A new mass grave has been discovered at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza where Palestinian officials have been investigating allegations of killings of patients and staff by Israeli forces during their occupation of the site.
Published On 9 May 2024
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US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has confirmed reports that the United States paused a weapons shipment to Israel, as President Joe Biden’s administration faces growing pressure to condition aid to the top US ally amid the war in Gaza.
Testifying before a US congressional subcommittee on Wednesday, Austin said the Biden administration had paused “one shipment of high payload munitions” amid concerns about the Israeli military’s push to invade the southern Gaza city of Rafah.
“We’ve been very clear … from the very beginning that Israel shouldn’t launch a major attack into Rafah without accounting for and protecting the civilians that are in that battlespace,” Austin told US lawmakers.
“We’ve not made a final determination on how to proceed with that shipment [of weapons],” the Pentagon chief added, noting that the transfer is separate from a supplemental aid package for Israel that was passed in late April.
“My final comment is that we are absolutely committed to continuing to support Israel in its right to defend itself.”
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, responded to the shipment pause by saying the US decision was “very dissapointing”.
“[US President Joe Biden] can’t say he is our partner in the goal to destroy Hamas, while on the other hand delay the means meant to destroy Hamas,” Erdan said.
Al Jazeera’s Kimberly Halkett, reporting from the White House on Wednesday, said the shipment included 1,800 bombs each weighing about 900kg (2,000lbs) and another 1,700 bombs each weighing 226kg (500lbs).
“There has been, leading up to this delay, significant concerns on the part of not only student protesters across the United States but also within the president’s own party … about how these weapons are being used,” Halkett said.
US Senator Bernie Sanders welcomed the Biden administration’s pause on the weapons transfer, but said it “must be a first step”.
“The US must now use ALL its leverage to demand an immediate ceasefire, the end of the attacks on Rafah, and the immediate delivery of massive amounts of humanitarian aid to people living in desperation,” Sanders said in a statement. “Our leverage is clear. Over the years, the United States has provided tens of billions of dollars in military aid to Israel.”
The Biden administration has faced months of criticism over its “iron-clad” support for Israel amid the Gaza war, which has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians and plunged the enclave into a dire humanitarian crisis.
But Washington has largely continued to provide military and diplomatic backing to Israel as the war grinds on.
Israel stepped up its bombardment of Rafah on Monday, killing dozens of people after ordering about 100,000 residents in the city’s eastern areas to evacuate.
Israeli troops also stormed the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, which serves as a major gateway for humanitarian aid.
Yet despite continuing to say it has concerns for the fate of the more than 1.5 million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah, the US Department of State this week sought to play down the recent moves by the Israeli army.
“This military operation that they launched last night was targeted just to [the] Rafah gate,” US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said on Tuesday.
“It wasn’t an operation in the civilian areas that they had ordered to be evacuated. So we will continue to make clear that we oppose a major military operation in Rafah.”
Human rights advocates have urged the US to do more to pressure the country to end its war on Gaza, however, and President Biden faces mounting protests — including on US college campuses — over his stance.
A new poll released on Wednesday also suggested a growing disconnect between Biden and his Democratic Party base, which could pose a challenge as he campaigns for re-election in November.
The poll by Data for Progress, in collaboration with news website Zeteo, suggested that 56 percent of Democrats believed Israel was committing “genocide” in the besieged Palestinian territory.
It also found that seven in 10 American voters — and 83 percent of Democrats — also support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
Hasan Pyarali, the Muslim Caucus chairman for College Democrats of America, the university arm of the Democratic Party, told Al Jazeera last week that many young people have signalled they will not vote for Biden in the upcoming election.
“It’s not just good policy to oppose the genocide; it’s good politics,” he said.
The United Nations defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, including killings and measures to prevent births.
In January, the International Court of Justice — the UN’s top court — acknowledged there was a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza and ordered Israel to take “all measures within its power” to prevent genocidal acts against Palestinians.
Israel has rejected the accusation that it is committing genocide.
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Mbyo/Kigali, Rwanda – Mukaremera Laurence gazed at the ground as Nkundiye Thacien spoke about how he used a machete to kill her husband 30 years ago.
The three of them had been neighbours and lifelong friends, living together in the Rwandan village of Mbyo. But then, in 1994, Thacien received orders to kill.
