Dozens of UN experts call for targeted sanctions and arms embargo on Israel

 A group of 38 independent UN human rights experts, appointed by the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva as part of its special procedures, have called on UN member states to impose an arms embargo and targeted sanctions on Israel.

In a joint statement on Tuesday, the experts urged UN member states to "immediately review all diplomatic, political, and economic ties with Israel, inclusive of business and finance, pension funds, academia and charities."

They called on member states to implement an immediate and complete embargo on the sale of arms, munitions and other military equipment to Israel.

The UN experts added that states must impose targeted sanctions on Israel and investigate dual citizens involved in crimes while serving in the Israeli military, or involved in settler violence in the occupied West Bank. 

The call comes as the UK indicated it is looking into restricting some, but not all, arms sales to Israel, althought it has offered no timetable on the decision. 

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Reports have claimed that the Labour government is reviewing evidence to identify which UK-made weapons may have been used in suspected war crimes in Gaza.

The UN experts' statement is in response to the International Court of Justice's (ICJ) recent landmark advisory opinion that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is unlawful and should be brought to an end "as rapidly as possible". 

Judges at ICJ ruled that member states have a duty to "take steps to prevent trade or investment relations that assist in the maintenance of the illegal situation created by Israel".

The UN experts said: “The advisory opinion reaffirms peremptory norms prohibiting annexation, settlements, racial segregation and apartheid, and should be seen as declaratory in nature and binding on Israel and all states supporting the occupation."

Assassination of Hamas leader in Iran puts new president in a trap Assassination of Hamas leader in Iran puts new president in a trap

 Muhammad Sahimi

Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, was assassinated in Tehran, widely believed by Israel. He was in Tehran to attend the ceremonies marking inauguration of Iran’s new President, Dr. Masoud Pezeshkian. The two men met before Haniyeh was killed.

As of this writing, Israel has not commented on the killing or the allegations that it was behind it.

In assassinating Haniyeh, Israel would have struck at two targets, not one. The second one is the new Pezeshkian administration. On the day the reformist President was taking office, a foreign leader and an ally of Iran is assassinated, and as the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, he must address a security crisis with international dimensions and implications.

If Saeed Jalili, Pezeshkian’s opponent in the second round of Iran’s presidential elections, had won, given his radical and extremist positions, and his bombastic style, it would have helped Israel in its attempts to convince the international community that engaging Iran diplomatically will not be fruitful, and the country must be put under maximum pressure.

But Pezeshkian is a moderate, and although he has repeatedly condemned the United States for its support of Israel in its war in Gaza, for imposing harsh economic sanctions on Iran, and exiting the nuclear treaty with Iran known officially as JCPOA, he is also pragmatic in seeking a dialogue with the U.S. During his campaign, Pezeshkian stated repeatedly that he would pursue negotiations with the United States, a position apparently supported by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in order to get the economic sanctions lifted.

Dialogue between Iran and the United States is, however, the last thing that Israel, and particularly Benjamin Netanyahu, wants at this stage. If anything, Netanyahu would expand the war to Lebanon in hopes that Iran will react strongly and enter the war directly. Neither Hezbollah nor Iran wants a war with Israel at this stage, but no one should be under the illusion that if Israel begins a full-scale war with Lebanon and Hezbollah, Iran will sit it out.

Unlike Hamas, a Sunni group that has had differences with Iran over the past twenty years, particularly when it refused to support Bashar al-Assad in Syria during the war there that angered Tehran, Hezbollah is a Shiite organization and Iran’s most important asset in the Middle East. If Israel starts waging a full-scale war against Lebanon, and the Islamic Republic does not intervene to defend Hezbollah, it will lose all credibility with its allies throughout the Middle East. Iran has already been criticized by the Houthis in Yemen for not defending Hamas in Gaza.

Since Iran has not shown any inclination towards starting a direct war with Israel, the next best scenario for Israel is to trap it in an untenable position. Assassinating the leader of an ally, particularly in Tehran in the evening of the day in which a new administration took the oath of office, is that trap. It has put President Pezeshkian and his allies in an extremely difficult situation.

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If Iran does nothing, it will be mocked throughout the region. Tehran’s radicals will also relentlessly attack Pezeshkian for supposedly being “soft” or a “sell-out,” trying to cripple, if not topple, his administration and his programs before they have even been started. He is already under attacks by the extremists for seeking negotiations with the United States.

