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By Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad

In the imperial theater of Washington, where regimes are puppeteered and loyalties auctioned, a curious ceremony unfolded. General Asim Munir, Pakistan’s top-ranking uniformed ruler, arrived not as a diplomat of a sovereign republic but as a dutiful envoy of dependency—polished boots, borrowed spine, and holy book in tow. It wasn’t a diplomatic visit; it was a political pilgrimage. An Umrah not to Mecca, but to the marble halls of American hegemony—complete with the Qur’an in one hand and a playbook of compliance in the other.

This wasn’t some off-the-record rendezvous. It was a coronation cloaked in pleasantries, a tribute to a man who has turned his country into a military estate while moonlighting as a cleric in camouflage. If Pakistan’s generals once held a monopoly on guns, Munir has added sermons to his arsenal. And Washington, ever the connoisseur of reliable strongmen, received him not with reluctance but with reverence.

General Michael Kurilla of U.S. CENTCOM sang Munir’s praises before Congress, calling Pakistan a “phenomenal partner in the counterterrorism world.” The phrase drips with irony. For decades, Pakistan’s military has treated terrorism not as a menace to defeat, but as an asset to manage. They rear militants like racehorses—some galloped toward Kabul, others herded into Kashmir, and the rest leased out to whichever patron was willing to pay. That the same generals now profit from counterterrorism contracts is less a twist of fate than the cunning design of empire.

But Munir’s journey to Washington wasn’t to reminisce over old alliances. He came to renew vows—between client and master, between gun and gold. And the message he delivered was crisp, calculated, and unmistakable: Pakistan remains a subcontractor for American power, ever willing to whisper verses of moral clarity in public while striking Faustian bargains in private.

Take Gaza. As Israeli bombs pummel a besieged population and Western leaders squirm under the weight of their own hypocrisy, Islamabad offers its routine package of condemnations—pre-written, perfunctory, and purposely ineffectual. Munir’s regime weeps on paper for the Palestinians while embracing covert cooperation with Tel Aviv. The Pakistani security establishment has learned to perform outrage like seasoned thespians—loud enough to appease the mosque-going public, but never disruptive enough to inconvenience the friends of Zion.

And then there’s Iran—where the theater of deceit reaches near-Shakespearean levels. The laughable idea that Pakistan’s ruling elites, military or civilian, support Iran in any meaningful sense would be comedy gold if it weren’t so tragic. Yes, someone in the Pakistani government reportedly told Tehran they stood with them. But so did Mohammad bin Salman, who phoned Iran’s Supreme Leader to express his concern over Israeli aggression. We are now grading regimes on who delivers the most solemn condemnation while doing absolutely nothing. Strong language is cheap, and the Muslim world has been having a clearance sale since the Gaza genocide began.

In truth, no one is more desperate to normalize with Israel than Pakistan’s political and military class. They’ve been salivating for Tel Aviv’s cutting-edge surveillance tech—the same tech lavished on New Delhi. It’s well known in diplomatic circles that the fastest route to Washington’s heart is through Tel Aviv’s intelligence desk. The generals of Rawalpindi took note long ago.

So in a country where 99% of the population is fervently anti-Zionist, the elite decided to test the waters of the Abraham Accords. Overnight, media outlets—never shy about following GHQ’s script—began arguing that perhaps shaking hands with Israel wasn’t such a terrible idea. Unfortunately for these normalization enthusiasts, the Pakistani people and Prime Minister Imran Khan slammed that door shut with a velocity that nearly dislocated wrists in Tel Aviv. Khan’s categorical rejection of this Zionist courtship was one of the many reasons he was later shown the exit by those who mistake coups for governance.

Meanwhile, a bizarre episode unfolded: Iran publicly claimed that Pakistan had assured them that if Israel nuked Iran, Pakistan would respond in kind. Cue the panicked denials. The ISI officer who made this brazen claim during a trip to Tehran has since vanished—into thin air, or more likely, into one of the ISI’s many memory holes. When it comes to commitments, the Pakistani establishment prefers the disappearing act.

Still, the charade continued. Trump himself invited General Munir for a personal tutorial in the dark arts of duplicity, though the general hardly needed instruction. He’s become a natural. The two men reportedly agreed on everything from Israel to Iran to whose back to stab next in the region. Like a good student of empire, Munir deployed his token civilian accessory—Shehbaz Sharif—to Tehran, mouthing brotherly platitudes while serving as a courier of subversion. The real message was clear: Pakistan, under its current custodians, would continue to play the snake in Iran’s garden—smiling as it bites.

Leaked briefings from the Trump-Munir rendezvous paint a picture of gleeful synchronicity. Munir reportedly pledged to keep Pakistan’s flirtation with China strictly transactional. As General Bajwa once joked to his American handlers that he didn’t even like Chinese food, Munir promised to go further: a drone base for “counterterrorism” operations, which in reality would serve as a launchpad for American muscle-flexing in China’s backyard. The base might as well come with a neon sign: “Now Serving Empire, 24/7.”

Some hopefuls in the Pakistani-American diaspora still fantasize that Trump might have told Munir to free his supposed ally, Imran Khan, from prison. Don’t hold your breath. If Trump did mention Khan, it was probably with the same sincerity he showed Iran during fake negotiations while greenlighting Israeli assassinations.

Let us not forget the Pakistani establishment’s military generosity—to Ukraine. Yes, while claiming strategic restraint elsewhere, Pakistan shipped weapons to Kyiv in bulk. All because General Bajwa wanted to prove to Washington that Imran Khan’s “aggressive neutrality” was a diplomatic sin. So the regime happily supplied munitions to Ukraine while making eyes at Moscow and peddling neutrality to the public. It’s geopolitical karaoke—just sing whatever the room wants to hear.

Which brings us back to the great Iranian illusion. Some in elite Pakistani circles still puff their chests and proclaim that Pakistan is prepared to assist Iran militarily. This is not just false—it’s delusional. These are the same elites who have been begging for Tel Aviv’s friendship for two decades, hosting backchannel envoys, and sending congratulatory signals disguised as policy ambiguity. Their commitment to Zionism is not a secret—it’s a résumé.

It is this very allegiance that Imran Khan rejected with open defiance. And it was this defiance that made him a liability for an establishment that values compliance over conscience. Regime change wasn’t just about power—it was about re-aligning Pakistan’s spine to the curvature of American and Israeli expectations.

Indeed, Munir’s true mission is to prove his fluency in the language of duplicity—a dialect spoken fluently in Riyadh and Tel Aviv, and mastered in Washington. He is auditioning for the role long played by the likes of General Sisi and MBS: authoritarian, Islamic-tinged, loyal to Empire, lethal to dissenters. A general who quotes the Qur’an but lives by the CIA handbook.

General Munir never lets a microphone pass without invoking his status as a hafiz—a man who has memorized the Qur’an. It’s a credential he wields like a talisman, as if the scripture will absolve the sins of his regime. But spiritual memory is no substitute for moral clarity. Somewhere between memorizing Surah Maryam and rehearsing military crackdowns, Munir appears to have skipped over the verses on justice, compassion, and the sanctity of human life. Perhaps in the same way Pharaohs recited ancient prayers while building pyramids on the backs of slaves.

Munir is not merely a hypocrite. He is the ideal specimen of American preference in Muslim leadership: religiously performative, domestically repressive, and geopolitically obedient. His regime has jailed dissidents, gagged journalists, and converted the judiciary into a costume party of kangaroo courts—all while smiling politely for Western cameras and preaching Islamic virtue to a battered populace.