“It was an order and if you didn’t obey they threatened to kill your family,” Thacien told Al Jazeera, “so I felt like I had to do it.”
He speaks about one of the 20th century’s most macabre events, when the majority Hutu group he belonged to, which ruled Rwanda at the time, began a campaign of mass killing against the Tutsis – the minority ethnic group to which Laurence’s husband belonged.
More than 800,000 people – by some estimates, a million – died during 100 days at the hands of machete-wielding Hutus. More than 250,000 women were targeted with sexual violence, according to the United Nations.
Now, Laurence and Thacien live as neighbours in Mbyo, a village that has turned from a killing site to a place practicing resilience and unity. It is one of six reconciliation villages in Rwanda where perpetrators and survivors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis live together and attempt to reconcile their past.
“We can’t forget; it’s impossible to forget,” said Laurence. “We live in peace now, but we remember it and always will.”
While their reconciliation story is seemingly one of success, despite criticism of it being artificial, Rwandans continue to struggle with the legacy of the genocide. Many survivors have found solace in learning the truth about how their loved ones were murdered and from apologies from their killers. Others have not found such closure, as new mass graves continue to be discovered and killers’ identities continue to be exposed.
Ethnic violence had been bubbling in Rwanda for decades before April 6, 1994, but it was on that day that a plane carrying then-President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira, bot was shot down over Kigali. The death of the two presidents, who were both Hutu, led Hutu extremists to blame the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel group helmed by current president Paul Kagame, who had been fighting against the ruling Hutus since they took power in 1979. The RPF’s position was that the plane had been shot down by Hutus to provide an excuse to begin killing Tutsis. The Hutus used the flight to revive a long-held belief that all Tutsis needed to be exterminated, convincing the Hutu population in Rwanda to immediately start a campaign of slaughter.
Thacien says that soon after the plane crashed, he heard orders on the newly created Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines station for Hutus to kill all Tutsis – and anyone who protects them – or be killed themselves. The radio messages spewing hate and identifying names of high-profile Tutsis to be targeted were responsible for inciting more than 45,000 killings. The Hutu-run military also spread word on the ground, encouraging violence and organising killing sprees. Thacien joined his fellow Hutus in the killings.
Government forces and Hutu militia groups – together known as Interahamwe, a name that means “those who attack together” – began killing Tutsis in Kigali while also distributing weapons to ordinary Hutus.
Hutus had been preparing to eradicate the Tutsi people for years, explained Thacien, who participated in several Hutu meetings some years before, but “1994 was the official genocide”, he said.
He was 47 when it began. He recalls how people discussed killing tactics and ways to spread genocidal ideologies, while dehumanising the Tutsis by calling them “cockroaches” and “snakes” that needed to be exterminated.
On April 7, Thacien was stationed at main junctions checking identification, which at the time mentioned an individual’s ethnicity, to single out Tutsis to be killed. He also participated in killing parties; one of his targets was Laurence’s husband.
More than a million Hutus joined the movement and used machetes, grenades, guns and other blunt weapons to kill their neighbours, regardless of gender or age, if they belonged to the Tutsi group. Hutus who tried to protect their fellow Tutsis were also targeted.
Places of worship, where people usually found safety, became massacre sites. In the second week of the genocide, thousands – mostly women and children – sought out safety at the Nyamata Church, about 30 minutes from Mbyo.
Hutu militias killed the armed men protecting the church and threw grenades inside and outside its doors. Then the Interahamwe slaughtered the survivors inside with machetes.
Today, evidence of the carnage is still evident throughout the church. There are bullet holes in the roof and the walls. Clothing, coffins and skeletal remains litter the floor. A blood-stained cloth covers the pulpit. In the basement, one floor holds multiple skulls marked by machetes or bullet holes. More than 10,000 people from the church massacre and surrounding areas were buried in mass graves next to the church.
Similar events happened across the country. The massacre ended in July when the RPF, the Tutsi rebel group from Uganda, captured Kigali and overthrew the Hutu government. Its leader, Paul Kagame, became president and continues to rule in Rwanda.
Many still don’t know who killed their loved ones. Laurence found out in 2003, when Thacien wrote to her from prison and apologised for killing her husband.