If Iran does react strongly, it will add to the mountain of problems that it is facing. This is not what Pezeshkian and his lieutenants want or had hoped for, but they may be forced to act, knowing that, depending on how they respond, it may force the United States to get directly involved in defense of Israel, at the time when the Pezeshkian administration is hoping to re-start the negotiations with it. Either way, Israel would be temporarily a “winner.”

Khamenei has issued a statement, condemning the assassination, and promising revenge: “The brave and prominent Palestinian mujahideen leader Ismail Haniyeh joined Allah at dawn last night and the great resistance front is in mourning. The criminal and terrorist Zionist regime martyred our dear guest in our house and made us bereaved, but it also prepared the ground for a harsh punishment for itself.”

In his own statement, Pezeshkian said, “The Islamic Republic of Iran will defend its territorial integrity, honor, dignity and pride, and make the terrorist occupiers regret their cowardly action.”

Meanwhile this morning, the U.S. carried out a strike in Iraq, attacking a base south of Baghdad that is controlled by the pro-Iran Shiite group, Popular Mobilization Forces. It killed four members of the group and wounded four others. This comes after U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria came under attack last week. Israel also attacked Beirut and killed Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah's most senior military commander.

The repercussions of the assassination, if it leads to a wider war in the region, for the U.S. presidential elections will also be important. If a wider war involving Iran, Israel, and Hezbollah is started, the Biden administration will surely take Israel’s side. But this will create severe problems for Vice President Kamala Harris who is trying to distinguish herself from Biden and his unconditional support for Israel that has caused deep fissures within the Democratic Party.

Given that, according to many reports, last week’s meeting between Netanyahu and Harris did not go as Netanyahu wanted, which had irked him since Harris had called for an immediate ceasefire, a new war is also the last thing that Harris would or should want.

Thus, the assassination will undoubtedly increase tensions in the region, even if it does not lead to a wider war, because it will give rise to a precarious situation whereby the most minor mistake by any side may create a huge explosion. The tensions may weaken the rejuvenated moderates and Reformists in Iran, and setback what Pezeshkian has planned to do for both the domestic and regional affairs. This will not bode well for the region.

Two Decades Later, the Applause Continues… by James Wile

 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel spoke before a joint session of the United States Congress on July 24 to address the terror attacks of October 7 and ask for continued support for his war on Gaza. Before Netanyahu even arrived in Washington DC, my thoughts were already drawn back to September 20, 2001. On that day, nine days after the attacks of September 11, George W. Bush was prepared to address a joint session of the United States Congress. The president was announced as he entered the chamber, and members of Congress greeted him with a standing ovation lasting more than three minutes. Eventually, the applause subsided as the president stood at his podium and the audience sat back down. Before he began his address the speaker of the House told the members of Congress he was honored to present to them the president of the United States. The crowd erupted with another standing ovation.

Two standing ovations before George W. Bush had uttered a single word of his speech. These two rounds of applause established a pattern for the rest of the evening. The president would spend a large percentage of his speech silently looking out at a room full of standing representatives and listening as applause echoed through the chamber.

The speech Bush gave was certainly powerful. I can put myself in that time and remember being a teenager inspired by his words, but the passage of time has not been kind to the contents of his address. Listening now I am no longer filled with a patriotic resolve, but rather a kind of catatonic dread. The twenty-first century was only months old, but the United States was about to set itself on a path littered with self-inflicted wounds as if it were a nation in search of a lethal error. The steps down this path were greeted with rabid applause.

That evening the president declared a Global War on Terror. Nothing less than a holy war against evil. In his own words, “I will not yield. I will not rest. I will not relent in waging the struggle for freedom and security for the American people. The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.”

I remember believing those words. God was on our side. We might not have known the twists and turns of the journey ahead, but we knew its ultimate destination was freedom, justice, and security. The U.S. government was going to do whatever it needed to do to keep its citizens safe. If war in the Middle East was the only way to achieve our promised outcome, then so be it. The coming war would not be easy, but it would guarantee the safety of all Americans.

Today, looking back on twenty-three years of the Global War on Terror we can now see the fruits of America’s holy war. The course the conflict would take is known. The outcome can be seen, and it is not the one we were promised. Financial ruin brought on by the U.S. government’s futile attempt to make constant war seem affordable. Innocent civilians killed in drone strikes. Children starved to death. American troops killed in lands far from home or dead by their own hand after a supposed safe return. Only the willfully ignorant can deny that these are the true fruits of the Global War on Terror.