Little wonder, then, that democracy in Pakistan is treated like a seasonal flu—something to be suppressed, mocked, or quarantined. Imran Khan, who dared speak of sovereignty and civilian rule, now rots behind bars while the real arbiters of power toast champagne in foreign capitals. Many in the Pakistani diaspora, especially those orbiting the Trumpian right, foolishly cling to the hope that the orange messiah will free Khan if reelected. But this is the genius of Empire: it creates the wound, offers the bandage, and charges you for both.

Yet behind this mask of pragmatic neutrality lies a deeper game. Pakistan’s military remains useful to Washington not in spite of its duplicity, but because of it. In an era where India is both partner and problem—lavished with defense deals but disobedient on Russia, Palestine, and BRICS—Pakistan becomes a tool for subtle coercion. A well-timed skirmish in Kashmir, a terrorist scare in Punjab, or a diplomatic spat with Dhaka—all of these become levers to keep Modi in check. Munir plays this role with the smugness of a man who knows that even puppets can pull strings.

And then there’s the China card. Beneath the rhetoric of counterterrorism cooperation lies a thinly veiled espionage operation. The resurgence of American intelligence activity in Pakistan—particularly in Baluchistan and Gilgit-Baltistan—mirrors the playbook of containment. The recent spate of attacks on Chinese workers and projects? Far from random acts of violence. These are pressure points, signaled by forces who know exactly where to poke. That some elements within Pakistan’s own security apparatus appear complicit only confirms how much of the state has become an auction house of allegiances.

None of this is surprising. What is grotesque is the sanctimony with which Munir cloaks his betrayals. It is not enough to oppress a people; he must do it in the name of faith. It is not enough to sell out a nation; he must do it while quoting Hadith. The performance is exhausting, but effective—at least to those too starved to notice they’re being fed poison with golden spoons.

And so, while Pakistan’s youth struggle with unemployment, inflation, and a collapsing educational system, while the courts are weaponized and elections rendered fiction, while activists disappear into black sites and families mourn in silence—Munir parades through Washington as a statesman of stability. A man with no mandate, no legitimacy, no moral compass—lionized as a “reformer” by think tanks run by arms dealers and ideologues.

The people of Pakistan deserve better. Not just from their rulers but from a world that claps for tyrants if they recite the right slogans. Munir’s reign is a symptom of a broader disease—the normalization of authoritarianism when it serves geopolitical interests. Strip away the uniforms, the Qur’ans, and the press releases, and what remains is a security state moonlighting as a theocracy, propped up by foreign funds and shielded by international apathy.

Let the photo-ops continue. Let CENTCOM issue more praise. Let the New York Times run puff pieces about “moderate military men.” But history, unlike newspapers, doesn’t forget. It remembers who stood with the oppressed and who supped with their executioners.

Munir’s visit to Washington will not be remembered as a diplomatic milestone. It will be recorded—indelibly—as a page from the playbook of betrayal: betrayal of Iran, of Gaza, of China, and above all, of the very people in whose name he rules.

And when the Qur’an is next recited in Rawalpindi’s echoing halls, it may fall upon those verses that speak not of power, but of justice. Not of obedience to Empire, but of accountability before God. Munir may have memorized the text. But history will judge whether he ever understood it.

Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan. 

15 June 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jonathan Kuttab

The Israeli attack on Iran is very likely the start of a long-term regional war between Israel and Iran, and perhaps include other Arab or Islamic countries. In the short term, the attack is the result of a personal decision by Netanyahu to avoid ending the war on Gaza and to ensure his personal and political survival. The war will unite the nation, prevent the collapse of his governing coalition, shield him from accountability and investigations into his actions and his failures that he has been avoiding. In broader terms, however, it is the logical conclusion of a wider and more basic decision to “live by the sword,” to ensure “total victory” and impose Israel’s dominance over the entire region by sheer force of arms, by military superiority and a monopoly on nuclear weapons. Its only justification comes in accepting a worldview that is governed entirely by the logic of brute power, regardless of ethics, morality, law, international relations, or mutual cooperation. It is a logic that sees the world as an enemy to be vanquished, with no hope or aspiration towards peace or coexistence that is not based on total power and domination.

Jabotinsky, a rightwing Zionist leader long before the state of Israel was created, expressed this outlook when he wrote in The Iron Wall that Arabs will never accept the creation of a Jewish state on their lands and will continue to resist it unless they are convinced that there is an iron wall they cannot overcome. Only when the Arabs give up that hope and accept the fact that they cannot defeat the Zionists will the Jewish settlers (later Israel) ever be secure. Until then, only overwhelming power and superiority will ensure success.

The same logic is now being used with respect to Iran. Instead of pursuing mutual understanding, coexistence, and cooperation, Israel seeks domination and “deterrence.” Under this view, no amount of assurances, inspections, or guarantees are sufficient. Back in 2012  Netanyahu claimed at the United Nations that Iran was only months away from having an atomic bomb. No analyst or expert agreed with him that a bomb was intended to physically destroy Israel but only to create (if ever actually produced) a balance and defense against Israel’s own nuclear arsenal. Even those who doubted Iran’s repeated proclamations that they were not intending to build a bomb and considered atomic weapons contrary to Islamic Shari’a believed such a bomb would only create a balance of power, threatening not Israel itself but its nuclear monopoly and regional domination.

Several countries today have atomic weapons, including historic enemies like Pakistan and India. All of us hope and pray that such weapons will never again be used. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (of which Iran is a signatory, but not Israel) was intended to reduce to zero the chances that nuclear weapons will be used. The international legal system was intended to prevent the risk of such an eventuality as well as reduce the risks of conventional warfare. It also created a network of conventions and treaties to regulate the conduct of countries during conventional warfare, if it occurs, and to protect civilians, noncombatants, and even wounded soldiers and prisoners of war when war breaks out. People, organisations, and countries which believe in a peaceful world try hard to safeguard this system and are deeply concerned when countries like the US and Israel scoff at international law and refuse to abide by its institutions and provisions.

The Israeli position, sadly, is that all such conventions, laws, and institutions  are irrelevant:  only power counts. Specifically, Israel needs to rely on its own military and nuclear power. It chooses to live by the sword. The memory of the Holocaust is used to justify this view and the slogan “never again” has been used to justify all sorts of self-centered actions that undermine the entire international system and ensure eternal enmity and never-ending war and hatred.

War is always a bad thing. We know how it starts, but we never know how it ends. It creates death and destruction, and most of the victims are innocent civilians. Yet war does not start in  one day. It is the result of a worldview and ideology that justifies itself and the destruction it creates. It is a decision to live by the sword and, sadly, whatever initial success may result, it dooms its proponents to “die by the sword.” 

Far better is a worldview that fosters peace and reconciliation, that seeks nonviolent methods of conflict resolution, that believes in and works for arrangements based on mutual respect, dignity and justice, that seeks reconciliation and not domination, and that is even willing to take risks rather than assure eternal enmity.

13 June 2025

Source: fosna.org

By Rev Graylan Scott Hagler

As the political and religious left continues to attack Christian nationalism, as a progressive Christian, I find myself increasingly uneasy. It is not that I believe Christian nationalism exists, or that it is dangerous to a pluralistic society with religious diversity and perspective, but the ire and critique is not applied across the board to other forms of ethnoreligious nationalism. There is a glaring absence on the political left and in the peace and justice movement to condemn Zionism with equal weight as is applied to Christian nationalism. Among nationalistic expressions of religion, expressions of narrow particularism, and obsessive focus on the justification of one religious/ethnic group over others Zionism escapes the condemnation for some reason that Christian nationalism is confronted with. 

