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west bank
Benjamin Netanyahu vs. International Law and the World
The Israeli government's enterprise in Gaza and the occupied West Bank is criminal and yet it continues.
Jun 09, 2025
The Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu is setting the stage for the upcoming United Nations’ International Conference for the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution. The three-day session, to be held in New York on June 17-20, 2025, will be chaired by the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, and the Crown Prince of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Muhammad bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz. It is believed that at this confab France and a number of other countries will formally recognize the State of Palestine. In an angry response, Netanyahu announced that should France and others make this announcement Israel will retaliate with the formal annexation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
In a sense, the threats are meaningless, not because Israel couldn’t take measures to sabotage a Palestinian state, but because this is precisely what it has been doing for several decades—and it’s accelerated its efforts in the past few years.
The daily news from Gaza is numbing. After 18 months of an immense toll in lives and property, Israel agreed to a ceasefire in March, only to break it and intensify their plans to ethnically cleanse and annex large swathes of this territory. Daily, there are reports of Israeli bombings, shelling, or shootings that kill scores of Palestinians at shelters or food distribution sites. In each instance, the Israelis, true to form, at first deny that it happened, then deny that they had anything to do with the killings—“it might have been Hamas” or, “if we did, it was because our soldiers were forced to shoot in the air” to control unruly crowds. When all else fails, they obfuscate by announcing that a military review panel is looking into the matter (coupled with the charge that anyone prejudging the matter before the Israeli military publicly issues its findings—which they never do—must be guilty of harboring an anti-Israel bias). The result is that there is no accountability and the killings continue.
The Netanyahu government’s plan for Gaza is taking shape. The logic behind the Israeli-US “humanitarian mission” in Gaza is now established and that is to facilitate their “ethnic cleansing” masterplan for the area. First, the Israelis are conducting “mopping up” operations in the north, evicting as many Palestinians as possible from 80% of Gaza and forcing them to congregate in congested areas along the southern border. Then, after denying Palestinians food aid for three months, they have set up these Israeli-run food distribution sites in the south with the clear message that “if you’re hungry and want food, this is the only place you’ll get it.” As throngs of desperate Palestinians mass at the sites, the Israelis use live ammunition as crowd control, killing dozens at each location. The entire enterprise is criminal and yet it continues.
The situation in the West Bank has gone from bad to worse. After months of raids that have taken the lives of 1,000 Palestinians and destroyed the homes of 40,000, the Israeli government has authorized the establishment of 22 new settlements, the confiscation of more Palestinian lands, and the construction of more Jewish-only roads. All of this will serve to further the cantonization of the West Bank, isolating Palestinian population centers from one another.
The design Israel is following was laid out in 1978 by Mattityahu Drobles of the World Zionist Organization. The Drobles Plan envisioned total conquest of the West Bank through the establishment of Israeli settlement blocs connected by highways and secured infrastructure that would divide the area making the establishment of a contiguous Palestinian state impossible. This was Drobles’ declared intent. Back in the 1970s, Israel’s Labor governments rejected this idea, preferring to build settlements along the 1967 lines. When Likud came to power, they embraced Drobles in 1979 and began to implement it, but without ever formally acknowledging it. Now they have.
Palestinians in East Jerusalem fare no better. They still face threats of confiscation of homes and properties, the weaponization of archaeology through which Israel has seized sites they believe hold special importance to their history, while ignoring that same site’s pre-history or current importance to Palestinian Muslims or Christians. And while Christians and Muslims are violently assaulted or harassed as they seek to pray on their faiths’ holy days, Jewish worshippers are protected by the Israeli military as they violate what had been the previously accepted “status quo” at the Haram al Sharif. While in the past, these violations were carried out by a handful of Jewish religious extremists, now there are thousands, including government officials, who annually invade the Haram. And as if to signal their clear intentions, the Israelis have changed street signs which once pointed the way to the “Haram” to now read the “Temple.”
And so, the upcoming UN sessions have the makings of a supreme test of wills. It pits the Israeli government, backed by the United States, against the rest of the world. We know what Israel is doing and what they still can do. The question is whether other nations will find the resolve to directly confront Israel’s plans and take direct action to isolate and punish them for their actions. It will require more than recognition of Palestinian rights, verbal protests, or resolutions of disapproval of Israeli policies. Europe can’t just protest settlements and genocide in Gaza, while continuing to be the largest buyers of Israeli-made weapons. If they don’t apply sanctions (like Spain) or boycott settlement products (like Ireland), nothing will change.
In a real sense, what is at stake in next week’s UN sessions is even more than just recognition of a Palestinian state, it is the survival of the rule of law and human rights covenants and the integrity of the United Nations.
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Devastating Report Details an Occupied Palestine on 'Edge of Erasure'
"The world is witnessing Israel relentlessly starve and bomb Palestinians with total impunity," said one humanitarian worker in the region.
Jun 05, 2025
A new report by a leading Quaker social justice organization urges observers of Israel's bombardment and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza and its accelerated annexation of the West Bank to see the "escalating violations" not as isolated pushes for control of the occupied territories but something much more sinister and profound.
According to the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), SC), the policies and violence Israel is perpetrating on people across the territories are "systematic and risk the erasure of Palestinians."
The group joined leading humanitarian organizations that have spent years providing aid and services to Palestinians in Gaza—only to have their work impeded and made deadly by the Israel Defense Forces' (IDF) attacks—in releasing The Edge of Erasure, a comprehensive look at the humanitarian situation in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The AFSC surveyed 46 international and Palestinian organizations on their experiences trying to deliver aid and services across Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, from March 26-May 28.
The groups were up against Israel's total blockade on humanitarian aid in Gaza, which was imposed starting March 2, two weeks before the IDF broke a temporary ceasefire and began intensifying attacks in the enclave.
In late May Israel began allowing in a tiny fraction of the amount of 500 aid trucks that entered Gaza on a daily basis before the war; advocates have said the trickle of relief is far from enough.
During the AFSC's survey, 93% of the groups said they had exhausted or were close to exhausting their aid supply in Gaza, including food, flour, fuel, hygiene kits, medications, and other essentials.
"In the face of such systematic devastation, only a comprehensive, multi-sectoral response at scale can even start to address the overwhelming, man-made humanitarian crisis."
Seven of the groups said their dwindling supplies were partially the result of Israeli attacks, with groups forced to leave materials behind due to forced displacement orders. Others said their supplies are in trucks stuck in Jordan or Egypt without the ability to enter Gaza, and some said that once they've gotten aid deliveries to distribute, they've been unable to hand out medicines because they're already expired.
More than a third of the organizations said their facilities had been directly or indirectly struck by IDF attacks, despite acknowledgement from the Israeli military that humanitarian groups must be "deconflicted."
"In several instances, no prior notification was given before the strikes," the AFSC said.
At least 452 humanitarian workers are among the more than 54,000 people who have been killed in Gaza since October 2023, and eight of the groups reported staff being injured, while five reported workers being killed in Israeli attacks during the reporting period.
While intensifying its bombing campaign and imposing a blockade that international experts said in May had pushed the entire population into a food insecurity emergency, with half a million people facing starvation, Israel has also turned at least 81% of Gaza into "no-go" militarized zones in recent months.
More than two-thirds of the groups said during the survey period that they were no longer able to access certain areas, particularly in northern Gaza as well as the southern cities of Khan Younis and Rafah.
"Recent Israeli forces' attacks have continued to dissect Gaza into increasingly isolated zones, cutting communities off from basic needs necessary for survival," reads the report. "In many cases, remaining residents have been literally unable to move, due to exhaustion, injury, illness, infirmity, disability, contamination with unexploded ordnance, or lack of alternatives. Some areas are formally cut off or declared inaccessible, while others have been subject to such intensive shelling and forces' attacks that they have been practically unreachable for aid delivery. These conditions effectively impose sieges within the siege, with parts of Gaza inaccessible for humanitarian operations."
Gaza's population is now confined to just 19% of the enclave due to "increasingly expansive forced displacement orders," and people are facing "simultaneous and intersecting crises" including displacement, destruction of housing, destruction of water and sanitation networks, starvation, the loss of 95% of school buildings which had been used as shelters after the war began, and a decimated healthcare system.
Palestinians have also been left without ways to maintain self-sufficiency, with less than 5% of Gaza's cropland now available for cultivation due to the Israeli military's access restrictions and damage.
"The world is witnessing Israel relentlessly starve and bomb Palestinians with total impunity," said Hanady Muhiar, Palestine/Israel country representative for the AFSC. "Israel is weaponizing hunger and destroying a principled humanitarian aid system that could be providing lifesaving goods at scale to the Palestinian people in Gaza. We all have an obligation to prevent genocidal crimes. It is urgent that states, organizations, and individuals take immediate action to stop it."
Meanwhile, the IDF has intensified attacks and demolitions of buildings in the West Bank, with 85% of structures in Masafer Yatta destroyed and over 100 homes in Nour Shams and Tulkarm refugee camps recently ordered demolished. Israeli settlers have also escalated attacks in the territory.
