jewish people – was watched millions of times and received overwhelmingly positive comment.
But Fry’s message in 2023 is starkly at odds with his position just fifteen years ago – when he was prepared to put his name to a letter, on the occasion of Israel’s sixtieth anniversary, that condemned the apartheid regime as one ‘founded on terrorism’, a reference to the 1948 ‘Nakba’ or catastrophe of the violent expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and the massacres that marked it.
The full letter read:
In May, Jewish organisations will be celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel. This is understandable in the context of centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, we are Jews who will not be celebrating. Surely it is now time to acknowledge the narrative of the other, the price paid by another people for European anti-semitism and Hitler’s genocidal policies. As Edward Said emphasised, what the Holocaust is to the Jews, the Naqba is to the Palestinians.
In April 1948, the same month as the infamous massacre at Deir Yassin and the mortar attack on Palestinian civilians in Haifa’s market square, Plan Dalet was put into operation. This authorised the destruction of Palestinian villages and the expulsion of the indigenous population outside the borders of the state. We will not be celebrating.
In July 1948, 70,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes in Lydda and Ramleh in the heat of the summer with no food or water. Hundreds died. It was known as the Death March. We will not be celebrating.
In all, 750,000 Palestinians became refugees. Some 400 villages were wiped off the map. That did not end the ethnic cleansing. Thousands of Palestinians (Israeli citizens) were expelled from the Galilee in 1956. Many thousands more when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. Under international law and sanctioned by UN resolution 194, refugees from war have a right to return or compensation. Israel has never accepted that right. We will not be celebrating.
We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land. We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state that even now engages in ethnic cleansing, that violates international law, that is inflicting a monstrous collective punishment on the civilian population of Gaza and that continues to deny to Palestinians their human rights and national aspirations.
We will celebrate when Arab and Jew live as equals in a peaceful Middle East.
Fry’s name appeared among more than one hundred Jewish signatories – many of whom have maintained to this day their principled opposition to Israeli apartheid, occupation, brutality and ethnic cleansing, such as Michael Rosen, Rica and Jo Bird, Diana Neslen, Sayle and many more.
Mr Fry, despite Israeli ministers’ boasts that they want their slaughter in Gaza to be a ‘Nakba 2023’, has not – and has now equated opposition to Zionism with antisemitism. What happened to him?
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Starmer’s guest Herzog signs shells to fire on Gaza
Genocide-mongering Israeli president warmly welcomed and presented with gifts by right-wing Starmer and Labour Friends of Apartheid
Israeli president Isaac Herzog has been photographed signing shells to be fired upon Gazan civilians. Herzog, like other Israeli government figures, has said that there are no innocents being killed in Israel’s wanton slaughter of Palestinian civilians:
It’s an entire nation that is out there that’s responsible. It’s not true, this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true.
So closely identified is Herzog with Israel’s war crimes that his comments were cited byexpert Raz Segal, the program director of genocide studies at Stockton University, as an example of the Israeli regime’s expression of intent to commit that and other war crimes.
According to Euromed Monitor, Israel has so far killed 30,000 people in Gaza, well over half of them women and children. Approaching 60,000 more have been injured, many of them severely.
As Declassified‘s John McEvoy has pointed out, Herzog recently received a fawning welcome from ‘Labour’ ‘leader’ Keir Starmer – who left him a signed note in a copy of a book presented to him by Steve McCabe, the parliamentary chair of the so-called ‘Labour Friends of Israel’ (LFI).
Starmer and LFI are no friends of working-class people – but they can’t get enough of those eager for war crimes against the Palestinians.
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Police charge Palestine Solidarity activist for backing legal right to resist occupation
Mick Napier charged with ‘support for proscribed organization’ under Terrorism Act as Establishment attempt to suppress solidarity with Palestine continues
Palestine Solidarity Activist Mick Napier, a founder of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, has been charged under anti-terror legislation after giving a speech in Glasgow in which he said:
I agree with the Palestinian right to resist by means that they choose.
Napier has been charged under the Terrorism Act with supporting a ‘proscribed organisation’. He also thanked Hamas for ‘breaking out of the Gaza concentration camp’. He was arrested at the demo, shortly afterward. According to Electronic Intifada, police officers told Napier that he was being arrested for ‘religiously aggravated’ offences.
Hamas was made a proscribed organisation by the UK government on the basis of its rocket attacks on Israel – but is not listed as a terror group by the United Nations and the UN defeated an attempted 2020 US resolution condemning the group for its rocket attacks. It is widely recognised that the right to resist occupation is protected under international law as part of the human right of self-determination, including the use of force consistent with the UN charter. It appears the UK Establishment is applying the Terrorism Act in a way inconsistent with international law.