Christian nationalism asserts that a particular country is founded on “Christian” principles. Its founders or framers were divinely inspired, and therefore the impetus is to draw those countries back into line with the original framework intended by the founders of that nation. Christian nationalism is a worldwide phenomenon, with proponents in Europe, and particularly evident in the United States. The political/religious framework offered in the United States is that the founders of the country, and all of its original documents were divinely inspired through white men who authored them. You cannot escape the fact that the founders of the United States were white men who were landowners, and therefore an undercurrent exists where Christian nationalism is built upon white privilege and supremacy. This is true whether it is in the United States or Europe. The belief is that the malaise that exist in national boundaries is due to the straying or abandonment of those Christian principles, and the antidote for the national demise is to return to religious inception initiating all the blessings that will flow as a result of doing so. Hence, we have witnessed the push to place the Ten Commandments in schools, the turning back of the clock on Roe v. Wade, the continued push to publicly fund religious schools, attacks upon the LGBTQIA communities, and the demonizing of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. It is presented as if all the problems and the failings of a nation is a result of eschewing “Christian” principles, affirming religious and ethnic pluralism, and because we have removed all the trappings, strictures, and images of so-called Christianity from public life. As a progressive Christian I unapologetically stand in opposition to Christian nationalism and all its forms of expression. 

Zionism is akin to Christian nationalism. A difference in Zionism is that it existed originally as political/religious thought among a diverse population spread across national borders in Europe that identified religiously and culturally as an ethnoreligious group. Originally the argument of Jews pursuing a homeland in Palestine was met with skepticism as a political/religious philosophy and existed on the margins. However, the various European pogroms against Jews began to coalesce larger swarths of Jews to strategically reconsiderZionism.

Zionism emerged in the 19th century as an ethnocultural ideology. It sought to establish a national home for the Jewish people that they controlled and therefore were free from the ethnic cleansing that arose periodically in Europe. World War II and the atrocities carried out against Jews other groups in Europe became a major factor for the intellectual and emotional acceptability of the Zionist framework that would result in the colonialization of Palestine. As the acceptability of Zionism arose as a solution for Jewish security among larger segments of the Jewish population its political and religious tenets became more wedded to Judaism. This conflation of Zionism with Judaism has become problematic in terms of having any sober political discussions on the realities and consequences of Israel and the implications of Zionism without being accused of being antisemitic.  

Zionism claimed that Palestine is the historical land of the Jews and therefore the Jewish right to the land outweighed anything that was Arab. The concept of “transfer”, or what we today would call “ethnic cleansing” is inherent to Zionism, believing that the security of Jews had to be based upon their majority, and to lessen any potential of uprisings in response to Jewish occupation. The idea of removing non-Jewish populations and affording non-Jews less rights than Jews evidently gained widespread support across an array of Zionist groups. The religious roots of Zionism focused upon the land of Palestine being promised by God to the Jewish people into perpetuity with the conquest and subjugation of non-Jewish people resulting. There are enough biblical narratives that justifies the subjugation, conquest, and killing of non-Jewish people. The political roots of Zionism are based upon what is presented as practical strategies of protection, security, and historical rights to the land. The religious justifications of Zionism are questionable given that Jews largely have appropriated and identified with the biblical narratives as stories of identity and belonging, just as Black people largely reinterpreted the biblical stories as our own identification with God and divine purpose. The political justification of Zionism is flawed in that it affirms the European colonialization and conquest of non-white lands, and the subjugation of non-white peoples. Zionism, though ethnic in character, is a nationalistic European expression of the stealing and conquest of the land of others and the extension of white supremacy in form and practice.

I am offering a brief summation of Christian and Jewish nationalism. I am also raising the ideological and political deficiencies of the left where it condemns Christian nationalism but fail in offering the same kinds of condemnation and critique of Jewish nationalism. One has to ask the question, why? Each form of religious nationalism is an apostasy to the spiritual and political concepts of Christianity and Judaism. Each nationalism avoids the declarations of justice, right treatment of neighbor, and welcoming the stranger as if it is foreign to the scriptural text. Instead, they turn to scriptures that seem to affirm their narrow and myopic points of view, conquest, and divine justification for subjugation and genocide. Each form of nationalism deserves and needs to be condemned. Peace and justice organizations on the left, liberal religious groups, and political secular groups need to apply their criticism of religious and political nationalism across the board and in a principled way. I am offering that all forms of nationalism are inherently evil because it strips non-conforming groups of their dignity, security, and freedom of expression. Zionism emerged because of nation-state nationalism, but the irony is that they formed another expression of nationalism to combat nationalism. This simply illustrates how one evil leads to another. Christian nationalism has been the backbone of all kinds of evils from enslavement to the Christianization and genocide of indigenous peoples. It must be condemned in all of its forms from the past to the present, and into any future expression. Zionism must also be subjected to the same types of criticism and analysis, and if we fail to apply the same standard of criticism across the board, in reference to Christianity, Judaism, and even Islam then we have certainly failed in being any moral voice at all.  

Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler

•   Pastor Emeritus, Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ

•   Director & Chief Visionary, Faith Strategies, LLC

•   Senior Advisor, Fellowship of Reconciliation, USA

12 June 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) is yet another facet of the US-supported Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip. Under the guise of providing aid, the GHF has enabled: mass killings, the replacement of UN-led humanitarian operations, the weaponization of aid, and plans for forced displacement and ethnic cleansing. The GHF is part of the broader aim to legitimize the re-establishment of Israeli military presence and entrench colonial domination over the Gaza Strip.

Since it began operating on 16 May 2025, the GHF has not alleviated the Israeli-manufactured widespread starvation campaign in Gaza, but has instead served as a death trap to Palestinians desperately seeking aid. The so-called aid organization has led to the killing of over 130 Palestinians and the injury of more than 1,000. It has actively contributed to a deliberately manufactured state of chaos—one that was foretold and warned against by the UN, Palestinian organizations, and international humanitarian groups from the outset.

The Israeli regime claims that the GHF was created because Hamas is looting and controlling aid in Gaza—a claim publicly refuted by the UN World Food Programme director. However, by its own admittance, it is the one funding and arming the gangs responsible for looting aid convoys in Gaza, thereby manufacturing the crisis the GHF claims to address.

The GHF is denying Palestinians their dignity and their right to life-saving aid and services where they are, and is forcing them to undertake long journeys to access minimal and insufficient aid. In this, they have employed a strategy repeatedly used by the Israeli regime throughout the genocide: directing Palestinians en masse toward areas falsely designated as “safe,” only to target those areas and people with bullets and bombardment. From its inception, the GHF has not only stripped Palestinians of dignity and safety in their pursuit of basic necessities, but has also fundamentally violated the core humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence. This mechanism, under the guise of humanitarianism, has only further enabled the genocide, forcing Palestinians in Gaza to choose between subjugation or death by starvation. As the UN Deputy Spokesperson, Farhan Haq, stated: “No person, anywhere, should be forced to choose between risking one’s life and feeding one’s family.”  