Adding to the tragedy, this unfathomable cost of life and wealth was paid to buy a security that was never delivered. This new holy war sold as a solution to terrorism was only a continuation of the same failed strategies that led to the terrorism of September 11. The military occupations of Middle Eastern countries, the support for violence against Palestinians, and the starvation of Iraqi children through sanctions were all policies listed in Osama Bin Laden’s “Letter to America” as justification for Al-Qaeda’s terror attacks. These twentieth century policies were all either continued, intensified, or geographically relocated to other Arab nations in the twenty-first century.

If one madman can be motivated to plan an attack on America, what is stopping another from turning to terror? We need look no further than the 2016 attack on the Pulse Night Club in Orlando, Florida that left 49 people dead and 53 wounded. Fifteen years into the Global War on Terror we saw another maniac committing terrorism and citing American foreign policy, specifically the bombing of Iraq and Syria, as justification. This attack was nowhere close to the scale of September 11, but I imagine that would bring small comfort to those who lost loved ones in the shooting.

The chief reason Americans are not safer now than we were when Bush addressed Congress is that American policymakers were either too ignorant to recognize the root causes of the attacks of September 11 or too unwilling to do anything about them. It was easier to let the nation’s bloodlust run wild than to soberly take account of the situation. But even twenty-three years later when the results of this failed foreign policy are undeniable, the applause in the halls of Congress goes on. Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress on July 24 received the same unified, enthusiastic standing ovations George W. received over two decades ago. Some members of Congress were even present at both addresses. The same hands that clapped on September 20, 2001 were present to clap again on July 24, 2024.

The Israeli prime minister’s speech unsurprisingly hit many of the same notes as the American president’s. Netanyahu claimed, “It’s a clash between barbarism and civilization.” Bush claimed, “This is the world’s fight. This is civilization’s fight.” Netanyahu threatened, “Those who attack Israel will pay a very heavy price.” Bush threatened, “Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” The predictable thematic overlap almost made it seem as if July 24 was just the echoing of the same speech and the same applause heard twenty-three years ago.

The reason Netanyahu’s address pulled my mind back to 2001 even before I had heard a single word of the speech is the attacks of October 7 gave a new generation of Israelis their own September 11 and gave their government a new excuse to meet violence with violence. Perhaps a young Israeli citizen listened to Netanyahu’s address as I had listened to Bush’s. Perhaps he too felt inspired by belief in the righteousness of his cause and was moved by the powerful rhetoric of his political leader.

My message to this young Israeli would be the same message I would give to myself in 2001. This proposed violence will not keep your people safe. I empathize with your desire to bring unspeakable pain to those who attacked your country but realize that this is also how the terrorists of September 11 and October 7 felt. This conflict did not start on the day your nation was attacked. Just like you have your reasons for wanting to unleash violence, your attackers had their reasons. Attempting to understand that motivation is the key to moving forward. More violence will only inspire more terrorism. Costs of Israel’s violence in Gaza are already appearing. Rather than increase security it has inspired more terrorism including a recent Houthi drone attack on Tel Aviv that left one person dead and several others injured.

Just as the American Global War on Terror has not led to safety for Americans, neither will an Israeli war on Gaza which kills civilians and aid workers and children lead to safety for the Israeli people; but the applause goes on. The continuation of the same failed policies with the same tragic results continues to be greeted with emphatic standing ovations. Let us hope there will come a generation of teenagers who can learn not to be swept up in the applause and to see that a leader who prescribes the cause of violence as the solution to violence is not a leader worth following.

US reaches plea deal with alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

 

The US has reached a plea deal with alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other defendants accused of plotting the 2001 terror attacks, according to the Defense Department.

The pretrial agreement – reached after 27 months of negotiations – takes the death penalty off the table for Mohammed, Walid Bin ‘Attash, and Mustafa al Hawsawi, prosecutors said in a letter, obtained by CNN, sent to the families of 9/11 victims and survivors shortly before the Department of Defense announced the news in a press release Wednesday evening.

After beginning negotiations in March 2022, the three men agreed to plead guilty to all charges, including the murder of the 2,976 people listed in the charging sheet, the families were told.

Mohammed and his co-defendants will enter guilty pleas at a plea hearing that could come as early as next week, according to the letter.

“We recognize that the status of the case in general, and this news in particular, will understandably and appropriately elicit intense emotion, and we also realize that the decision to enter into a pre-trial agreement will be met with mixed reactions amongst the thousands of family members who lost loved ones,” prosecutors wrote in the letter. “The decision to enter into a pre-trial agreement after 12 years of pre-trial litigation was not reached lightly; however, it is our collective, reasoned, and good-faith judgment that this resolution is the best path to finality and justice in this case.”

‘The least bad deal’

The plea agreement avoids what would have been a long and complicated death penalty trial against Mohammed.