The government had adopted a law that reduced prison sentences in exchange for confessions to the killings. To speed up the sentencing of more than one million participants in the genocide, local “gacaca” courts (gacaca means “grass” in the local Kinyarwanda language) were installed as community-led justice systems.
“I felt so bad about it even when I did it, but in prison I knew I had to face my actions,” said Thacien.
When Laurence received the letter and learned that the person who killed her husband was her friend and neighbour, she was shocked.
“It was so hard for me to read the letter,” Laurence told Al Jazeera, “I couldn’t imagine or understand what happened and why.” She worried that the release of prisoners back into the community would put her in danger of again being targeted by Hutu militias.
![A memorial to those who lost their lives during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda stands in the valley that separates two villages on adjascent hills, at the border between Musambira and Nyarubaka sectors of Kamonyi District, on March 4, 2019. Two villages on adjascent hills are re-learning to share all they have, including a well-spring at the bottom of the valley, after 1994 genocide. More than a thousand residents of the town were massacred in the days following the outbreak of inter-ethnic violence, a genocide in which over 800,000 mostly Tutsi people were slaughtered between April to July 1994, according to the UN.[Jacques Nkinzingabo/AFP]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/AFP__20190330__1F76DS__v1__HighRes__RwandaGenocideAnniversaryReconciliation-1712500209.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C513)
After Thacien was released from prison, a local priest organised a meeting so the perpetrators could apologise to the survivors in person. During the first event, people were shy and scared – they didn’t know what to say to each other. At the second meeting, Thacien says he built up the courage and approached Laurence, telling himself, “If she doesn’t forgive me I can’t control that, but what I can do is own up to what I did and ask for forgiveness.”
It took three years, but Laurence did forgive Thacien.
In 2005, they both moved to the Mbyo village, one of six reconciliation villages around the country that were built by a partnership formed between the government and Prison Fellowship Rwanda, an NGO dedicated to helping perpetrators of the genocide reintegrate into society.
The purpose of the villages was to have killers and survivors live alongside each other, while rebuilding their lives and reconciling the past. They also looked to create equality between the two ethnic groups and prevent people from taking revenge for the 1994 genocide.
Government policies also helped to encourage reconciliations, explained Felix Mukwiza Ndahinda, an assistant professor of transitional justice at the Netherlands-based Tilburg Law School and an expert on the Rwandan genocide.
Some of these policies included creating institutions focused on unity and reconciliation and removing ethnicity from personal identification.
Also, it was essentially made illegal to challenge the state’s narrative of the genocide. The government has faced criticism for exploiting history for political gain and has been accused of censorship. Opposition leaders or critics of the government have been imprisoned under the genocide ideology laws, which have been criticised as vague and seen by critics as political tools.
Ndahinda explained that political freedoms in Rwanda need to be examined against the country’s difficult history, genocide legacy and the resulting fracture that made it difficult to imagine how Rwanda could emerge from it. Reconciliation processes are more complex than this narrow frame, he added.
“How individuals engage with one another on the hills, live together in villages, negotiate their daily relations and sometimes choose to marry within families across the survivor-perpetrator divide is beyond governmental doing,” Ndahinda said.
Thacien and Laurence have been living in the reconciliation village for 19 years and remain close. When Thacien’s son got married recently, Laurence attended the wedding.
But not everyone has found peace.
Naphtal Ahishakiye, executive secretary of Ibuka, a genocide survivors’ group, spoke to Al Jazeera from the Nyanza Genocide Memorial site in Kigali’s suburb of Kicukiro, where workers were repainting and trimming grass in preparation for the following week’s commemoration events. He told Al Jazeera that “people are still suffering and many don’t have closure” because many remains haven’t been found and not all perpetrators have been sentenced.
More mass graves are still being discovered. Last October in the region of Hueye, bones were found during a home renovation. This prompted search-and-excavation efforts in the area, which led to the discovery of the remains of more than 1,000 people.
“For 30 years, villagers asked their neighbours to tell them the truth about what happened in the past and no one admitted to anything. Then they found the remains,” said Ahishakiye. “This undermines trust and the reconciliation process.”
A quarter of the genocide’s survivors still struggle with mental health, according to Ahishakiye, who stressed the need for continued support as new generations born after the genocide reach adulthood.