The Foundation replaces the existing UN-led and coordinated humanitarian system, particularly obstructing the life-saving aid provided by UNRWA, with a militarized and politicized mechanism run by the very actors inflicting genocide and starvation in the Gaza Strip. This mechanism, at its core, is part of a broader strategy to eliminate international presence and entrench Israeli “sovereignty” and colonial domination—not only in Gaza, but across all of historic Palestine.

Additionally, the GHF enables the Israeli government to instrumentalize humanitarian aid in service of its strategic and military objectives to colonize the Gaza Strip and forcibly displace its population. The Israeli cabinet approved its “aid” plan, administered through the GHF, in tandem with operation “Gideon’s Chariot,” which explicitly aims at “conquering” Gaza and driving its residents toward the southern part of the Strip. This actively pushes Palestinians closer to the border with Egypt to prospectively implement Trump’s forced displacement plan, which the Israeli regime has repeatedly announced as a condition to ending the genocide in Gaza.

As the GHF continues to operate illegally and contribute directly to the ongoing genocide, states have once again failed to take any meaningful action—or even acknowledge the illegality of the Foundation’s operations or the United States’ complicity. The UK, for example, has walked back earlier statements claiming that the Israeli regime’s blockade on Gaza is illegal, and many states have resorted to symbolic gestures such as targeted sanctions against some Israeli ministers. These actions are not only useless but serve to obscure the root causes and ongoing genocide, offering the illusion of accountability while enabling Israeli crimes.

The only appropriate—and long overdue—response and minimum obligation of third party states is the imposition of diplomatic, economic, and military sanctions against the Israeli regime. These must remain in place until the genocide ends, the GHF is dismantled, the UN-led humanitarian system is fully reinstated, and the Israeli colonial-apartheid regime is dismantled.

12 June 2025

By Sushma Raman and John Hocevar

Our planet’s oceans remain one of the last global commons—a shared resource that supports countless species, regulates our climate, and feeds billions of people. However, for over 50 years, we have witnessed their destruction from the combined impacts of industrial fishing, plastic pollution, and climate change. Now, incredibly but predictably, President Trump is exacerbating this crisis, signing a slew of Executive Actions that prioritize corporate profit over the long-term health of this vital resource.

As we commemorate the 23rd annual World Oceans Day, it is critical that we remember just how helpful some of the protective actions we have taken have been. The global moratorium on commercial whaling brought the great whales back from the edge of extinction. Marine sanctuaries have allowed fish populations to recover in once-depleted fisheries. Bans on dumping have prevented millions of tons of toxic waste from poisoning our seas. These wins are proof that when governments commit to science-driven solutions, underpinned by social, economic, and environmental justice, progress is not only possible, it is inevitable.

The next opportunity for bold action is fast approaching, with governments this week convening at the UN Ocean Conference in Nice, France. As the US retreats from leadership on ocean protection, the international community is poised to make decisions that could have lasting benefits or far-reaching consequences. Governments must unite behind science, uphold international law, and take bold, collective action to defend the rights and futures of coastal communities and chart a sustainable course for life on Earth.

Ratify the Global Ocean Treaty

The first important decision is ratifying the Global Ocean Treaty, the only legal tool that can establish marine protected areas in international waters outside of the Southern Ocean. Despite covering roughly 75% of Earth’s surface and its indispensable role in supporting life on Earth, only 2.7% of the ocean is fully or highly protected from human activities. That drops to a mere 0.9% for the high seas. The Treaty’s “30 by 30” target, adopted as part of the Kunming-Montreal GlobalBiodiversity Framework in 2022, aims to change that by increasing protection to at least 30% by 2030–the minimum scientists have stated is needed for marine ecosystems to recover and biodiversity to thrive.

There is no way to meet this target without the Global Ocean Treaty. To succeed, this protection must extend across both national and international waters. Domestically, countries must protect at least 30% of their national waters, ban unsustainable extractive industries, and ensure that local and Indigenous communities are central to marine conservation planning and decision-making processes.

Internationally, time is running out. The Treaty must be ratified this year to meet the 2030 deadline. However, while 60 ratifications are needed for it to take effect, only 31 countries have taken that step so far. Governments must act swiftly in the coming months to ratify the treaty and keep the 30 by 30 target within reach–before it’s too late.

Stop Deep Sea Mining

The Trump Administration’s rogue push to unilaterally launch deep sea mining in international waters has been widely condemned by several state actors, including UNOC co-host France, along with China and the European Commission as a threat to multilateral cooperation and the United Nations. Alongside concerns about the ecological damage deep sea mining would cause, governments, civil society organizations, and Pacific Indigenous rights groups have also cautioned that it could trigger a reckless race to exploit the seabed.

Scientists have also debunked the industry’s claims that deep sea minerals are necessary for a green energy transition and have warned that mining the deep ocean could cause irreversible ecological harm on a vast scale. The economic case is no more substantial, as extraction and processing costs remain prohibitively high, and demand from key sectors, such as automotive and technology is limited. The so-called “energy security” rationale—invoked amid rising tensions with China—is similarly baseless and being aggressively promoted by the very corporations that would profit most.

With less than a month until the Council of the regulatory body, the International Seabed Authority (ISA) convenes in July, governments must go beyond words. They must reaffirm the centrality of the United Nations and international law in governing this global commons and vote to enact a moratorium. Thirty-three countries have already called for a moratorium, ban, or pause on deep sea mining. Leaders gathering in Nice should build on this momentum by clearly voicing their support.

Now is the moment to make it clear that the deep ocean, recognized by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea as the common heritage of humankind, cannot be seized by those with the deepest pockets or the best-connected lobbyists. Instead, the international community must ensure that any decisions regarding the future of the seabed are guided by science, equity, and multilateralism, rather than haste or corporate pressure.

Support a Strong Global Plastics Treaty

Our oceans are drowning in plastic-but this crisis extends far beyond littered beaches. It is a growing ecological and public health emergency that stretches from the depths of the ocean floor to our dinner plates, from the polluted bodies of sea creatures to our bloodstream and the bodies of newborn children. No matter where we live or even how much money we have, we rely on clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and nutritious food to eat. Today, all of these things are contaminated by toxic chemicals and microplastics.

Yet while governments continue to profess support for ocean protection, their continued failure to address the root cause–unchecked plastic production–serves only to protect the profits of fossil fuel and petrochemical giants, not the health of marine ecosystems or the millions of people suffering the consequences of this plastic pollution.

As the final major gathering of relevant delegates and ministers before the resumed Global Plastics Treaty negotiations (INC-5.2), in August, UNOC presents a critical opportunity to change course. Delegates must issue a strong ministerial declaration on the Global Plastic Treaty that commits to cutting plastic production, ending single-use plastic, and prioritizing public health, environmental justice, and protection of our ocean.

The oceans are a shared resource. They are our planet’s life support system. But they are being damaged at a rate faster than we can save them for the benefit of a few.

While the scale of the threat is daunting, our history reminds us that we are not powerless.

This week’s UN Ocean Conference in Nice, France, and the critical UN meetings later this Summer, offer governments a crucial chance to protect the hard-won gains and reverse the damages that have been made. Whether they seize it will determine the future of the world’s largest—and most essential—commons.

Sushma Raman, Greenpeace USA’s Interim Executive Director, is a senior professional with extensive expertise in launching and scaling initiatives, collaboratives, and grantmaking programs aimed at advancing social justice.

John Hocevar is an accomplished campaigner, explorer, and marine biologist, John has helped win several major victories for marine conservation since becoming the director of Greenpeace’s oceans campaign in 2004.

