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By Wafaa Shurafa

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — The Israeli military on Monday issued sweeping evacuation orders covering most of Rafah, indicating it could soon launch another major ground operation in the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip.

Israel ended its ceasefire with the Hamas militant group and renewed its air and ground war earlier this month. At the beginning of March it cut off all supplies of food, fuel, medicine and humanitarian aid to the territory’s roughly 2 million Palestinians to pressure Hamas to accept changes to the truce agreement.

The evacuation orders appeared to cover nearly all of the city and nearby areas. The military ordered Palestinians to head to Muwasi, a sprawl of squalid tent camps along the coast. The orders came during Eid al-Fitr, a normally festive Muslim holiday marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.

Last May, Israel launched a major operation in Rafah, on the border with Egypt, leaving large parts of it in ruins. The military seized a strategic corridor along the border as well as the Rafah crossing with Egypt, Gaza’s only gateway to the outside world that was not controlled by Israel.

Israel was supposed to withdraw from the corridor under the ceasefire it signed with Hamas in January under U.S. pressure, but it later refused to, citing the need to prevent weapons smuggling.

Israeli forces killed 15 first responders during a ground operation in Rafah’s Tel al-Sultan neighborhood last week, in what the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said was the deadliest attack on its medics in years.

The Israeli military said its forces opened fire on several vehicles that raised suspicions by advancing without headlights or emergency signals. The military said a Hamas operative and eight other militants were among those killed.

The United Nations humanitarian office said the dead included eight Red Crescent workers, six members of Gaza’s Civil Defense, which operates under the Hamas-run government, and a U.N. worker.

Rescuers were only allowed to access the area nearly a week later to recover the bodies. Footage of Sunday’s recovery operation released by the U.N. showed Civil Defense workers digging into a mound of sand and pulling out a body wearing the same orange vest as the rescuers.

Israel has vowed to intensify its military operations until Hamas releases the remaining 59 hostages it holds — 24 of whom are believed to be alive. Israel has also demanded that Hamas disarm and leave the territory, conditions that were not included in the ceasefire agreement and which Hamas has rejected.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel would take charge of security in Gaza after the war and implement U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposal to resettle Gaza’s population in other countries, describing it as “voluntary emigration.”

That plan has been universally rejected by Palestinians, who view it as forcible expulsion from their homeland, and human rights experts say it would likely violate international law.

Hamas, meanwhile, has insisted on implementing the signed agreement, which called for the remainder of the hostages to be released in exchange for a lasting ceasefire and an Israeli pullout. Negotiations over those parts of the agreement were supposed to have begun in February, but only preliminary talks have been held.

The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, rampaging through army bases and farming communities and killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians. The militants took another 251 people hostage, most of whom have since been released in ceasefires or other deals.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not say how many were civilians or combatants. At its height, the war had displaced some 90% of Gaza’s population, with many fleeing multiple times.

Large areas of Gaza have been completely destroyed, and it’s unclear how or when anything will be rebuilt.

31 March 2025

Source: washingtontimes.com

Delivered at the General Debate on Item 3: Promotion and Protection of All Human Rights, Civil, Political, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Including the Right to Development.

By Ahmed Dremly

Huda Helles enjoyed a brief respite during the first days of the latest two-month ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

She lived with her family of eight in a makeshift tent in Al-Wihda Street, central Gaza City, after their house in Al-Shujaiya was bombed by an Israeli air strike in 2023. She and her family had a plan for the various dishes they wanted to cook during Ramadan.

That plan was turned upside down on 2 March, when Israel closed the borders, halting the entry of all humanitarian aid, food, and goods into Gaza. The renewed blockade has brought the enclave to the brink of famine once again.

“We used to cook a variety of dishes every day, but now, for over 20 days, all we’ve had is rice,” Huda said. “Now it’s starting to give me severe stomach cramps.”