The state can’t control how parents of both perpetrators and survivors communicate with their children in private about the past, Ndahinda pointed out. The Rwandan diaspora, made up mostly of people critical of President Kagame’s approach to governance, also has starkly contrasting views to Rwandans at home – differences that might not be as easy to handle, he added.
![Josepha Mukaruzima, 70 (C), a Tutsi woman from Ruseke village, whose entire family was killed, stands with Jean-Claude Mutarindwa, 42 (L), a Hutu from neighbouring Giheta village, at the border between Musambira and Nyarubaka sectors of Kamonyi District on March 4, 2019. In the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, majority Hutu's from Giheta turned on their long-time neighbours in Ruseke. Mutarindwa was a young man from the village of Giheta. Unlike his brothers, he did not pick up a machete to kill, and that helped him be one of the first to lay the foundation stones for reconciliation. The neighbours are now re-learning to share all they have, including a well-spring at the bottom of the valley. More than a thousand residents of the town were massacred in the days following the outbreak of inter-ethnic violence, a genocide in which over 800,000 mostly Tutsi people were slaughtered between April to July 1994, according to the UN. [Jacques Nkinzingabo/AFP]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/AFP__20190330__1F75K8__v4__HighRes__TopshotJosephaMukaruzima70CATutsiWomanFromRuseke-1712498295.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C513)
“The uncertainty about the future in an environment with pockets of instability remains on many people’s minds,” said Ndahinda.
But while issues still persist for many, often hidden behind closed doors, people like Laurence and Thacien have found a way to accept the past and move on together. Back in the Mbyo village, the two neighbours attend church together, share food and take care of each other’s children.
With tears in his eyes and while holding Laurence’s hand, Thacien said how grateful he is for Laurence’s forgiveness.
“I did something extremely bad and hurt her and her family,” he said, “Now, during the week of commemoration events my only wish is to be by her side. I want to show that I care for her and that I will protect her. I want her to feel safe with me.”
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Warning: Some of the images below are graphic and show victims of massacres.
On April 7, 1994, one of the most harrowing events in modern history began: the Rwandan genocide.
One hundred days of unfathomable slaughter in which an estimated 800,000-1,000,000 people were killed.
Rwandans were pitted against Rwandans, Hutu against Tutsi, neighbour against neighbour, and in some cases, family member against family member.
From grandmothers to infants, no one was spared – all dispatched to the next world by machete, machinegun or hand grenade.
Thirty years ago, Jack Picone was among the first international photographers to document the carnage.
He reflects on the journey he took in the grips of genocide, how ordinary Rwandans are finding healing and forgiveness, and the memories that still haunt him to this day.
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It has been 30 years since the Rwandan genocide – the campaign of extermination where the Hutu-led state killed an estimated 800,000, mostly Tutsi civilians, in just 100 days.
Published On 7 Apr 2024
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Bosnians have experience with genocide. Not just the signs of it coming. Not just the fact of it happening. But also this strange phenomenon we call “Schrödinger’s genocide”: the simultaneous glorification and denial of genocide. There is a cruel dance between the systematic relativisation of the legal qualification of genocide and the continuous pursuit of genocidal politics and its results.
Despite the verdicts issued by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), we have not healed. The ethnically cleansed Republika Srpska still stands as the triumph of the Serb genocidal project.
Bosnian history has demonstrated the futility of the “never again” mantra and Gaza is now confirming it. The genocide of my people was accompanied by the same rhetoric that Israeli officials now espouse: a genocidal army is the only thing standing between Europe and “Muslim barbarians”, they claim.
I have often lamented how the Jews, who struggled for years after World War II to globalise the knowledge about the Holocaust, started facing serious Holocaust denial as the number of living survivors started to dwindle. Swedish survivors Hédi Fried (98) and Emerich Roth (97) died recently – a major loss for the Jewish community and those working to uphold the “never again” vow.
By contrast, Bosnians are experiencing genocide denial while most of us, survivors, are still alive. Genocide scholar Gregory Stanton argued there are 10 stages of genocide, the last one being denial, but we are effectively experiencing the 11th phase: glorification and triumphalism.
There are people who not only invest resources into historical revisionism of the genocide they committed in the 1990s, but are de facto threatening to repeat it. The Bosnian “final solution” was not properly finalised, they often say. In my home city, Banja Luka, the administrative capital of Republika Srpska, you can buy T-shirts with the faces of war criminals Radovan Karadžić, Ratko Mladić, Biljana Plavšić, and Slobodan Milošević. And Russian President Vladimir Putin, too.
In the case of the Israeli onslaught on Gaza, which the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has already characterised as a plausible genocide, we see denial among Israeli politicians and propagandists while it is still going on. There is even more denial in Western countries with histories of horrific genocides, especially Germany.
Western governments and media are engaged in a systematic cover-up of Israeli war crimes and bullying of those who try to expose them. Laws are proposed on short notice that aim to criminalise free speech and criticism of Israel.
At the same time, the glorification of this genocide is broadcast in real time on social media. Accounts with thousands of followers post footage of Israeli soldiers committing war crimes. People want credit even for discrediting content. The Palestinians have been dehumanised to such an extent that their executioners are deeply convinced that their violent acts are not just morally justified but also noble, and they must take pride in their “good work”.
The Serb authorities did much to hide the concentration camps from foreign journalists. They tried to cover up massacres, moving mass graves multiple times. By contrast, the hubris of Israeli soldiers drives them to produce countless images and videos of their work: endearing messages to loved ones from sites of destruction, the mocking of everything Palestinian, proud repetitions of the genocidal discourse.
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard was right: We postmodern humans want to broadcast ourselves to the world whatever we do. I am not surprised that the Israeli army is broadcasting its war crimes as I was not surprised that Hamas had cameras on on October 7.
We have seen attempts to whitewash Hamas’s crimes, but we have also seen propaganda campaigns aimed at making them look even more horrible as a way of justifying the crimes of the Israeli army. Meanwhile, Palestinians have felt compelled to report in detail the atrocities they face. It is perverse that people suffering so much are forced to record and broadcast unimaginable slaughter to be believed, to be humanised, to be pitied enough so their cry for help is heard.
We think we live in a different time, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has shown the world that the old rules still apply. Though Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari is correct that since World War II fewer people have died in wars, Israel keeps confirming the fact that nations are built through violence.
In Gaza, the old world order came back with a vengeance. Western powers are doing the exact opposite of acting in the spirit of the civilisation they have bragged about building. They have armed the aggressor and aided his indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, their starvation, and culturicide. They encouraged the media to dehumanise the victims and cover up the crimes. And finally, despite the explicit ruling by the ICJ, they cut aid.
Let us note here that even the Israeli judge in the ICJ hearing on Gaza voted in favour of the provision of humanitarian assistance to Palestinian civilians. As a Holocaust survivor, of course, he did at least that.
Despite the staggering effort by Western media to suppress information, there has been a significant shift in public opinion in the West. This means that the timing is bad for Israel. Netanyahu and his predecessors should have finished their genocidal project decades ago.
Back then, there were fewer avenues for the truth to surface. Places were ethnically cleansed and mass graves were buried under parking lots. As the Israeli interviewees in a 2022 documentary about a massacre in the Palestinian village of Tantura made clear, they got away with it because no one was watching.
But people across the whole world are watching now and there is no excuse not to act to stop it.
Once a genocide happens, history shows, there is no going back. Six million Jews and millions of their unborn descendants are missing in Germany and other nations. Many are missing from countries across Asia and Africa. They will never return.
Germans may have apologised, built memorial centres, financed historical studies, and instituted prizes for science and literature, but the fact remains. The state of Israel is a continuous reminder that the Jews will never get back what they lost.
The laws of nation-building are like entropy. It is a one-way road. We Bosnians know this too well. Despite all the convictions of war criminals, the authorities of Republika Srpska still enjoy the gift they were given: half of Bosnia, nice and clean. Threats of secession and annexation to Serbia continue. The dream of Greater Serbia is on the horizon. Greater Serbia in the European Union. Maybe even in NATO.
No peace process will ever retrieve the territories and recreate Bosnia and Herzegovina as a multiethnic state with equal rights for all citizens. Bosnia remains an ethnostate where three ethnicities rule and others, such as Jews and the Roma, do not have equal political rights.
We see Israelis dream big of Greater Israel. If the world – whatever that means – allows Israel to take Gaza, it will never go back to the Palestinians even if the ICJ convicts all war criminals. There might be symbolic justice for some, but in practice, it will be an irreversible loss, endlessly debated in history books.