11 June 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Aviva Chomsky

In an aphorism sometimes attributed to Leo Tolstoy, sometimes to John Gardner, all literature relies on one of two plots: a person goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

Let me offer my own version. We might summarize the entire history of the human race in two words: people move. Everything else is just elaboration on that basic plot.

Some of history’s worst atrocities can be attributed to certain people trying to control other people’s movements, whether by capturing them, herding them into prison camps (concentration camps, strategic hamlets, model villages), enslaving and transporting them, or warehousing them in besieged countries or regions while barricading the borders of anyplace to which they might want to flee, often consigning them to death in treacherous deserts or seas for trying to exercise the basic human right of freedom of movement.

European Freedom and Colonial Domination

In February, President Trump astonished the world by proclaiming that the United States should “take over” Gaza and rid it entirely of its Palestinian population. Yet in many ways, as startling as that might have seemed, his proposal fit right in with his drive to remove millions of people from the United States. Both reflected a colonial arrogance that the U.S. and Israel share: the idea that some people (Americans/Europeans/Whites/colonizers) have the right to move themselves as they desire while moving others against their will. Consider it, after a fashion, a contemporary (as well as historic) version of apartheid.

Forcing people to move or prohibiting their mobility are two sides of the same colonial or neocolonial coin. Colonizers invade and drive people out or enslave, transport, enclose, and imprison them while barricading off the privileged spaces they create for themselves. In a vicious cycle, colonizers or imperial powers justify their borders and walls in the name of “security” while protecting themselves from those desperate to escape their domination. And such ideas, old as they may be, are still distinctly with us.

European imperial actors from Christopher Columbus on claimed the right to freedom of movement on this planet. Today, the flyer you get in the mail with your passport proudly insists that, “with your U.S. passport, the world is yours!”

Or consider historian and scientist Jared Diamond’s nonchalant claim that “no traditional society tolerated the relatively open access enjoyed by modern American or European citizens, most of whom can travel anywhere… merely by presenting a valid passport and visa to a passport control officer.”

Diamond argued that Americans and Europeans exemplify the freedoms of modernity, while more “traditional societies” oppress people by restricting their travel. But if Americans and Europeans enjoy the freedom to travel, it’s not because they are so much more modern than other inhabitants of this planet. It’s because other countries don’t restrict their freedom. On the other hand, it’s the U.S. and Europe, Diamond’s symbols of modernity, that tend to impose the greatest restrictions with their militarized borders and deportation regimes.

Perhaps we could better define modernity as the European drive to control mobility, forcing others to accept their intrusions while denying free mobility to the rest of the world. The United States and Israel offer a spectrum of examples of how the right to deport, the right to transport, the right to enclose, and the right to exclude tend to complement one another on this strange planet of ours. Both countries claim to be liberal democracies and celebrate their commitment to equal rights, while reserving those rights for some and excluding others.

Colonialism and the Postwar Order

While it’s easy to imagine that colonialism is part of our past, think again. Its structures, institutions, and ideas still haunt our world. And one of the defining powers of colonizers always was the way they reserved for themselves (and only themselves) the right to move freely, while also reserving the right to move those they had colonized around like so many chess pieces.

Moving (and moving others) has been inherent in every colonial project. The roots of today’s deportation regimes — particularly in the United States, Europe, and Israel — lie in the determination of colonializing countries to wrest wealth from the lands and labor of those they colonized and enjoy that wealth in their own privileged spaces from which the colonized are largely excluded.

The “rules-based world order” that emerged after World War II created institutions for international cooperation and international law, ended colonial empires (as the former colonies gained independence), and dismantled segregation in the United States and, eventually, apartheid in South Africa. But none of that truly or totally erased what had existed before. Global postwar decolonization and the struggle for equality proved to be lengthy and sometimes extremely bloody processes.

In the U.S., people of color are full citizens and can no longer, as a group, be legally enclosed or removed against their will. Europe, too, has dismantled its colonial empires. But the post-colonial world has developed a new form of global apartheid, where the racialized drive to enclose and remove is now directed at immigrants, the vast majority of them escaping the ongoing ravages left by colonialism (and more recently climate change) in their own countries.

Israel is in some ways an anachronism in that twentieth-century trajectory. Its colonizing project was carried out just as other colonized peoples were throwing off their rulers. Its expulsions of Palestinians, which began in the 1940s, have only accelerated in our own time. Meanwhile, Israel created its own legal version of apartheid (even as South Africa’s was dismantled), with those Palestinians who were not expelled increasingly surrounded by prisons and walls.

The Right to Deport: Israel

Zionists began to assert the right to expel well before the state of Israel was created in 1948.

In 1895, in an often-quoted passage, Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl, proposed that “we shall try to spirit the penniless [Arab] population across the border… The removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” During the post-World War I British Mandate in Palestine, Zionist, Arab, and British officials agreed that “there could be no viable Jewish state in all or part of Palestine unless there was a mass displacement of Arab inhabitants.”

Palestine’s British colonial authorities advocated such a displacement in their 1937 Peel Commission Report. It was then enthusiastically endorsed by Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion, later Israel’s first prime minister (“The compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us… an opportunity which we never dared to dream in our wildest imaginings”) and Chaim Weizmann (“If half a million Arabs could be transferred, two million Jews could be put in their place”).

Israel compounded its right to deport with the right to imprison, enclose, and kill. A plethora of laws and walls continue to restrict the return, movement, and residence of Palestinians. Israeli historian Ilan Pappé described the Israeli occupation regime in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967 as having created “the biggest prison on earth.”

In the older settler colonial countries, the days of Trails of Tears, imprisonment on reservations, the forced removal of children to boarding schools, and wars of extermination are mostly in the past. But in Israel, we are witnessing such a project happening before our very eyes. The eliminationist project there is proceeding apace with the tens of thousands killed in Gaza, and in President Trump’s and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bald proposals for the complete removal of the Palestinian population from that strip of land, as well as in the restrictions on mobility and the thousands of home demolitions and displacements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The Right to Deport: The United States

In the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this country ended slavery and enclosure and granted previously enslaved Africans and their descendants, as well as Native Americans, the right to citizenship.

Until after the Civil War, however, “immigrants” meant White Europeans — the only people then allowed to become citizens. Citizenship by birth, mandated by the 14th Amendment after the Civil War, complicated that picture because non-Whites born in U.S. territories also became citizens. To avoid this, the country quickly began to racially restrict immigration. By the late twentieth century, the right to immigrate and more equal rights inside the country were extended to non-Whites. But those rights were always fragile and accompanied by anti-immigrant and deportation campaigns, increasingly justified with the concept of “illegality.”

Developments in the twenty-first century clearly suggest that the arc of history does not necessarily bend toward justice, as a racial deportation regime resurges in a major fashion under President Donald Trump. He, of course, has long distinguished between “shithole countries” and “countries like Norway” as he continues to tighten the screws around most immigrants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, while recently ostentatiously welcoming White Afrikaaners from South Africa.

The Trump administration’s repressive treatment of immigrants includes endless border militarization, the stripping of legal status from hundreds of thousands of immigrants, inventing increasingly draconian excuses for deportation, expanding immigrant incarceration, and pursuing exotic extraterritorial imprisonment and deportation schemes, including pressuring and bribing countries ranging from Costa Rica and Venezuela to Libya and South Sudan to take people forcibly deported from the United States. Others are being disappeared into prisons in Guantánamo and El Salvador.

Strangely — or maybe not so strangely — at the same time that the United States is deporting such “despicable human beings,” it’s demanding the extradition of others, including dozens of Mexicans. “The previous Administration allowed these criminals to run free and commit crimes all over the world,” Trump complained. “The United States’ intention is to extend its justice system,” a Mexican security analyst explained, so that the U.S. can prosecute Mexicans for crimes committed in Mexico. Forcibly moving people works both ways.

Connecting the U.S. and Israel Through Importation-Deportation

The colonial importation-deportation-incarceration regimes of the United States and Israel are intertwined in many ways. Of course, the U.S. decision to strictly limit Jewish (and other southern and eastern European) immigration in the 1920s contributed to the desperate search of European Jews for refuge in the Hitlerian years to come — and to the growth of Zionism, and the postwar migration to Israel.

The new United Nations — made up primarily of colonizers who had been keen to deport (or, in the case of the United States, make sure they didn’t add to) their own Jewish populations — partitioned Palestine to create Israel at the end of 1947. As the only powerful country to emerge from World War II unscathed, the United States would play an outsized role in that organization.

President Trump’s proposal to take Gaza and eliminate its population expresses his own (and Israel’s) settler-colonial dream for what Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe famously called the “elimination of the native.” Trump initially suggested deporting Gaza’s population to Egypt and Jordan, then to Sudan, Somalia, and Somaliland, and then to Libya — proposals enthusiastically endorsed by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. By mid-March of this year, Israel was creating a new migration authority to oversee the planned expulsion and 80% of Jewish Israelis found that plan “desirable” (though only 52% thought it was “practical”).

As of late May, none of those countries had accepted Trump’s proposal, though negotiations with Libya were evidently ongoing. But Trump’s plan to pressure or bribe poorer, weaker countries to accept Palestinian deportees mirrored his deals to deport “unwanteds” from the United States. In addition to the several Latin American countries where his administration has already sent deportees, it is looking to Angola, Benin, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Libya, Moldova, and Rwanda as possibilities. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained, “We are working with other countries to say, ‘we want to send you some of the most despicable human beings to your countries…Would you do that, as a favor to us? And the further away from America, the better.’”

Another connection between the deportation regimes of the U.S. and Israel is the way the Trump administration has mobilized charges of antisemitism to imprison and deport Palestinians and their supporters. In ordering the deportation of protester Mahmoud Khalil and others, Rubio claimed that their “condoning antisemitic conduct” undermined American foreign policy objectives.

The United States and Israel share another dystopian project as well: ratcheting up fear and suffering to inspire people to “self-deport.” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem flooded social and other media with a “multimillion dollar ad campaign” threatening immigrants: “Leave now. If you don’t, we will find you and we will deport you.” In this respect, MAGA Republicans differed little from liberal Democrats, as Noem was echoing Vice President Kamala Harris’s words to Guatemalans: “Don’t come… If you do, you will be turned back.” In an eerily similar fashion, on the Israeli-occupied West Bank, “settler advertisements appear on screens and billboards telling Palestinians, ‘There is no future in Palestine.’” Though their tactics differ in scale — the United States is not massacring immigrants and bombing their neighborhoods — they share the goal of eliminating a population.

One apparent difference makes the comparison even more revealing. The United States is aiming its repression at immigrants; Israel against the native population. But the earliest history of deportation in the United States began with the pushing out or slaughtering of the indigenous Native American population in order to clear the land for White settlement. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Africans were forcibly imported to provide labor, many of them even before the U.S. became an independent state. They then remained enslaved and their mobility restricted for almost a century. Colonial control of freedom of movement, in other words, can take different forms over time.

Both the United States and Israel also disproportionately imprison their minoritized populations — another denial of freedom of movement. In the United States, this means people of color. Black people make up 14% of the population but 41% of the prison and jail population. Native Americans are incarcerated at four times the rate of White people. The United States also maintains the world’s largest immigrant detention system, with expansion plans already underway.

In Israel, it’s Palestinians who are disproportionately imprisoned, both inside that country and in its occupied territories. While Palestinians constitute about 20% of Israel’s population, they constitute about 60% of Israel’s prisoners. (Such statistics are hard to come by today, so that figure doesn’t include the thousands taken prisoner since Oct. 7, 2023.) Many Palestinian prisoners languish in what Israel calls “administrative detention,” a status created for Palestinians that allows lengthy detention without charge.

Borders, Walls, and Global Apartheid

We are so accustomed to imagining a world of equally sovereign countries, each creating its own immigration policy, that it’s easy to miss the colonial dimensions of immigration flows and the ways that colonial histories, immigration restrictions, expulsions, and incarceration are connected.  Settler countries like Israel and the United States have particular similarities (and particular connections), but most European powers that have benefited from the world’s colonial order now barricade their borders against potential migrants.

Most of the world agrees that apartheid inside a country’s borders is the epitome of injustice. Why, then, are we so ready to accept a global version of it?

Aviva Chomsky, a TomDispatch regular, is professor of history and coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts.

11 June 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Chris Hedges

The genocide is almost complete. When it is concluded it will not only have decimated the Palestinians, but will have exposed the moral bankruptcy of Western civilization.

This is the end. The final blood-soaked chapter of the genocide. It will be over soon. Weeks. At most. Two million people are camped out amongst the rubble or in the open air. Dozens are killed and wounded daily from Israeli shells, missiles, drones, bombs and bullets. They lack clean water, medicine and food. They have reached a point of collapse. Sick. Injured. Terrified. Humiliated. Abandoned. Destitute. Starving. Hopeless.

In the last pages of this horror story, Israel is sadistically baiting starving Palestinians with promises of food, luring them to the narrow and congested nine-mile ribbon of land that borders Egypt. Israel and its cynically named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), allegedly funded by Israel’s Ministry of Defense and the Mossad, is weaponizing starvation. It is enticing Palestinians to southern Gaza the way the Nazis enticed starving Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to board trains to the death camps. The goal is not to feed the Palestinians. No one seriously argues there is enough food or aid hubs. The goal is to cram Palestinians into heavily guarded compounds and deport them.

What comes next? I long ago stopped trying to predict the future. Fate has a way of surprising us. But there will be a final humanitarian explosion in Gaza’s human slaughterhouse. We see it with the surging crowds of Palestinians fighting to get a food parcel, which has resulted in Israeli and U.S. private contractors shooting dead at least 130 and wounding over seven hundred others in the first eight days of aid distribution. We see it with Benjamin Netanyahu’s arming ISIS-linked gangs in Gaza that loot food supplies. Israel, which has eliminated hundreds of employees with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), doctors, journalists, civil servants and police in targeted assassinations, has orchestrated the implosion of civil society.

I suspect Israel will facilitate a breach in the fence along the Egyptian border. Desperate Palestinians will stampede into the Egyptian Sinai. Maybe it will end some other way. But it will end soon. There is not much more Palestinians can take.

_________________________________________________________

We — full participants in this genocide — will have achieved our demented goal of emptying Gaza and expanding Greater Israel. We will bring down the curtain on the live-streamed genocide. We will have mocked the ubiquitous university programs of Holocaust studies, designed, it turns out, not to equip us to end genocides, but deify Israel as an eternal victim licensed to carry out mass slaughter. The mantra of never again is a joke. The understanding that when we have the capacity to halt genocide and we do not, we are culpable, does not apply to us. Genocide is public policy. Endorsed and sustained by our two ruling parties.

