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NGOs Urge UK Labour Government to End 'Complicity in Israeli Crimes' in Gaza
"We are asking this government for leadership and to take a just decision, for the sake of Palestinians in Gaza who are living through 'hell on Earth,'" said six rights groups.
Jul 12, 2024
A week after the British Labour Party won control of the United Kingdom's government, six rights organizations called on Prime Minister Keir Starmer to bring the country "back from the brink" and restore its "credibility on the international stage" by ending its military support for Israel.
"The Labour Party now has the chance to start restoring some credibility by ensuring the U.K. abides by international law, thereby extricating the U.K. from the indelible stain of complicity in Israeli crimes that deeply shock the conscience of humanity," wrote the British Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) and Al-Haq, based in Palestine.
The groups wrote the letter with the support of the International Center of Justice for Palestinians, War on Want, the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
Addressing Starmer along with newly appointed Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Secretary of State for Business and Trade Jonathan Reynolds, the groups reminded the prime minister that following his election, he promised Britons that the "sunlight of hope was shining once again" after 14 years of Conservative rule, and called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to say there is a "clear and urgent need for a cease-fire."
"Calls for a cease-fire are evidently not enough, in particular when the U.K. is arming one party to the conflict," wrote the groups, pointing out that earlier this week Palestinians in northern Gaza reported that recent bombing there has "matched October 2023 in its intensity—with levels of destruction not witnessed since World War II, nearly all civilian infrastructure is completely destroyed."
"We are asking this government for leadership and to take a just decision, for the sake of Palestinians in Gaza who are living through 'hell on Earth,'" they wrote. "The world should have put an end to their unimaginable suffering a long time ago. Labour must suspend, revoke, and refuse all arms licenses for Israel now."
The U.K. licensed about £859,381 ($1.09 million) of weapons to Israel in the last three months of 2023, as the Israel Defense Forces relentlessly attacked Gaza and blocked nearly all humanitarian aid, leading to what 10 independent United Nations experts this week said is now famine across the enclave.
"The new Labour government's calls for a cease-fire are meaningless while it continues to arm Israel. British weapons have killed too many Palestinians," said GLAN lawyer Charlotte Andrews-Briscoe. "This government knows that the only lawful and moral decision is to stop arming Israel. Britons have voted for change: This government must deliver that change."
On social media, GLAN amplified a video posted by Starmer on Sunday in which he pledged to "restore politics as a force for good."
"We are calling on Keir Starmer to put these words into action," said the legal group.
When the war on Gaza's population of 2.3 million people ends, said the groups, Starmer's government must expect that there will be "a reckoning in which Israel will be found to have committed mass atrocities."
But the organizations called on Starmer—who, months before he called on Netanyahu to agree to a cease-fire, said Israel had "the right" to withhold power and water from Gaza—to see that ending military support for Israel "is not only the legal obligation of the U.K., it is a moral obligation."
"Schoolchildren will learn about this period for years to come, just as we have all learned about past genocides and wondered how they could be allowed to happen," reads the letter. "Will they read about a new Labour government that acted with respect for the sanctity of all human life?"
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Federal Court Hears Appeal in Case Accusing Biden of Complicity in Gaza Genocide
"Genocide can never be a legitimate foreign policy choice," argued one plaintiffs' attorney.
Jun 10, 2024
Following the dismissal earlier this year of a federal lawsuit accusing senior Biden administration officials of failing to prevent Israel's U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco on Monday began hearing an expedited appeal by Palestinian plaintiffs in the case.
Arguing that U.S. leaders "have a legal duty to prevent, and not further," genocide, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) first filed a lawsuit last November in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in Oakland on behalf of the rights groups Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCI-P) and al-Haq, as well as a group of individual Palestinians in Gaza and the United States.
"Genocide can never be a legitimate foreign policy choice," CCR senior staff attorney Katie Gallagher argued during Monday's proceedings.