"The deliberate and excessive use of violence, demolitions, and displacement is not merely hindering aid delivery," reads the report, "it risks forcible transfer and entrenching annexation, and the erasure of Palestinians from their land."
Ninety-three percent of organizations in the West Bank reported "a sharp increase in movement restrictions throughout the reporting period."
The Israeli military has rejected the groups' attempts to coordinate humanitarian work, denying nearly 70% of aid movement requests between April 30-May 6.
A 51-year-old woman who spent three decades running a program for children with disabilities at Nour Shams refugee camp described being forced by Israeli soldiers to leave her home.
"The Israeli forces gave me only two hours to collect my things," said the woman. "I was afraid to find someone hiding there. They cut the electricity, so it was dark. Everything is lost. There was a picture of me, a painting made by some artist. They stomped on it and ruined it... Everything is lost now. The parents are desperate. They don't know what to do. I try to give them advice, but it’s not
the same."
The AFSC demanded a permanent cease-fire; an end to the humanitarian aid blockade—which "states with influence" must "use all possible measures" to achieve; an end to Israel's "unlawful presence" in the occupied territories; and boosted funding for the relief response.
"In the face of such systematic devastation," reads the report, "only a comprehensive, multi-sectoral response at scale can even start to address the overwhelming, man-made humanitarian crisis."
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'I Call it Genocide Because IT IS Genocide' Says UN Palestine Expert Francesca Albanese
"To end it, we must first be willing to see it."
Jun 03, 2025
United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese pushed back Tuesday against Israel and its defenders, who for years have attempted to gaslight and malign the Italian legal scholar for tirelessly condemning what an increasing number of international experts—including many Israelis and diaspora Jews—agree is a genocide in Gaza.
"I call it genocide because IT IS a genocide," Albanese wrote on the social media site X on Tuesday, amplifying a video she recorded last week in which she said that "Israel is committing genocide in Gaza."
"It's not an opinion, it's a fact," the 48-year-old Georgetown University scholar asserted. "Top international experts, including Israelis, agree upon that."
Under Article II of the Genocide Convention, the crime of genocide is defined as killing, "causing serious bodily or mental harm" to a group of people, "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part," "imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group," or "forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
Israel is currently facing a genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) brought by South Africa and supported by dozens of nations, either individually or via regional blocs. The ICJ has issued three provisional orders for Israel to take steps including avoiding genocidal acts and ending weaponized starvation in Gaza. Critics say Israel has violated all three orders.
The International Criminal Court has also issued warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defense minister, for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza including extermination and forced starvation.
"In Gaza, Israel has killed nearly 60,000 people with bombs bullets, and drones, including 16,000 children," Albanese said in the video. "It has flattened homes, schools, churches, hospitals, water networks, farms, even cemeteries. The death toll from hunger, disease, untreated wounds, an deprivation could reach 300,000."
"Prisoners, including medics and journalists, have been tortured. Many have been raped, using dogs and sticks; some have died in Israeli prisons," she continued. "Forced displacement continues in the West Bank, and over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in 20 months, and 1 in 5 is a child."
"Beware of those who use Hamas' crimes or the fate of the hostages to justify this massacre," she said. "Civilians are never legitimate targets. Israel has masked everything with legal words: 'evacuations,' 'safe zones,' 'human shields'—it's fiction."
Israel and its leaders deny they are committing genocide and say those who make such allegations—including Jews—are antisemitic. Albanese has been a prominent target of such smears, in which the Biden and Trump administrations as well as members of U.S. Congress, both Democratic and Republican, have taken part while supporting tens of billions of dollars in U.S. armed aid for Israel.
Albanese has called the U.S. and other Western nations that support Israel an "axis of genocide."
"And what about us? We are failing the test of our humanity."
Gaza officials say Israeli bombs, bullets, and blockades have left at least 193,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing and millions more forcibly displaced, sickened, or starved— sometimes to death. Israeli forces are currently carrying out a plan by Netanyahu's far-right government to conquer, indefinitely occupy, ethnically cleanse, and possibly recolonize Gaza, which U.S. President Donald Trump said he wants to make into the "Riviera of the Middle East"—presumably devoid of Palestinians.
"And what about us?" asked Albanese in the video. "We are failing the test of our humanity. Too many media, governments, companies, universities, too many guilty consciences and dirty hands. This genocide bears our fingerprints. It's under our eyes. Denying it today means being ignorant, or complicit. Stopping it is the only way to remain human."
"Genocide is a process, not a single act," Albanese added. "A collective act. A criminal venture. To end it, we must first be willing to see it."
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