Napier is not the only human rights advocate targeted by police. As Skwawkbox exclusively reported, Brighton-based Tony Greenstein was arrested earlier this week and suffered the confiscation of his electronics, for a single tweet, after what is believed to have been a complaint from a right-wing pro-Israel group. He was released without charge on police bail, but under a series of draconian bail conditions that attack his freedom of speech as well as his privacy.
Mick Napier was released on bail under similarly draconian conditions banning him from attending any protest in Scotland and from entering the centre of Glasgow. He pleaded not guilty to all five charges and is due to appear in court 9 January. PSC Scotland – a separate organisation from the English PSC – has said it will give him full support.
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Video: Israeli police kick journalist repeatedly in head – now hospitalised with ‘serious’ injuries
Yet more brutality from apartheid regime
Turkish photojournalist Mustafa Haruf has been kicked repeatedly in the head, without provocation, by Israeli police in occupied East Jerusalem, leaving him hospitalised in a serious and not yet stabilised condition.
Haruf, who works for Turkish news agency Anadolu, was first struck in the head with a rifle then yanked to the ground and set on by two uniformed thugs as others looked on and others tried to prevent filming:
Mr Haruf was subsequently able to speak to colleagues from his hospital bed. In Gaza, an Israeli airstrike killed Al Jazeera journalist Samer Abu Daqqa today and wounded Wael Al-Dahdouh, the Al Jazeera reporter whose family was killed in a targeted airstrike early in Israel’s genocidal assault, as they reported on yet another UN school being bombed.
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Video: Webbe ‘I will not be accomplice’ to war crimes, signs call for ICC Gaza investigation
Leicester East MP issues no-holds-barred speech; over 66,000 sign letter to International Criminal Court
Leicester East MP Claudia Webbe MP has signed a formal call to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate and prosecute Israeli war crimes in Gaza.
And in a no-holds-barred Westminster Hall speech to MPs explaining her decision to put her name to the formal letter of complaint, she said that she ‘will not be an accomplice’ to the daily atrocities against Palestinian civilians:
Webbe was one of the first of more than 66,000 international lawmakers, civil society representatives and civilians to sign the official complaint asking on the ICC to investigate, prosecute and arrest Israeli government figures, including Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, for war crimes against the people of Gaza including genocide and crimes against humanity.
“‘Never again’ must mean never again for anyone”
In a statement today, Ms Webbe MP said:
I have signed a formal complaint to the International Criminal Court for Justice calling on them to investigate and prosecute the Israeli government for war crimes against the people of Palestine, including genocide and crimes against humanity.
Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has destroyed or severely damaged 60-70% of homes and public buildings – some estimates say 80-90% – and has killed more than 20,000 civilians, including at least 10,000 children, as well as maiming countless others, who are now forced to undergo amputations and other serious surgery without anaesthetic, in impossible conditions.
The death toll from bombs and missiles is horrifying, but the toll from starvation and disease is set to be even worse, with Israel only allowing a fraction of the aid into Gaza that its people need and the UN unable to distribute it effectively because so many of their trucks have been destroyed. More than 150 UN personnel have been killed.
Yet the Israeli government is blaming the UN for the situation and is using humanitarian aid as a weapon of war, while Israel’s ministers have even suggested dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza and talk openly of ‘Nakba 2023’ – a repeat of the violent mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 – and Israeli troops have planted flags in the centre of flattened residential districts to stake their claim.
I have received well over 6,000 letters and emails from constituents calling for an immediate ceasefire and I am comforting too many who have lost family under the rubble and others desperately worried about their loved ones and friends in Gaza and I will not be silent. Collective punishment is a war crime, forcible transfer of the population is a war crime, indiscriminate bombing and the use of white phosphorus on civilians – now confirmed by Amnesty International – is a war crime. I will not be an accomplice.
I have signed the formal complaint to the International Criminal Court because there must be accountability for those responsible, and I have urged my colleagues in Parliament to do the same.
Never again must mean never again for anyone.
The formal letter of complaint to the ICC, which has been signed by hundreds of politicians globally as well as more than 66,000 others, is still open for readers to add their names here. Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Podemos Social Rights minister Ione Belarra Urteaga and a host of other global lawmakers have signed. Details of signatories can be found here.
Despite the huge number of signatures, the UK media appear determined to ignore the war crime prosecution call.
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