The suit—which names President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin as defendants—seeks to force the U.S. administration to stop "providing further arms, money, and diplomatic support to Israel" as it wages a war of annihilation in which more than 132,000 Palestinians have been killed, maimed, or left missing; nearly 90% of Gaza's population has been forcibly displaced; and at least hundreds of thousands of people are starving.
Palestinian American writer Laila al-Haddad, a plaintiff in the case, lost her aunt and three of her cousins to a November Israeli airstrike on a United Nations school in the Jabalia refugee camp that killed more than 30 people.
"I promised my surviving family members in Gaza that I would do everything in my power to advocate on their behalf," al-Haddad wrote in an article published Monday by The Nation.
"Although I knew the case would be an uphill battle, I testified to make a record of Israel's horrific slaughter of my family, the displacement and dispossession and starvation of the surviving members, the deliberate destruction of my hometown and everything that sustains life there, and ethnic cleansing of my people," she continued.
"As a Palestinian, I struggle to balance the disgust and impotence I feel knowing that my tax dollars are being used to kill my family members in Gaza with an urgency to do everything in my power to demand an end to this administration's complicity in genocide," al-Haddad added.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White ruled on January 31 that the case fell "outside the court's limited jurisdiction" and rejected the suit on technical grounds—even as he wrote that "the current treatment of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military may plausibly constitute a genocide in violation of international law."
On February 27, the 9th Circuit Court granted a motion by CCR and co-counsel at Van Der Hout LLP to expedite plaintiffs' appeal amid soaring Palestinian civilian casualties and destruction wrought by Israel's assault on Gaza.
Last week, 9th Circuit Judge Ryan Nelson
recused himself from the new case following pressure from plaintiffs who questioned his impartiality after he visited Israel in March with 13 other federal judges on a trip sponsored by the World Jewish Congress meant to convince U.S. jurists of the legality of Israel's Gaza onslaught.
Genocide is defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention as killing or causing serious physical or psychological harm to members of a group, "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."
At least hundreds of jurists and genocide experts around the world concur that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The International Court of Justice is currently weighing a genocide case against Israel brought by South Africa and backed by more than 30 nations and regional blocs. Last month, International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan said he is seeking to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders for alleged crimes including extermination.
As CCR noted:
Numerous Israeli government leaders have expressed clear genocidal intentions and deployed dehumanizing characterizations of Palestinians, including "human animals." At the same time, the Israeli military has bombed civilian areas and infrastructure, including by using chemical weapons, and deprived Palestinians of everything necessary for human life, including water, food, electricity, fuel, and medicine. Those statements of intent—when combined with mass killing, causing serious bodily and mental harm, and the total siege and closure creating conditions of life to bring about the physical destruction of the group—reveal evidence of an unfolding crime of genocide.
The Biden administration has provided Israel with billions of dollars in military aid and arms and ammunition sales, as well as diplomatic cover in the form of United Nations Security Council vetoes and genocide denial, as its forces continue to obliterate Gaza 248 days after the Hamas-led attacks on October 7 that left more than 1,100 Israelis and foreign nationals dead—at least some of whom were killed by so-called "friendly fire"—and over 240 others taken hostage.
"The U.S. courts have an opportunity in front of them: Judges can choose to take a minimal step towards allowing DCI-P and the other plaintiffs to have a chance at holding the Biden administration accountable for its role in the genocide of Palestinians, or they can sit back and refuse to carry out checks on the executive branch," DCI-P advocacy officer Miranda Cleland wrote in an opinion piece published Friday by Middle East Eye. "It is a choice, quite literally, between life and death."
"Israeli forces, emboldened by the so-called ironclad support of the Biden administration, have killed on average more than 60 Palestinian children every day since October 7," she continued. "That's more than 15,000 children who won't go back to school, or play with their friends, or hug their parents ever again. Those 15,000 children will not grow up and live in a free Palestine."
"If the U.S. courts continue to green-light Biden's impunity, more Palestinian children and their families will pay the price," Cleland added. "It is a price that I, alongside many other voters in the U.S., are not willing to accept."
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Palestinian Groups Condemn Silence of UN's Top Official on Genocide
"The glaring absence of any action in response to the sustained mass atrocities endured by Palestinians in Gaza raises significant concerns about the special adviser's capability to execute her mandate."
Feb 07, 2024
More than a dozen Palestinian human rights groups on Wednesday demanded an investigation into the United Nations Office of Genocide Prevention and its special adviser, Alice Wairimu Nderitu, over their near-total silence as the Israeli military continues its large-scale assault on Gaza's starving population.
In a letter to U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, Al-Haq, and other organizations wrote that the "absence of any action in response to the sustained mass atrocities endured by Palestinians in Gaza raises significant concerns about the special adviser's capability to execute her mandate with due effectiveness and impartiality."
The groups argued that the silence from Nderitu is "particularly glaring" now that the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the U.N.'s highest legal body, has ruled that South Africa's genocide case against Israel is plausible and ordered the Israeli military to do everything in its power to prevent genocide.
Other U.N. experts have vocally warned that Palestinians in Gaza are facing a possible genocide at the hands of the Israeli military. In November, eight U.N. special rapporteurs issued a joint statement declaring that "time is running out to prevent genocide and humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza."
"The U.N. cannot afford to stay silent in the face of the genocide currently taking place in Gaza and must avoid repeating the mistakes of the past."
Nderitu, a Kenyan diplomat, expressed alarm on October 15 over "the loss of civilian lives resulting from Israeli bombardments" in Gaza but has not described Israel's actions as possibly genocidal. A review of the U.N. Office on Genocide Prevention's website shows that Nderitu has not issued a public statement on Gaza in nearly four months, even as she has condemned the intensification of violence in Sudan and other countries.
Israeli forces have killed tens of thousands of Gazans since Nderitu's October 15 statement, and nearly the entire population of the enclave has been displaced in those intervening months.
"The gravity of the situation on the ground in Gaza and the urgency it commands intensify our concerns that the special adviser is in dereliction of her duties and responsibilities demanded by her mandate," the Palestinian groups wrote Wednesday. "This failure includes neglecting to raise awareness about Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza or, at the very least, to the alarming risk of genocide; failing to acknowledge the ICJ ruling that Israel is plausibly committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza along with the provisional measures ordered for Israel; and refusing to engage meaningfully, meet, or respond to requests from Palestinian human rights organizations."
The groups urged Guterres to launch an investigation into "the reasons behind the failure of both the special adviser and the Office on Genocide Prevention to fulfill their mandates" and to publicly disclose the findings.
"The failure of the international community, including Ms. Alice Wairimu Nderitu, to prevent Israel's genocide in Gaza has tangible consequences on the ground," the new letter reads. "This is evident in the tragic toll of 100,000 Palestinians who have been killed, injured, or are missing, constituting 4% of the total Gaza population. The ongoing mass atrocities in Gaza require an unequivocal response. The U.N. cannot afford to stay silent in the face of the genocide currently taking place in Gaza and must avoid repeating the mistakes of the past."
Nderitu has faced internal criticism at the U.N. over her lack of response to Israel's war on the Gaza Strip.
In late October, dozens of unnamed U.N. staffers signed an internal memo rebuking Nderitu for failing to sufficiently condemn Israel's indiscriminate bombing of Gaza and its yearslong blockade, which has denied food, water, and medicine to increasingly desperate Palestinians.
A petition calling for Nderitu's resignation, meanwhile, has garnered more than 21,000 signatures.
"With the official in charge of genocide prevention taking no action despite public pressure, statements by U.N. special rapporteurs, and thousands of civilians killed, including U.N. staff and their families, we demand Nderitu's immediate resignation and for her to be held accountable for her failure to act in response to mass atrocities in Gaza," states the petition, which was launched in December. "The world is watching, and history will remember the actions taken, or not taken, by the United Nations in response to a genocide unfolding in Gaza."
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