Netanyahu knows, as do all the others in his government, that even if they are sentenced as war criminals, the posterity will absorb that. Films will be made about them as complex human beings with good and bad sides. Many will glorify and whitewash them. The Bibi T-shirt industry will do well.
Some Israelis are already thinking of Gaza in terms of real estate. The future intrudes on the present. We are watching Schrödinger’s genocide live, analysing what is happening as if it is already history, as if we are already in the future, observing it from a distance. It is almost like a quantum (entangled) genocide.
I understand some Israelis who are against the war but are in denial about the genocide just as I understand some Serbs who cannot imagine atrocities have been done in their name. And yet, a new zeitgeist is emerging and the interest in international law is rising. Times are changing, but where are we going? And, more importantly, what will we be when we get there?
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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Israel is expected to submit a report to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Monday on the measures it has taken to prevent possible genocide in Gaza. This is to assess whether Israel complied with the provisional measures ordered by the ICJ on January 26.
South Africa, which brought the case, says Israel has failed to comply with the measures. “I believe the rulings of the court have been ignored,” said Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor.
Here are the measures the ICJ ordered, as we look at whether Israel followed through in the past month since the ruling.
The six provisional directions the ICJ gave on January 26 are:
Article 2 of the Genocide Convention entails not killing members of a particular group and not causing physical or psychological harm to members of that group, not inflicting living conditions which are calculated to bring about the end of the existence of a people, and not carrying out actions designed to prevent births within that group of people.
The ruling also added that Israel is supposed to ensure its military does not take such action and that Israel should punish direct and public incitement to commit genocide in relation to the Palestinians in Gaza.
Between the January 26 ruling and February 24, Israeli attacks have killed at least 3,523 Palestinians, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. An average of 120 Palestinians were killed every day. At least 5,250 Palestinians were injured in Israeli attacks.
Many of these attacks were air raids on central and southern Gaza throughout the month, targeting residential areas, schools, hospitals and even refugee camps. Palestinians left in the northern region, now totally devastated, have been starving as Israel has placed heavy restrictions on aid delivery.
Israel laid siege on al-Amal Hospital and Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis – a tactic repeated from the earlier phase of the war when Gaza’s largest medical facility, al-Shifa Hospital, was crippled by siege and shelling. Israel has said hospitals were being used as command centres by Hamas but it has yet to provide concrete proof for its claims.
Israel has since partially withdrawn from the Nasser Hospital but it deployed snipers, who fired on people approaching the largest hospital in the south.
Numerous cases of torture, killings and torching of civilian homes have been reported in clear disregard to the ICJ order last month.
Israeli far-right politicians and ministers have continued to use anti-Palestine rhetoric that campaigners say is genocidal, particularly open calls for the forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza.
Israel also targeted Rafah, the southernmost part of Gaza which now shelters about 1.5 million Palestinians most of whom fled earlier phase of the war. Escalating air raids and shelling have increased the death toll as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made his intentions clear to invade the southern region bordering Egypt.
Human Rights Watch on Monday said Israel had failed to comply with at least one measure in ICJ’s order by obstructing basic aid to Gaza and using starvation as a weapon of war.
“The Israeli government is starving Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians, putting them in even more peril than before the World Court’s binding order,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. “The Israeli government has simply ignored the court’s ruling, and in some ways even intensified its repression, including further blocking lifesaving aid.”
The flow of humanitarian aid has been badly affected after several Western donors led by the United States suspended funding to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, in the wake of Israeli accusation that UNRWA staff were involved in the October 7 Hamas attacks that triggered the latest conflict. According to the UNRWA chief, Israel has yet to provide evidence in support of its allegations.
UNRWA warned that this could lead to the agency being unable to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza, which would plunge the enclave into starvation. On Sunday, a two-month baby died due to starvation in Gaza City, as famine grips the besieged enclave.
On Monday, UNRWA said an average of less than 100 aid trucks have reached Gaza per day in February, far below its target of 500. These deliveries brought in just 50 percent of the amount of aid that was delivered in January, UNRWA said in its latest situation update.
On some days in February, less than 10 trucks entered Gaza. Only seven trucks entered on February 9, nine entered on February 12, four on February 17, and nine again on February 19.
Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right finance minister, said on February 13 that he had blocked a US-funded flour shipment to Gaza because it was going to UNRWA.
Footage from February 19, verified by Al Jazeera, showed Palestinians in northern Gaza scattering after hearing gunshots while they were lining up for food aid. Israeli forces shot at least one Palestinian man dead and injured several others when they opened fire on a crowd awaiting food.
UNRWA made an announcement on February 7 saying some of its aid trucks carrying food into Gaza were bombed, purportedly by Israeli forces on February 5.
If it is found not to have complied with the ICJ’s legally binding orders, any UN Security Council member state may refer the matter to the UNSC, which would then vote on whether to require Israel to abide by the provisional measures.
If it still refuses to do so, Israel could face UN sanctions, which could include economic or trade sanctions, arms embargoes and travel bans. The UN Charter also allows the UNSC to go a step further and intervene with force.
An adverse verdict from the court might prevent Israel’s allies from sending weapons as happened in the Netherlands, where a court blocked the supply of equipment for the F35 fighter jets used to bomb Gaza. The Dutch government has challenged the order.
However, any sanctions may be vetoed by the US, Israel’s closest ally. It has vetoed three ceasefire resolutions on Israel since October 7.
In the statement, HRW said other countries should press Israel’s government to comply with the orders through sanctions and embargoes.
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‘Israel operates under a climate of absolute impunity,’ says Craig Mokhiber, former top UN official.
Since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza the United Nations has been under pressure. More than 85 percent of the Gazan population is currently homeless and living in dire conditions, while the UN remains in political gridlock.
Three weeks after the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza, the former director of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Craig Mokibher, resigned from his post, protesting that the UN was “failing” in its duty to prevent what he called a “textbook case of genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza. He also accused the US and most of Europe of being complicit.
So, is the UN failing in its duty to prevent the massacre in Gaza? And what is at stake for the future of Palestine?
On UpFront this week, Marc Lamont Hill discusses the role of the UN in Israel’s war on Gaza with Craig Mokhiber, the former director of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
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EXPLAINER
As civilian casualties continue to mount in Gaza, global calls for countries to halt arms sales to Israel grow.
The United States Senate has approved a bill committing $14bn to support Israel’s war on Gaza this week.
Even before the start of the war last October, the US firmly supported Israel with the supply of military equipment, contributing $3bn annually in military aid. Many other countries provide military support to Israel via arms sales.
Civilian casualties continue to mount in Gaza – currently standing at more than 28,000 dead with thousands more trapped under rubble and presumed dead in just four months of bombardment and ground invasions. The rising death toll is prompting international condemnation from humanitarian and civil society groups in the form of statements, protests and lawsuits filed against countries alleged to be providing military support to Israel. Some countries are responding to this pressure.
On Monday, the European Union foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, commented on US President Joe Biden’s description of Israel’s response to the October 7 Hamas attacks as “over the top”. “Well, if you believe that too many people are being killed, maybe you should provide less arms in order to prevent so many people being killed,” Borrell told reporters.
So which countries continue to send weapons to Israel and which are taking steps to suspend supply?
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s arms transfers database, 68 percent of Israel’s weapons imports between 2013 and 2022 came from the US.
The US military also stockpiles weapons on the ground in Israel, presumably for use by the US army itself. However, the US has allowed Israel to make use of some of these supplies during the Gaza war.
Besides the US, Israel also receives military imports from other nations.
In its interim ruling on South Africa’s genocide case against Israel on January 26, the ICJ stated that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide in Gaza and ordered it to take “all measures within its power” to prevent acts that could amount to genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. This has spurred humanitarian organisations around the world to pressure their governments to halt sales of arms and military aid.
The ruling “goes beyond Israel” alone, said Raed Jarrar, advocacy director at Washington, DC-based think tank Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). The interim ruling highlights the legal and political obligations of countries to prevent genocide. Advocates say weapons sales and military aid could be deemed to amount to complicity in genocide and be in violation of international law.
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A Jewish activist group in the US staged a protest inside Pennsylvania’s state capitol building calling for an end to genocide in Gaza and for the state to stop investing in Israeli companies. More than 100 people were reportedly arrested.
Published On 6 Feb 2024
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