“This is the least bad deal in the real world that would ever happen,” said Peter Bergen, a terrorism expert and CNN national security analyst who has written extensively about Osama bin Laden.

The government faced the difficult challenge of advancing a case that had stalled over the course of the two decades since Mohammed’s capture in Pakistan in 2003 for his alleged involvement in the terror attacks.

“They were still in pre-trial hearings,” Bergen told CNN. “Getting some kind of deal is better.”

In 2008, Mohammed was charged with a list of crimes including conspiracy, murder in violation of the law of war, attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects, intentionally causing serious bodily injury, destruction of property in violation of the law of war, and terrorism and material support of terrorism. The US had said it would seek the death penalty for Mohammed.

But the military trial against Mohammed and his alleged co-conspirators was delayed for years as the US tried to determine how to handle the issue of torture used against Mohammed and others at secret CIA prisons in the 2000s. The issue posed a legal problem for prosecutors about whether evidence obtained through torture was admissible in court.

The trial was set to begin on January 11, 2021, but delays brought about by the resignation of two judges and the coronavirus pandemic pushed the date back again.

The three alleged conspirators will still face a sentencing hearing where the parties will present evidence to argue for an appropriate sentence short of the death penalty. That sentencing hearing will not occur before next summer, according to the letter sent to families.

“During the sentencing hearings in this case, there may be an opportunity for a member of your family to testify about the impact the September 11 attacks have had on you and your loved ones, and to provide a victim impact statement that will be considered by the military jury in determining a sentence,” prosecutors said in the letter.

The letter notes that prosecutors met with families for feedback about possible plea agreements as is required by law.

As part of the agreement, the defendants agreed to answer written questions from the surviving victims and victims’ families about their roles and reasons for conducting the attacks.

The families now have 45 days to submit questions to be answered by the alleged co-conspirators by the end of the year, the letter says. According to the letter, the prosecutors plan to travel to meet with the families in person this fall to discuss the plea agreements.

It’s unclear where Mohammed and his co-defendants will serve out their sentences.

The Biden administration has made it a priority to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba where the defendants have been held, repatriating several detainees who were no longer considered significant threats to national security. But dozens of detainees still remain in the facility.

Israeli strike kills Al Jazeera journalists near Ismail Haniyeh's home in Gaza

 

Al Jazeera Arabic journalist Ismail al-Ghoul reporting on the scene [Al Jazeera]

An Israeli air strike near the house of Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza killed two journalists who were reporting on the Hamas leader's assassination in Iran.

Ismail al-Ghoul, a journalist for Al Jazeera Arabic, and cameraman Rami al-Refee were killed in the strike near the Aidia area west of Gaza City.

"It is with a heavy heart that we mourn the loss of our colleague journalist, Ismail Al-Ghoul, who was killed in an Israeli air strike while courageously covering the events in northern Gaza," Al Jazeera Managing Editor Mohamed Moawad wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“Without Ismail, the world would not have seen the devastating images of these massacres,” he wrote, adding that he “relentlessly covered the events and delivered the reality of Gaza to the world through Al Jazeera".

“His voice has now been silenced, and there is no longer a need to call out to the world. Ismail fulfilled his mission to his people and his homeland. Shame on those who have failed the civilians, journalists and humanity.”

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Haniyeh was killed in an Israeli strike in Tehran on Wednesday, just hours after he attended the swearing-in ceremony for Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian.

This was the second high-profile Israeli assassination within hours, following a strike in Beirut that reportedly killed senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr, heightening fears that the region is sliding towards a full-blown war.

Israel has killed more than 160 journalists in Gaza since the beginning of the war in October 2023, according to Palestinian government officials.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said the war in Gaza was “the deadliest period for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992”.

Over 39,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel’s war on Gaza started, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

 

Israeli Lawmaker Says Raping Palestinian Prisoners Is ‘Legitimate’

Hanoch Milwidsky, a member of the Likud party, made the comments in a debate about the arrest of Israeli soldiers at the Sde Teiman prison

by Dave DeCamp July 31, 2024 at 4:37 pm ET CategoriesNewsTagsIsrael, Palestine

A member of the Israeli Knesset has defended the idea of raping Palestinian prisoners after Israeli soldiers suspected of sexually torturing a detainee at the Sde Teiman detention facility were arrested.

The arrest took place on Monday, sparking protests from far-right activists, including several members of the Knesset and at least one minister in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition.

In a meeting of lawmakers on the day of the arrest, Hanoch Milwidsky, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, was asked if it was legitimate “to insert a stick into a person’s rectum?”