There is nothing left to say. Maybe that is the point. To render us speechless. Who does not feel paralyzed? And maybe, that too, is the point. To paralyze us. Who is not traumatized? And maybe that too was planned. Nothing we do, it seems, can halt the killing. We feel defenseless. We feel helpless. Genocide as spectacle.

I have stopped looking at the images. The rows of little shrouded bodies. The decapitated men and women. Families burned alive in their tents. The children who have lost limbs or are paralyzed. The chalky death masks of those pulled from under the rubble. The wails of grief. The emaciated faces. I can’t.

This genocide will haunt us. It will echo down history with the force of a tsunami. It will divide us forever. There is no going back.

And how will we remember? By not remembering.

Once it is over, all those who supported it, all those who ignored it, all those who did nothing, will rewrite history, including their personal history. It was hard to find anyone who admitted to being a Nazi in post-war Germany, or a member of the Klu Klux Klan once segregation in the southern United States ended. A nation of innocents. Victims even. It will be the same. We like to think we would have saved Anne Frank. The truth is different. The truth is, crippled by fear, nearly all of us will only save ourselves, even at the expense of others. But that is a truth that is hard to face. That is the real lesson of the Holocaust. Better it be erased.

In his book “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” Omar El Akkad writes:

Should a drone vaporize some nameless soul on the other side of the planet, who among us wants to make a fuss? What if it turns out they were a terrorist? What if the default accusation proves true, and we by implication be labeled terrorist sympathizers, ostracized, yelled at? It is generally the case that people are most zealously motivated by the worst plausible thing that could happen to them. For some, the worst plausible thing might be the ending of their bloodline in a missile strike. Their entire lives turned to rubble and all of it preemptively justified in the name of fighting terrorists who are terrorists by default on account of having been killed. For others, the worst plausible thing is being yelled at.

You can see my interview with El Akkad here.

You cannot decimate a people, carry out saturation bombing over 20 months to obliterate their homes, villages and cities, massacre tens of thousands of innocent people, set up a siege to ensure mass starvation, drive them from land where they have lived for centuries and not expect blowback. The genocide will end. The response to the reign of state terror will begin. If you think it won’t you know nothing about human nature or history. The killing of two Israeli diplomats in Washington and the attack against supporters of Israel at a protest in Boulder, Colorado, are only the start.

Chaim Engel, who took part in the uprising at the Nazis’ Sobibor death camp in Poland, described how, armed with a knife, he attacked a guard in the camp.

“It’s not a decision,” Engel explained years later. “You just react, instinctively you react to that, and I figured, ‘Let us to do, and go and do it.’ And I went. I went with the man in the office and we killed this German. With every jab, I said, ‘That is for my father, for my mother, for all these people, all the Jews you killed.’”

Does anyone expect Palestinians to act differently? How are they to react when Europe and the United States, who hold themselves up as the vanguards of civilization, backed a genocide that butchered their parents, their children, their communities, occupied their land and blasted their cities and homes into rubble? How can they not hate those who did this to them?

What message has this genocide imparted not only to Palestinians, but to all in the Global South?

It is unequivocal. You do not matter. Humanitarian law does not apply to you. We do not care about your suffering, the murder of your children. You are vermin. You are worthless. You deserve to be killed, starved and dispossessed. You should be erased from the face of the earth.

“To preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library,” El Akkad writes:

To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures. To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, food. Banks. To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilized world might win.

There are people I have known for years who I will never speak to again. They know what is happening. Who does not know? They will not risk alienating their colleagues, being smeared as an antisemite, jeopardizing their status, being reprimanded or losing their jobs. They do not risk death, the way Palestinians do. They risk tarnishing the pathetic monuments of status and wealth they spent their lives constructing. Idols. They bow down before these idols. They worship these idols. They are enslaved by them.

At the feet of these idols lie tens of thousands of murdered Palestinians.

Chris Hedges, who graduated from seminary at Harvard Divinity School, worked for nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, National Public Radio and other news organizations in Latin America, the Middle East and the Balkans.

11 June 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

Gaza (Quds News Network)- Israel has committed the crime against humanity of extermination in Gaza, according to a damning new report by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry. The report states that Israeli forces systematically target civilians sheltering in schools, mosques, and cultural sites across the besieged territory.

The Commission also found that Israeli forces committed war crimes, including wilful killing and directing attacks at civilians, especially in educational and religious facilities. These attacks have devastated Gaza’s civilian life and infrastructure and amounted to a deliberate effort to erase Palestinian identity and future.

“We are seeing more and more indications that Israel is carrying out a concerted campaign to obliterate Palestinian life in Gaza,” said Navi Pillay, Chair of the Commission and former UN human rights chief.

he report found that Israel destroyed or damaged over 90% of Gaza’s school and university buildings and more than half of its religious and cultural sites. Hundreds of thousands of children have been denied access to education for nearly two years. The commission says this scale of destruction reflects intent to exterminate a protected group and deny them the means to survive and thrive.

Cultural Erasure and War Crimes

The Commission documented Israeli airstrikes, shelling, arson, and controlled demolitions that targeted education facilities. In several cases, Israeli soldiers filmed themselves mocking Palestinians before destroying schools. Such actions, it said, demonstrate intent to permanently destroy the Palestinian education system.

In attacking civilians sheltering in mosques and schools, Israel committed the crime of extermination under international law. While the destruction of cultural sites is not in itself genocidal, the report notes it may infer genocidal intent when combined with other actions aimed at destroying a population.

The report also confirms that Israeli forces used Gaza schools and universities for military purposes, including converting part of Al-Azhar University into a synagogue for soldiers.

The report strongly condemns Israel’s systematic and disproportionate attacks, which violated international law requiring distinction between civilian and military objects.

The report says Israel deliberately destroyed 10 major cultural and religious sites in Gaza with no military justification. Artefacts were looted or destroyed, and civilian heritage was erased. The Commission says this erasure of culture is part of a broader campaign to weaken Palestinian collective identity.

“The destruction of cultural and religious life harms not just the present generation but generations to come,” said Pillay. “It erodes Palestinians’ historical ties to the land.”

West Bank Also Targeted

The Commission also documented severe impacts on the education system in the occupied West Bank and the eastern part of Jerusalem. Over 806,000 students have faced harassment, school closures, and settler violence. Israeli authorities have done little to prevent or prosecute these attacks.

In the eastern part of Jerusalem, religious worship at Al-Aqsa Mosque has been heavily restricted. Israeli forces have carried out militarized raids and allowed increased access to Jewish settlers, triggering tension and eroding Palestinian religious freedoms.

The report will be formally presented to the UN Human Rights Council on June 17, 2025.

Israel, which withdrew from the Council in February, has previously accused it of bias. After the Commission’s March report accused Israel of committing genocidal acts by targeting Gaza’s reproductive healthcare system, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed the council as “anti-Semitic” and “irrelevant.”

But Navi Pillay said the findings are based on international legal standards and rigorous investigation.

“Children in Gaza have lost their childhood,” she said. “They live without education, without safety, and with no hope. This is not just war. This is extermination.”

11 June 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor 

Palestinian Territory – Israeli forces are employing a local armed gang involved in aid theft, along with foreign mercenaries from a US private security firm, to kill starving Palestinian civilians near food distribution centres in Rafah. These groups are also tasked with inciting chaos and contributing to the systematic destruction of essential services and livelihoods in the Gaza Strip.