On Wednesday, the UN aid coordination office, OCHA, said in its latest update that Israel’s ban on entry of aid has continued for nearly a month and that no aid entered the enclave throughout this period. All requests by humanitarian agencies to coordinate access with Israeli authorities have been denied.

Moreover, Israeli attacks killed eight humanitarian workers since its unilateral decision to resume hostilities on Gaza on 18 March, bringing the total number of aid workers killed by the Israeli army in Gaza to 399, OCHA said.

Helles recalled when the blockade was imposed. The shops were empty within hours, and what was left was too expensive, she said. Even the charity distributions, which once offered a variety of meals, have dwindled, now providing only small servings of rice at the time of Iftar.

After days of eating little more than rice, Huda couldn’t sleep at night, suffering from severe stomach pain and colic. She was diagnosed with a stomach infection two weeks ago.

“Doctors advised me to eat healthy food and avoid canned goods,” she said. “But there’s nothing else to eat except the low-quality charity distribution. I am surviving on eating only bread and cheese, when possible.”

Helles’s mother, Manal, 52, was also supposed to eat healthy food. She suffered a heart attack and high blood pressure at the beginning of this month. Huda thinks that the main reason for her mother’s deteriorating health is living in the harsh conditions in the tents, including the dire lack of food and clean water for drinking.

“During Ramadan, my mother used to prepare a beautiful spread of chicken, meat, and vegetables, carefully preparing each dish for the family,” Huda recalled. “Now, she looks at us helplessly, asking us to hang on, hoping that the starvation will not last much longer.”

‘We lived on canned hummus’

Before the ceasefire, Huda and her family had been displaced to Khan Younis, in the southern part of Gaza.

“We were not able to find a piece of bread. For two months, we lived only on canned hummus.”

During the ceasefire, Huda and her family feared the return of war and the famine that would inevitably follow. And that is what has happened. “It’s unfair to live in starvation again,” she said.

Ahmed Ramda, 38, also struggles to find something to eat or feed his four children during Israel’s current complete blockade on the entry of humanitarian aid, including food. He thinks that the blockade’s impact is even worse than last year.

“We no longer have the energy to flee from one place to another, fetch water, or even recover from wounds due to the lack of food and medical care,” he said.

“They want us to be homeless, reliant on limited humanitarian aid, but all we want is for the borders to open so we can work, make a living, and live in peace.”

He was once a driver, but his car was bombed by Israeli air strikes in November 2023 while he and his family were evacuating. His house was also destroyed, his father killed, and many other family members were wounded.

Now, Ramda and his family live in a tent on Omar Al-Mukhtar Street in central Gaza.

“My children cry every day, refusing to eat the lentils or rice from the charity distributions. They ask me for chicken, meat, and fruits,” Ahmed said. “Their mother even lied to them, telling them she put minced meat in the food, but it melted while cooking.”

“I wish to be dead before the moment I see my children starve to death.”

In January 2024, Ramda and his wife, Sana, welcomed their baby girl, Misk, into the world in their displacement tent in Deir al-Balah, in the middle of the Gaza Strip. However, due to the lack of proper nutrition, Sana had a difficult time breastfeeding Misk.

Tragically, Misk died of malnutrition in August 2024.

“Sana struggled to breastfeed Misk due to the lack of healthy food and because we couldn’t afford what was available in the markets,” Ramda explained through tears.

Meanwhile, his 10-year-old daughter, Jori, has been battling dehydration.

“I lost one daughter, and I’m terrified of losing another before the borders open and we get food,” he said. “I appeal to the world to end our suffering – not for us, the adults, but for the sake of our children, who are deprived of their most basic rights.

“If the borders open, I hope to flee Gaza, seeking a new life in Norway or Belgium, where I can find a job and live in peace with my family.”

‘We want the war to end’

Mazen Marouf, 48, a farmer, struggles to survive with his 11-member family. During the ceasefire, he and his six sons had planted tomatoes and onions on their farmland in Beit Lahia, hoping to feed themselves and make a living from their crops.

