Daily Brief Audio Series
Israel is starving Gaza, and children are paying the price.
It’s doing this in defiance of the World Court, and today, I’m going to go into a bit of detail to explain what’s been happening in The Hague, but please, never forget this fundamental point: the government of Israel is starving Gaza as a weapon of war.
The International Court of Justice has issued legally binding orders requiring Israel to enable the provision of basic services and humanitarian assistance. The Court has done this twice, in fact: first in January and again in March.
Let’s be clear about a couple of things here.
First, the International Court of Justice – the ICJ, also called “the World Court” – is not the same thing as the International Criminal Court, the ICC. They are both based in The Hague, and they are both in the news regarding the Gaza crisis, so I’ve seen some confusion out there, particularly on social media.
The ICC can deal with individual responsibility for atrocity crimes – including war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. It has not issued indictments related to the Gaza crisis yet, but rumors of possible indictments of top Israeli officials, and inappropriate threats of retaliation against ICC officials from US senators and others, have been in the headlines.
The ICJ does not deal with individuals; it deals with states, specifically international legal disputes between states. In the relevant case here, South Africa is alleging that Israel is violating the international Genocide Convention of 1948. The ICJ is being asked to make a legal determination about state responsibility for genocide.
The ICJ has not made that determination one way or the other yet. It may take years before they rule on the question of genocide.
However, the ICJ has issued what are called “provisional measures” to address the immediate situation. Citing “catastrophic conditions” in Gaza in January, the court issued legally binding orders, including an order to enable the provision of basic services and humanitarian assistance. They gave the government of Israel a month to comply, and the government pretty much ignored the Court.
In March, with the “spread of famine and starvation,” the Court imposed additional measures, ordering Israel to ensure the unhindered provision of humanitarian assistance, in full cooperation with the UN, including by opening new land crossing points. Again, Israel contravened the Court and the legally binding order.
Now, it’s true that, in April, Israeli authorities allowed more aid trucks to enter Gaza, and they opened an additional crossing and allowed construction of a port for aid entry. However, the increase in aid was small, nowhere near enough aid to meet the overwhelming need, according to the UN and humanitarian groups, who reported that Israel continued to block critical aid items.
The most recent news from the ground is even more grim. On May 5, Israeli authorities closed the Kerem Shalom crossing after a Hamas rocket attack, and on May 7, they seized the Rafah crossing, thus blocking aid entering from Egypt currently.
There’s a lot of detail here, I know, but the result of all this is straightforward enough. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, about half of them children,
face famine, and many risk dying of starvation following Israel’s continued disregard for the law.
In short, Israel is starving Gaza, and children are paying the price.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is visiting Europe this week, and as is too often the case with these high-level meetings, European leaders are strenuously avoiding the words “human rights” and “crimes against humanity.”
Yesterday, China’s leader held meetings with French President Emmanuel Macron, including a trilateral get-together with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
There was reportedly no mention of human rights anywhere. European leaders’ failure is as shocking as it is unsurprising.
It’s shocking because the human rights situation under Xi Jinping’s rule has been increasingly brutal. His government has committed crimes against humanity – including mass detention, forced labor, and cultural persecution – against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang province. It’s also erased Hong Kong’s freedoms. Thousands of critics across China are behind bars.
European leaders’ failure is also unsurprising because we’ve seen it so many times before. Just a few weeks ago German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was in Beijing, where he, too, neglected to mention China’s serious human rights violations.
As always, trade dominated EU-China discussions yesterday. There were spats over potential EU tariffs targeting China’s subsidies of electric vehicles and a Chinese threat to retaliate on things like French cognac.
Trade is important. No one denies that.
But something seems to happen to top EU leaders when they meet with their Chinese counterpart. It’s not that they’re afraid to bring up difficult issues. The trade matters they talked about yesterday were tense and tricky, as were discussions about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which they also raised.
But when it comes to China’s human rights violations, EU leaders somehow lose their tongues.
It’s as if EU leaders have forgotten their own power: that the EU is about one sixth of the global economy and that the interconnectedness of the Chinese and European economies – two of the three largest in the world – is not something Beijing would want to wreck on a whim.
Once again, EU leaders have behaved as if they are simply too scared to even say the words “human rights” or “crimes against humanity” in Xi’s presence.
Some leadership we’ve got here.
The US Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP) created a mobile application, called “CBP One.” It’s supposed to be, “a single portal to a variety of CBP services.”
One of these “services” is to arrange appointments for those seeking asylum in the US. And it’s doing a terrible job of it.
Let’s remember the basics. Everyone has the right to seek asylum in another country. This does not mean – as the shouty hate-mongers on US TV news channels would have you believe – that anyone can just live wherever they want. No. It means you have the right to ask for asylum, and the authorities should look at your individual case and treat you humanely in the meantime.