Milwidsky replied, “Yes! If he is a Nukhba [Hamas militant], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!”

According to Haaretz, the Palestinian prisoner who was raped suffered from a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage, and broken ribs and was taken to the hospital for an operation.

The Times of Israel reported that two out of the ten soldiers arrested for the rape were released on Wednesday and that they were not the main suspects. The report also said that Honenu, a legal aid organization representing four of the soldiers, claimed the soldiers were acting in self-defense when they forcibly sodomized the Palestinian prisoner.

The condition of the prisoner confirms some of the worst allegations made by Palestinians who were previously held in Sde Teiman. Younis al-Hamlawi, a senior nurse who was detained by Israeli forces in Gaza after he left Al-Shifa Hospital over allegations that he was tied to Hamas, told The New York Times that Israeli soldiers penetrated his rectum with a metal stick, causing him to bleed and leaving him in “unbearable pain.”

The Times report said a leaked report from the UN “cited a 41-year-old detainee who said that interrogators ‘made me sit on something like a hot metal stick and it felt like fire,’ and also said that another detainee ‘died after they put the electric stick up’ his anus.”

More BBC ‘News’ Channeling Israeli Propaganda as Its Own

Forget a 10-month genocide in Gaza. Only when Israel can exploit the deaths of Syrians living under its military occupation are we supposed to start worrying about the ‘consequences’

by Jonathan Cook Posted onAugust 01, 2024

BBC coverage of the attack on a football pitch in the Golan Heights on Saturday has been intentionally misleading.

The BBC’s evening news entirely ignored the fact that those killed by the blast are a dozen Syrians, not Israeli citizens, and that for decades the surviving Syrian population in the Golan, most of them Druze, has been forced to live unwillingly under an Israeli military occupation.

I suppose mention of this context might complicate the story Israel and the BBC wish to tell – and risk reminding viewers that Israel is a belligerent state occupying not just Palestinian territory but Syrian territory too (not to mention nearby Lebanese territory).

It might suggest to audiences that these various permanent Israeli occupations have been contributing not only to large-scale human rights abuses but to regional tensions as well. That Israel’s acts of aggression against its neighbors might be the cause of “conflict”, rather than, as Israel and the BBC would have us believe, some kind of unusual, pre-emptive form of self-defense.

The BBC, of course, chose to uncritically air comments from a military spokesman for Israel, who blamed Hizbullah for the blast in the Golan.

Daniel Hagari tried to milk the incident for maximum propaganda value, arguing: “This attack shows the true face of Hizbullah, a terrorist organization that targets and murders children playing soccer.”

Except, as the BBC failed to mention in its report, Israel infamously targeted and murdered four young children from the Bakr family playing football on a beach in Gaza in 2014.

Much more recently, video footage showed Israel striking yet more children playing football at a school in Gaza that was serving as a shelter for families whose homes were destroyed by earlier Israeli bombs.

Doubtless other strikes in Gaza over the past 10 months, so many of them targeting school-shelters, have killed Palestinian children playing football – especially as it is one of the very few ways they can take their mind off the horror all around.

So, should we – and the BBC – not conclude that all these attacks on children playing football make the Israeli military even more of a terrorist organization than Hizbullah?

Note too the way the western media are so ready to accept unquestioningly Israel’s claim that Hizbullah was responsible for the blast – and dismiss Hizbullah’s denials.

Viewers are discouraged from exercising their memories. Any who do may recall that those same media outlets were only too willing to take on faith Israeli disinformation suggesting that Hamas had hit Gaza’s al-Ahli hospital back in October, even when all the evidence showed it was an Israeli air strike.

(Israel soon went on to destroy all Gaza’s hospitals, effectively eradicating the enclave’s health sector, on the pretext that medical facilities there served as Hamas bases – another patently preposterous claim the western media treated with wide-eyed credulity.)

The BBC next went to Jerusalem to hear from diplomatic editor Paul Adams. He intoned gravely: “This is precisely what we have been worrying about for the past 10 months – that something of this magnitude would occur on the northern border, that would turn what has been a simmering conflict for all of these months into an all-out war.”

So there you have it. Paul Adams and the BBC concede they haven’t been worrying for the past 10 months about the genocide unfolding under their very noses in Gaza, or its consequences.

A genocide of Palestinians, apparently, is not something of significant “magnitude”.

Only now, when Israel can exploit the deaths of Syrians forced to live under its military rule as a pretext to expand its “war”, are we supposed to sit up and take notice. Or so the BBC tells us.

Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism