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For Immediate Release
January, 10 2024, 03:27pm EDT
Contact:
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7413 5566,After hours: +44 7778 472 126,Email:,press@amnesty.org
ICJ hearings over Israel’s alleged breaches of the Genocide Convention a vital step to help protect Palestinian civilians
THE HAGUE
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) proceedings on a South Africa legal case alleging that the state of Israel is breaching its obligations under the UN Genocide Convention could help protect Palestinian civilians, end the man-made humanitarian catastrophe in the occupied Gaza Strip and offer a glimmer of hope for international justice, said Amnesty International today.
South Africa filed an application alleging that Israel’s acts and failure to act in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, in the wake of the attacks on 7 October 2023 by Hamas and other armed groups, are genocidal in character. South Africa’s application urges the court to order “provisional measures” to protect the Palestinian people in Gaza, including by calling upon Israel to immediately halt military attacks that “constitute or give rise to violations of the Genocide Convention” and to rescind related measures amounting to collective punishment and forced displacement. Initial hearings will take place at the ICJ in The Hague on 11 and 12 January.
As the United States continues to use its veto power to block the UN Security Council from calling for a ceasefire, war crimes and crimes against humanity are rife, and the risk of genocide is real.
Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International
Amnesty International has not made a determination that the situation in Gaza amounts to genocide. However, there are alarming warning signs given the staggering scale of death and destruction with more than 23,000 Palestinians killed in just over three months and a further 10,000 missing under the rubble, presumed dead, as well as an appalling spike in dehumanizing and racist rhetoric against Palestinians by certain Israeli government and military officials. This, coupled with Israel’s imposition of an illegal siege in Gaza, which has cut off or severely restricted the civilian population’s access to water, food, medical assistance and fuel, is inflicting unfathomable levels of suffering and puts the survival of those within Gaza at risk.
“There is no end in sight to the mass human suffering, devastation and destruction we are witnessing on an hourly basis in Gaza. The risk that Gaza would be transformed from the world’s biggest open-air prison to a giant graveyard has, crushingly, materialized right before our eyes,” said Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International.
“As the United States continues to use its veto power to block the UN Security Council from calling for a ceasefire, war crimes and crimes against humanity are rife, and the risk of genocide is real. States have a positive obligation to prevent and punish genocide and other atrocity crimes. The ICJ’s examination of Israel’s conduct is a vital step for the protection of Palestinian lives, to restore trust and credibility in the universal application of international law, and to pave the way for justice and reparation for victims.”
All states have an international legal obligation to act to prevent genocide under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948 and, as determined by the ICJ previously, under customary law. This means that the obligation to prevent is binding on all states, including states that are not party to the Convention. On 16 November 2023 a group of UN experts warned of a “genocide in the making” in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and particularly in Gaza.
“It is difficult to overstate the scale of the devastation and destruction that has been wrought in Gaza over the past three months. Much of northern Gaza has been destroyed and at least 85% of Gaza’s population is now internally displaced. Many Palestinians and human rights experts see this as part of an Israeli strategy to render Gaza “unlivable”. This has been coupled with disturbing statements from certain Israeli officials advocating for the unlawful deportation or forcible transfer of Palestinians outside Gaza and abhorrent use of dehumanizing rhetoric,” said Agnès Callamard.
“Pending a final ruling of the International Court of Justice on whether the crimes of genocide and other crimes under international law have been committed, an urgent order to implement provisional measures would be an important means to help prevent further death, destruction and civilian suffering and provide a warning to other states that they must not contribute to grave violations and crimes against Palestinians.”
Background
Genocide is defined as certain acts committed with “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group” such as a national, ethnical, religious and racial group.
The provisional measures requested by South Africa include calls on Israel to desist from acts within Article II of the Genocide Convention including “killing members of a protected group” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. As such, it calls on Israel to prevent forced displacement and deprivation of access to adequate food, water, humanitarian assistance, and medical supplies to Palestinians. Under the Convention, nobody, including the highest government officials, can claim personal immunity for any alleged acts.
South Africa’s ICJ application cites evidence gathered by Amnesty International documenting damning evidence of war crimes and other violations of international law by Israeli forces in their intense bombardment of Gaza, including direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects, indiscriminate and other unlawful attacks, forced displacement of civilians and collective punishment of the civilian population. It also cites research by Amnesty International highlighting that Israel’s system of domination and oppression of Palestinians amounts to apartheid.
Amnesty International also condemns the war crimes committed by Hamas and other armed groups on 7 October, including hostage-taking and deliberate killing of civilians, and their continued indiscriminate rocket attacks.
The organization has repeatedly called for the investigation of violations of international law by all parties and for an immediate sustained ceasefire, the release of all remaining civilian hostages held by armed groups in Gaza, the release of Palestinians arbitrarily detained by Israel and for Israel to end its illegal and inhumane siege of Gaza.
Amnesty International is a worldwide movement of people who campaign for internationally recognized human rights for all. Our supporters are outraged by human rights abuses but inspired by hope for a better world - so we work to improve human rights through campaigning and international solidarity. We have more than 2.2 million members and subscribers in more than 150 countries and regions and we coordinate this support to act for justice on a wide range of issues.
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Leaked CIA Analysis Shows Trump and Hegseth 'Lied Through Their Teeth' About Iran War, Says Murphy
White House officials "just straight up fabricated shit," said the Democratic senator from Connecticut.
May 07, 2026
Just hours before the Trump administration conducted what it claimed were "self-defense strikes" against "Iranian military facilities," The Washington Post reported Thursday that the Central Intelligence Agency concluded that "Iran can survive the US naval blockade for at least three to four months before facing more severe economic hardship."
Citing four unnamed officials familiar with the analysis, the newspaper highlighted that "the CIA analysis might even be underestimating Iran's economic resilience if Tehran is able to smuggle oil via overland routes."
Militarily, "Iran retains about 75% of its prewar inventories of mobile launchers and about 70% of its prewar stockpiles of missiles," the Post added. "There is evidence that the regime has been able to recover and reopen almost all of its underground storage facilities, repair some damaged missiles, and even assemble some new missiles that were nearly complete when the war began."
Drop Site News' Murtaza Hussain responded that if this assessment along with a previous one from the Center for Strategic and International Studies about "remaining US munitions and interceptor capacity are even approximately correct, it goes a long way to explaining why Trump seems so eager to end the war whereas the Iranians have either dug in or escalated their negotiating positions. The missile math of continuing the conflict would be much more favorable to the Iranians, especially if the war continued for a significant time."
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The Post's reporting came one month into a fragile ceasefire and starkly contrasts the recent framing of conditions in Iran from President Donald Trump and others in his administration, including Defense Secretary Pete Hesgeth.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) responded to the Post's reporting by quoting Hegseth, who said in March that "never before has a modern, capable military, which Iran used to have, been so quickly destroyed and made combat ineffective."
Murphy declared: "They lied through their teeth. Just straight up fabricated shit."
Still, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly stuck to the administration's framing in a Thursday statement to the Post.
"During Operation Epic Fury, Iran was crushed militarily," Kelly said. "Now, they are being strangled economically by Operation Economic Fury and losing $500 million per day thanks to the United States military's successful blockade of Iranian ports. The Iranian regime knows full well their current reality is not sustainable, and President Trump holds all the cards as negotiators work to make a deal."
Meanwhile, some experts were unsurprised that the CIA privately delivered a "sober" assessment contradicting the administration's public commentary on the conflict—which it now claims is no longer an active "war," seemingly to dodge a key congressional deadline.
"Nice to know that a confidential CIA analysis is confirming what close observers of the Iranian economy have been saying publicly for weeks! Intelligent policymakers rely on intelligence. But Trump jeopardized diplomacy by instigating a blockade that was never going to work," said Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Europe and founder of the think tank Bourse & Bazaar Foundation.
Sharing the reporting on social media, Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior fellow and director of military analysis at the think tank Defense Priorities, wrote: "As I argued a week into the U.S. blockade, Iran can hold out for months without economic collapse. The costs for the US and the world are increasingly unsustainable, however."
Earlier this week, Stephen Semler, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, estimated that the US government spent $71.8 billion on the Iran War during its first 60 days, an average of $1.2 billion daily. The International Monetary Fund warned last month that the conflict could cause a global recession.
Last Friday, Trump responded to the War Powers Act's 60-day deadline by claiming to Congress that his war—which already violated US and international law—had been "terminated." The White House said at the time that no fire had been exchanged since April 7, when a ceasefire deal was reached just hours after the president issued a genocidal threat against the Iranian people.
However, on Thursday evening, United States Central Command announced that Iran "launched multiple missiles, drones, and small boats" at American warships. CENTCOM added that it "eliminated inbound threats and targeted Iranian military facilities responsible for attacking US forces, including missile and drone launch sites; command and control locations; and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance nodes."
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"Local hospitals and emergency rooms could shut their doors forever because billionaires insist on paying less than the rest of us," said Emmanuel Saez, the French economist who designed California's wealth tax proposal.
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The architect of California's wealth tax proposal called out The Washington Post and its multibillionaire owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, on Thursday for peddling what he said is "misinformation" to readers.
Emmanuel Saez, a French economist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was tapped by California's largest union to design the tax proposal, singled out an opinion piece by the Washington Post editorial board from earlier this week that argues the proposal would backfire and cost California billions of dollars in tax revenue each year.
Saez said the article contains glaring falsehoods and omits key information about the proposal, which aims to create a one-time tax of 5% on the total assets of California's roughly 200 billionaire residents in order to recoup about $100 billion in revenue for healthcare, food assistance, and education stripped from the state by last year's Republican federal budget legislation, which will hand $1 trillion in tax breaks to the wealthiest 1% of Americans over the next 10 years.
The piece, published on Monday with the headline "California already losing with billionaire tax referendum," argues that even if California voters don't ultimately approve the measure, "the specter of such a wealth tax has already cost the state more in lost future revenue from income taxes than it would raise" due to an exodus of wealthy people from the state—an oft-used but weakly substantiated talking point by opponents of the measure.
The Post cited a paper by Jared Walczak, a visiting fellow at the California Tax Foundation, which it said demonstrates that billionaire flight "will cost California’s state government somewhere between $3.5 billion and $4.5 billion every year in other tax collections, and up to $19 billion in lost [gross domestic product]."
But Saez argued that his study makes a "basic mistake" by "modeling a mobility response of billionaires to a permanent annual and recurrent 5% wealth tax." In reality, though, the tax would be imposed only once and would apply to any billionaires who resided in the state after January 1, 2026, which has already passed, so it no longer creates an incentive to move.
Saez argued that in any case, "Walczak’s estimation of the California income tax paid by billionaires who have threatened to leave is also wildly exaggerated."
Walczak's figure for lost tax revenue, he said, hinges on the idea that the three richest men who've threatened to leave the state, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, pay $1.7 billion in California income taxes each year.
"If only they paid so much!" Saez quipped.
"In reality, using Securities and Exchange Commission data on stock sales, stock donations, dividends, and executive compensation, we can directly estimate that they paid only [$269 million] in California income tax in 2025, 6.3 times less than Walczak’s assumption," he said, citing a paper he co-wrote in March responding to a similar argument by a conservative think tank.
He cited tax data showing that the tech tycoons—who own a combined $810 billion according to Forbes—only collectively paid about [$22 million] per year on average between 2019-25, with Brin and Page paying no taxes on their wealth from stock in Google's parent company Alphabet during three of those years because they didn't sell stock, get dividends, or receive executive compensation. This is despite 90% of their wealth coming from those holdings.
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The Post also claimed that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) United Healthcare Workers West, the union leading the charge in support of the referendum, is "pretend[ing] that the tax is needed to save California’s health system from 'collapse'" and is instead dishonestly using that framing to covertly pursue the "redistribution of wealth."
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Eighty-three more hospitals in California may be at risk of closing due to the federal funding cuts, according to a recent nationwide analysis by Public Citizen. But Saez said the billionaire's tax would go a long way toward closing the gap.
"Right now, California’s billionaires pay much lower tax rates than what working families pay out of every paycheck," Saez said.
Despite claims otherwise by the Post editorial board—which last month ran another piece arguing that due to progressive taxation, "the rich already pay more than their fair share"—according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, at all levels of government from 2018-20, billionaires paid just 24% of their total income in taxes, while the US-wide average was 30%. This disparity arises largely due to loopholes that allow the rich to avoid taxes on business and investment gains that are not sold.
"Local hospitals and emergency rooms could shut their doors forever because billionaires insist on paying less than the rest of us," Saez said.
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Even former Vice President Kamala Harris reportedly "has no problem with a public airing" of the Democratic National Committee's internal "autopsy" report on her 2024 loss to Republican President Donald Trump—which the DNC has continued to conceal, despite mounting demands for transparency.
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NBC cited "a person who has heard the conversations," one of multiple sources journalists Jonathan Allen and Natasha Korecki spoke with for their broader report exploring "turmoil over the Democratic Party’s future" and Harris' consideration of a 2028 run.
For months, Martin has resisted pressure to release the autopsy—which, as Axios revealed in February, found that the Biden administration's support for Israel's genocidal assault on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip contributed to Harris' defeat.
Citing a "person close to Harris," NBC also reported Thursday that the former VP "is signaling privately that she has more to say about the Middle East now that she is freed from the Biden White House policy," and "she is likely to do so after the midterm elections," either "from the perspective of a party elder or from the perspective of a candidate seeking votes."
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Potential contenders include governors from the Trump 2.0 era—such as Gavin Newsom of California, JB Pritzker of Illinois, Andy Beshear of Kentucky, and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan—as well as leading progressive voices in Congress, such as Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
Norman Solomon, national director of RootsAction, which has spearheaded calls for publishing the full postmortem, wrote in a recent opinion piece for Common Dreams that "Martin's concealment of the autopsy report puts a thumb on the scale for one candidate: Kamala Harris."
Solomon highlighted the DNC's reported conclusion about the role of the Gaza genocide in the election result, and suggested that "renewed attention to the Harris 2024 finances would also be unwelcome."
In response to Harris' reported remarks to donors, Solomon said Thursday that "more than four months have passed since Martin announced he was reneging on his promise to release the autopsy.
"But Harris still hasn't made any public statement that she believes it should be released," he added. "Saying so privately to some big donors is very different than publicly calling for transparency from the DNC, which is badly needed."
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