US law guarantees this right, and it’s also affirmed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
However, for decades, successive US administrations – both Republicans and Democrats – have narrowed access to asylum. In a sense, the CBP One app, launched under Trump and expanded under Biden, seems no more than a high-tech continuation of a long-standing bipartisan effort.
Using CBP One is pretty much mandatory for people seeking asylum in the US. But it’s clunky to use, and obviously, you need a mobile phone in the first place. This is not something every would-be asylum seeker possesses, either having lost everything in fleeing whatever danger they’re running from – or seeing it stolen by criminals or Mexican officials along the way.
Most importantly, the CBP system does not supply enough appointments through the app to meet demand. A new report goes into extensive detail, and user reviews of the app on hosting sites Google and Apple are an endless list of frustrations with functionality and desperation over delays. Asylum seekers give the app one star out of five, only because zero stars is not an option.
What’s happening here is what’s called “metering,” that is strictly limiting the number of people allowed to seek asylum each day. In a way, again, this is nothing new: the US started doing metering by other means under Obama, and the practice was formalized under Trump. Since 2017, there have been legal challenges to metering as a violation of US and international law.
The problem created by metering – now “digital metering” with the CBP One app – is that tens of thousands of people seeking asylum in the US have been forced to wait in Mexico. Often, they are there for several months, exposed to serious dangers, like rape, kidnapping, torture, and murder.
If I had to review the CBP One app, I’d say: terrible app, zero stars.
“Take no prisoners, shoot everyone,” the voice says in the video over and over.
He’s giving commands to four Russian soldiers in a forested area, seen from a drone above. One of the Russian soldiers nears the entrance of a dugout where two Ukrainian soldiers are positioned. The first Ukrainian soldier begins to emerge cautiously with a second Ukrainian soldier close behind, while the Russian soldier observes.
About seven seconds later, the Russian soldier starts shooting, causing both Ukrainian soldiers to collapse. The first Ukrainian soldier lies motionless on the ground. The second crawls back into the dugout.
The voice commands: “Guys, kill everyone, the second [Ukrainian soldier] is wounded, shoot him from atop, shoot him, take no prisoners.”
A Russian soldier throws a grenade into the dugout the Ukrainian had crawled into.
The voice then says: “Grenade, well done, here you go. And the second one was finished too, well done, guys.”
This is video footage from a Russian drone. It’s the Russians’ recording of their own operations – and recording someone apparently ordering soldiers to commit atrocities. It was posted to a Telegram channel that supports the Russian side in the war.
Our experts examined this video and found no evidence it had been tampered with. It’s likely as real as it is disturbing. And it’s just one such incident of several Human Rights Watch has documented in a new report, released today.
In another case, verified drone footage shows at least seven Ukrainian soldiers exiting a dugout as Russian soldiers aim their guns at them. The Ukrainians remove their body armor, and at least one soldier removes their helmet. They lie face down. Then, Russian soldiers open fire on them.
The summary execution of surrendering and injured soldiers is expressly forbidden under international humanitarian law. Quite simply, it’s cold-blooded murder.
Such documented incidents are part of the ever-growing list of Russian atrocities in Ukraine. We need to see another list start growing now: that of perpetrators brought to justice.
As our climate burns out of control, too many politicians are dithering – and worse.
I get it. Reality is hard. It requires difficult decisions. It’s so much easier for politicians to present a fantasy world, to deny or downplay the science of human-driven climate change. And when anyone rejects your fantasy thinking and demands climate action, you simply use state power to shut them up.
Governments are increasingly turning to repression against those calling on their leaders to take steps to address the climate crisis. They are threatening environmental defenders in many parts of the world, using intimidation, legal harassment, and, absurdly, counterterrorism laws against climate activists. Sometimes, they even resort to deadly violence.
In Australia’s state of New South Wales, for example, the government created a new law targeting protesters who block roads or ports. The bizarre result is that activists who temporarily inconvenienced some people have been sent to maximum security prisons for months – meanwhile, people committing violent crimes like assault can avoid being sent to jail altogether.
In the UK, there’s also an ongoing crackdown on climate protesters. Recently enacted laws severely restrict people’s right to peaceful protest. In December, a peaceful climate protester who took part in a slow march on a public road for about 30 minutes, was sentenced to six months in prison.
Europe is likewise failing, with newly introduced repressive laws and practices in several countries. Authorities are targeting environmental movements, which are now sometimes labelled “terrorist threats,” and attacked them with legal prosecutions and police brutality.
A clampdown on environmental activism is happening elsewhere, too – Uganda, India, the list goes on.
But here’s the thing: repression doesn’t change the reality of the climate crisis. Harassment, arrests, imprisonment, killings... none of that slows humanity’s release of carbon into the atmosphere, which is the actual problem here.
Governments should be taking steps to address the climate crisis rather than spending time and effort violating the human rights of those drawing attention to it.