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War crimes

Israel’s Crimes Must Be Met With Arms Embargo

August 27, 2020 By Maureen Clare Murphy, Electronic Intifada. , , , , ,
Israel’s bombing of the besieged Gaza Strip must be met with an “urgent and comprehensive military embargo,” the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee stated on Sunday. Israel has bombed Gaza every night for the past 12 days in response, or so it claims, to incendiary balloons flown from the territory. Those balloons have caused fires on agricultural land in southern Israel. Two-thirds of Gaza’s population of 2.1 million are refugees, some of them from the lands just on the other side of the Gaza boundary fence. Israel denies them their right to return, enshrined in international law, while encouraging Jews worldwide to emigrate to Israel. Gaza has been under a devastating blockade enforced by Israel and Egypt for the past 13 years.

Israel Cuts Fuel, Gaza Goes Dark

August 22, 2020 By Tamara Nassar, Electronic Intifada. , , ,
The Gaza Strip’s only power plant shut down on Tuesday after Israel stopped the transfer of fuel to the territory. The halting of fuel transfers is among a series of collective punishment measures Israel has imposed on Gaza. Israel has claimed the measures are a response to incendiary balloons released from Gaza. The launching of such balloons by some Palestinians is, in reality, a symbolic effort to draw attention to the deteriorating situation in Gaza, long subject to an Israeli siege. Although incendiary balloons caused several fires in Israel, “no injuries or damage have been reported,” according to The Jerusalem Post. Israel has also bombed Gaza on an almost a daily basis over the past week.

Atomic Bombings At 75: The Illegality Of Nuclear Weapons

August 5, 2020 By Francis Boyle, Consortium News. , , ,
The mere possession of nuclear weapons violates the Nuremberg Principles (decreed a day before Nagasaki) and other international laws. The human race stands on the verge of nuclear self-extinction as a species, and with it will die most, if not all, forms of intelligent life on the planet earth. Any attempt to dispel the ideology of nuclearism and its attendant myth propounding the legality of nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence must directly come to grips with the fact that the nuclear age was conceived in the original sins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki constituted crimes against humanity and war crimes as defined by the Nuremberg Charter of August 8, 1945 [promulgated two days after Hiroshima and a day before Nagasaki], and violated several basic provisions of the Regulations annexed to Hague Convention No. 4 Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land (1907), the rules of customary international law set forth in the Draft Hague Rules of Air Warfare (1923), and the United States War Department Field Manual 27-10, Rules of Land Warfare (1940).

Israel’s Secret List Of Officials Who May Stand Trial At International Court

July 20, 2020 Noa Landau, Haaretz. , , ,
Israel is drawing up a secret list of military and intelligence officials who might be subject to arrest abroad if the International Criminal Court in the Hague opens an investigation into alleged Israeli war crimes in the Palestinian territories. Haaretz has learned that this list now includes between 200 and 300 officials, some of whom have not been informed. The great secrecy surrounding the issue stems from a fear that the mere disclosure of the list’s existence could endanger the people on it. The assessment is that the court is likely to view a list of names as an official Israeli admission of these officials’ involvement in the incidents under investigation. The ICC is expected to rule shortly on whether to approve the request by ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda to investigate Israel and Hamas over suspicions of war crimes in the territories beginning in 2014, the year of Operation Protective Edge.

Iranian Arrest Warrant For Trump Shows How Disreputable US Presidency Has Become

June 30, 2020 By Finian Cunningham, RT. , , ,
The arrest warrant issued by Iran for the murder of General Qassem Soleimani in January shows how disreputable the office of the US presidency has become. Trump has openly bragged about ordering the assassination of the widely revered Iranian commander. There was a time when American presidents would at least use discretion in liquidating foreign enemies. Not Trump. He reveled in the murder. For the more liberal apologists of America’s Murder Inc., Trump’s kind of bravado is embarrassing. The president is just not supposed to divulge the bloody reality of Washington’s lawlessness. Interpol, which serves as an international agency linking national police forces, told RIA Novosti if it receives a request to arrest Trump, its own rules will not allow it to act on it arguing that the Iranian move is illegitimate because it is “politically motivated”

Ahmed Erekat Was Executed With The Blessing Of Abbas And The Oslo People

June 30, 2020 By Dr. Amira Abo el-Fetouh, Middle East Today , , ,
Ahmed Erekat was not the first Palestinian to be killed by the Israeli occupation forces in cold blood, nor will he be the last to be killed “because he tried to attack” them. The young man was shot dead as he helped his sister with her wedding preparations. Instead of the bride rejoicing, the Zionists turned her wedding into a funeral for the entire Erekat family, and all Palestinians. Heinous crimes like this are committed on a regular basis, and the Israelis and their supporters try to justify them on every occasion. They tell their pre-packaged “self-defense” claims to the world; defend their presence on occupied land and claim to be fighting against anti-Semitic terrorists who deny the Jewish people a homeland in Israel. They kill and displace the indigenous people and then justify their despicable criminal acts without batting an eyelid. Amazingly, the world not only believes them but also sympathizes with them, as if they are the victims instead of the people they are killing and displacing. It is a cowardly world that sees with only one eye; a world without a conscience that supports the criminals at the expense of the victims.

Fortress On A Hill: Rebecca Gordon And American Nuremberg

May 9, 2020 Danny Sjursen, Fortress on a Hill. , , ,
Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular and author of American Nuremberg: The Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post 9/11 War Crimes, stop by the podcast to discuss torture and moral injury in the post 9/11 world, her experiences in Nicaragua and South Africa, how past presidents paved the way for Donald Trump, and over-classication in the intelligence community. Rebecca Gordon received her B.A. from Reed College and her M.Div. and Ph.D. in Ethics and Social Theory from Graduate Theological Union. She teaches in the Philosophy department at the University of San Francisco and for the university’s Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good. Previous publications include Letters From Nicaragua, Cruel and Usual: How Welfare “Reform” Punishes Poor People, and Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States.

US And Israel Team Up To Thwart War Crimes Probes

April 19, 2020 Maureen Clare Murphy, Electronic Intifada. , , ,
The US secretary of state’s threats to sanction two employees working for the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and their families last month may have been the opening salvoes of a new US-Israel war against the justice body in The Hague. Both states currently face the embarrassing specter of war crimes investigations by the court – an unprecedented challenge to their impunity. In response, they aim to disempower the court by preventing it from exercising jurisdiction in countries that are not state parties to the Rome Statute, the treaty on which the court was founded. Should the US and Israel succeed, it would be a significant blow to the court’s independent mandate and purpose as a court of last resort for the victims of the world’s worst human rights abusers.

Team Trump Failed To Bully ICC Into Dropping War Crimes Probe

March 15, 2020 Marjorie Cohn, Truthout. , , ,
fter the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) found a reasonable basis to believe that U.S. military and CIA leaders committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in Afghanistan, Team Trump threatened to ban ICC judges and prosecutors from the U.S. and warned it would impose economic sanctions on the Court if it launched an investigation. Apparently succumbing to the U.S. threats, in April 2019, the ICC’s Pretrial Chamber refused to authorize the investigation that prosecutor Fatou Bensouda had requested. But in an unprecedented decision, the Appeals Chamber unanimously overruled the Pretrial Chamber on March 5, 2020, and ordered a formal investigation of U.S., Afghan and Taliban officials for war crimes, including torture, committed in the “war on terror.”

Palestinians Decry ICC Prosecutor’s Delay Of Israeli War Crimes Investigation

January 4, 2020 Marjorie Cohn, Truthout.org , , ,
In a significant development for Israeli accountability, Fatou Bensouda, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), seeks to launch an investigation into war crimes committed in Palestine. But she has established an unnecessary and politically suspect condition to slow down the process. Following a five-year preliminary examination, Bensouda found a reasonable basis to mount an investigation of “the situation in Palestine.”

Israel/Palestine War Crimes Probe ‘Momentous Step Forward’, Says UN Rights Expert

January 1, 2020 By Loulou d'Aki, News.un.org , , ,
An independent UN human rights expert hailed on Tuesday, the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) decision to consider a formal criminal investigation into allegations of war crimes in Palestine as a "momentous step forward in the quest for accountability" in the five-decade-long Israeli occupation. "Accountability has, until now, been largely missing in action throughout the 52-year-old occupation," said Michael Lynk, the Special Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.

ICC Decision To Investigate War Crimes Touches Israelis’ Deepest Fear (Accountability)

December 27, 2019 Jonathan Ofir, Mondoweiss.net , ,
The recently announced decision of the International Criminal Court to investigate Israeli war crimes (pending a pre-Trial chamber decision on the “territories” at hand), has hit a raw nerve in Israel. It is not merely that Prime Minister Netanyahu went on Hasbara overdrive with his antics, saying that ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda is ignoring “the truth when she says that the very act of Jews living in their ancestral homeland, the land of the Bible, that this is a war crime”.

US Leaders Can Now Be Prosecuted For Illegal War

July 30, 2019 C.J. Polychroniou, Truthout.org , , ,
War is gathering around the world, and autocratic leaders are undermining the legal checks on their discretion to launch attacks abroad. With the rule of law under threat, the International Criminal Court recently defined and activated for prosecution a new crime called the “crime of aggression.” The crime of aggression — leadership responsibility for planning, preparing, initiating or waging illegal war — has begun to permeate international, regional and national legal systems around the world. But in an age of drones, cyberattacks, insurgents and autocrats, is it too little, too late?

Clemency For Lowly War Criminals, Free Passes For The Mighty

June 7, 2019 By Rebecca Gordon, Tomdispatch.com , , ,
Memorial Day has come and gone and President Trump did not issue his pardons after all. There was substantial evidence that he was planning to use the yearly moment honoring the country’s war dead to grant executive clemency to several U.S. soldiers and at least one military contractor. All have been accused, and one already convicted, of crimes in the never-ending war on terror. But apparently, Trump received enough resistance from serving and retired senior military officers and former soldiers, including presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, to change his mind -- for now.

U.S. Vets Expose Irish Govt Complicity In War Crimes

May 1, 2019 Staff, Afri , , ,
Tarak Kauff and Ken Mayers are two US Army Veterans and members of US Vets for Peace who felt called to come to Ireland to help expose the Irish Governments complicity in US led war crimes in the Middle East and North Africa. They were imprisoned for 13 days without bail and their passports were taken off them affectively holding them hostage in Ireland pending a trial. This legal action is in stark contrast to the treatment Clare Daly and Mick Wallace TD's got for essentially the same crime (both spending only 2 hours in a cell).
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