Euro-Med Monitor’s field team documented Israeli forces, along with members of an armed gang they had formed, opening fire on hundreds of civilians attempting to reach an army-established aid distribution centre west of Rafah. Fourteen Palestinians have been killed so far, reflecting the role of these gangs as enforcers of a policy of mass killing.

Our team verified the testimonies of over 12 witnesses, several of whom were injured on Monday morning’s violence in the Al-Alam area west of Rafah, as civilians tried to obtain food aid.

According to witness testimonies, a crowd of starving civilians headed to the area after receiving news of an aid delivery. They were met by armoured four-wheel-drive military vehicles carrying armed men in uniforms bearing an insignia that included the words ‘Palestinian Counter-Terrorism Service’ along with a Palestinian flag. This uniform is specific to an armed gang formed by Yaser Abu Shabab, which operates in direct coordination with Israeli forces and controls certain areas.

Meanwhile, gang members ordered civilians to line up, then abruptly told them to disperse, claiming there would be no aid that day. Driven by hunger and desperation, the crowd continued toward the distribution centre, only to be met with a barrage of direct gunfire from the Israeli-commanded gang, resulting in civilian casualties. When the brother of one wounded man objected to the shooting, he was also shot at close range and likely killed on the spot.

As tensions escalated and the armed gang lost control, its members retreated toward Israeli military positions. Israeli forces then intervened, joining them in random and direct gunfire using military vehicles, quadcopters, and Apache helicopters. The assault forcibly dispersed the crowd, killed at least 14 civilians, and injured dozens more.

Euro-Med Monitor received credible information that a foreign mercenary employed by the US security company overseeing the aid distribution centre shot and killed a civilian. Tear gas was also repeatedly used to disperse aid seekers.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has explicitly acknowledged the formation of an armed tribal militia known as the ‘Abu Shabab Gang’ to carry out combat missions in the Gaza Strip. Our data indicates that this gang is also involved in looting aid, including UN trucks, through armed robberies conducted under the protection of Israeli quadcopters. The stolen goods are then transported to Israeli-controlled areas and sold at exorbitant prices.

The repeated involvement of this armed gang is deeply alarming, as it deliberately opens fire on civilian crowds at aid distribution centres and along truck routes, resulting in deaths and injuries, including among women and children, in gruesome scenes that reveal Israel’s transformation of the hunger crisis into a systematic tool for mass killing.

Members of the US private security company operating within Israeli-imposed aid distribution centres in the Gaza Strip engage in combat operations against civilians and carry out field missions in direct coordination with the Israeli military, which provides them with weapons, equipment, and operational orders on the ground.

Given the nature of their role, their participation in hostilities outside their home countries and on behalf of a foreign military force may qualify them as ‘mercenaries’ under the 1989 International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries, which explicitly prohibits such involvement.

Additionally, the ‘Abu Shabab Gang’ is a local irregular armed force created by the Israeli army, operating under its direct supervision and receiving logistical and weapons support. The gang conducts security and field operations that help enforce control over the population, including dispersing crowds, blocking access to aid, and committing acts of violence and killings against civilians.

Although members of this group are residents of the Gaza Strip, the nature of their operational coordination with the Israeli army renders Israel legally responsible for their actions. As the occupying power, Israel is bound by the Fourth Geneva Convention to protect the civilian population and prevent its agents from committing violations against them.

The Israeli authorities’ authorisation of foreign actors, including private military contractors and local armed groups such as the ‘Abu Shabab Gang,’ to operate inside the Gaza Strip under their direct supervision or in coordination with them does not absolve Israel of legal responsibility; it reinforces and deepens it.

Under international humanitarian law, an occupying power remains responsible for all acts committed within territories under its effective control, whether by official forces or by irregular entities acting with its authorisation or with its explicit or tacit consent.

This responsibility extends to all serious violations committed by these actors, including extrajudicial killings, the deliberate denial of humanitarian aid, the use of starvation as a method of warfare, and the use of mercenaries in hostile acts against the civilian population. Furthermore, Israel’s authorisation of local groups to carry out security and combat missions against civilians, while providing them with weapons, air support, and coordinated movement, constitutes a dangerous pattern of violations for which Israel bears direct responsibility.

Israeli practices are not isolated violations, but part of a systematic policy aimed at dismantling the social structure of the Gaza Strip and expanding impunity by outsourcing violence to external and local actors. This calls for immediate action by the international community to ensure accountability for these grave and complex crimes.

An immediate and independent international investigation must be launched into the grave crimes committed by members of the ‘Abu Shabab Gang’ and foreign mercenaries working with the US private security company. Those involved must be prosecuted before the competent international judiciary or under national jurisdictions, whether through regional mandates or the principle of universal jurisdiction, given the severity of the crimes committed.

Euro-Med Monitor calls for the US security company to be added to the list of entities complicit in international crimes, and for a ban on its contracting with any international or governmental agency.

The Palestinian Authority must clearly and decisively state its position on the gang, which has repeatedly claimed coordination with parties within the Authority. A transparent internal investigation must be launched to examine any potential coordination between gang members and officials in the Authority, and legal action must be taken against anyone found to be involved in or complicit with violations against civilians.

All states, both individually and collectively, must fulfil their legal responsibilities by taking urgent action to stop the genocide in the Gaza Strip, through implementing effective measures to protect Palestinian civilians; ensuring Israel’s compliance with international law and the decisions of the International Court of Justice; preventing the implementation of the US-Israeli forced displacement plan; and holding Israel and its more powerful allies accountable for all crimes against the Palestinians in the Strip. The International Criminal Court must implement the arrest warrants for the Israeli Prime Minister and Minister of Defence at the earliest opportunity, in accordance with the principle that there is no immunity for international crimes.

The international community must also impose economic, diplomatic, and military sanctions on Israel and its allies, particularly the United States, for such grave violations of international law. These sanctions should include arms embargoes; a ban on the export and import of parts, software, and dual-use goods; an end to all political, financial, and military support; freezing the assets of officials involved in crimes against Palestinians and imposing travel bans on these officials; suspending the operations of Israeli and US military and security companies in international markets and freezing their assets; and suspending trade privileges and bilateral agreements that provide Israel and the US with economic benefits that enable their continued crimes against the Palestinian people.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor is a Geneva-based independent organization with regional offices across the MENA region and Europe

11 June 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Collective

Israeli forces killed 31 starved civilians and injured 200 more on Wednesday at an alleged ‘aid distribution point’ near the Israeli-created ‘Netzarim corridor’, according to medical sources in Gaza. Victims were waiting for food when troops opened fire, marking the latest massacre linked to operations run by the Israeli-American Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

Mahmoud Basal, spokesman for Gaza’s Civil Defence confirmed that 31 people were killed and about 200 people have also been wounded and taken to hospitals. He said that the casualties were a result of “Israeli tank and drone fire”.

Al Jazeera spoke to Jaber Al Hawjeri, a father of six who was near an aid distribution site in central Gaza’s so-called Netzarim Corridor when Israeli forces opened fire.

Desperate for food after running out of supplies, even bread, Al Hawjeri said people were “shot at” by what he believes were snipers or drones.

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“We went to face death for some humanitarian aid, but we were attacked and left without any food,” he said, adding that his nephew was among the wounded.

“Victims were all over the place … The situation is going from bad to worse. We have no hope at all.”

11 June 2025

Source: countercurrents.org