But when Israel broke the ceasefire on 18 March, their plans were shattered.

“Israeli artillery and aerial shelling began suddenly in the morning. We could only take our tent,” Marouf said. “We didn’t know where to go.”

Marouf and his family could hardly find an empty place to set up their tent in Al-Yarmouk neighbourhood due to the crowded movement of displaced people. They are still struggling to find something to eat, as they have no money and were unable to bring any food with them when they evacuated.

The north of the Gaza Strip, especially Beit Hanoun, was once considered the food basket of Gaza, but has been decimated by the war. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), at least 67.6 percent of cropland in northern Gaza has been destroyed by Israel.

“We only eat when charity distributions come or when others share their canned food,” Marouf explained. “My family and I are sick and suffering from malnutrition.”

“We don’t want to rely on humanitarian aid. We want the war to stop now and to live in peace and dignity.”

Middle East Eye delivers independent and unrivalled coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond.

29 March 2025

Source: middleeasteye.net

By Lee Mordechai and Liat Kozma

The acute hunger crisis in the Strip is part of a deliberate Israeli strategy to cripple Hamas’ governance capabilities and banish humanitarian groups.

For almost a month, not a single drop of humanitarian aid has entered Gaza. Since March 2 — when the second phase of the ceasefire was due to commence, only for Israel to renege on its commitment to the deal — Israel has blocked the entry of all food into the Strip, along with fuel, medical equipment, and other essential supplies. The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has warned that Gaza’s flour stores will likely run out completely before the end of this week.

While the current policy is more extreme than anything we’ve seen since October 7, Israel has nonetheless imposed restrictions on the entry of aid into Gaza throughout its onslaught. Already in December 2023, Human Rights Watch declared that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war. Almost a year later, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, in part on the grounds that they had “intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food.”

The surge of humanitarian aid that Israel allowed to enter Gaza during the recent two-month ceasefire only served to underscore the cruel intentionality of the starvation policy. Israel argued for months — including in a year-long case at the High Court of Justice, in response to a petition by five Israeli human rights organizations — that any obstacles to the entry of aid were not its fault, attributing them instead to the inefficiencies of humanitarian agencies or looting by gangs. Yet the data paint a clear picture to the contrary.

While the quality and quantity of available data about the volume and composition of aid entering Gaza have declined significantly since the beginning of the ceasefire in mid-January (the two primary sources of information, the Israeli army’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT, and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, have stopped providing detailed dashboard updates), we can still see that the number of aid trucks authorized to enter Gaza increased dramatically, helping to somewhat alleviate the humanitarian crisis in the Strip.

Whereas, according to COGAT, a daily average of 126 aid trucks entered Gaza in the six months leading up to the deal — even despite an ultimatum from the Biden administration in October, demanding the entry of 350 trucks per day — the numbers that entered in the first three days of the ceasefire were 634, 916, and 897 trucks, respectively. The six-week period between the start of the ceasefire on Jan. 19 and Israel’s imposition of a full blockade on March 2 saw the entry of more trucks (25,200) than during the previous six months altogether (21,368).

During the ceasefire, Israel also lifted some of the barriers it had previously imposed on the entry of aid. For example, aid operations within Gaza no longer required coordination with the Israeli army, and it became possible to deliver much larger quantities of supplies to northern Gaza, which had until then been difficult to access. Over 100,000 tents were distributed, and visual evidence showed that heavy equipment, such as bulldozers, was brought in and used to clear roads and remove some of the rubble.

Additionally, the ceasefire allowed Hamas to reassert its governing capabilities in Gaza, which led to a drastic reduction in the looting of aid trucks to the point that the phenomenon became nearly nonexistent. The increased availability of aid also reduced the demand for goods on the black market, further contributing to the decline in looting.

These humanitarian relief measures, however, were not absolute. For example, around 10 percent of the more than half a million residents who returned to their destroyed homes in northern Gaza ended up moving south again, in part because they could not find sufficient means of survival in the devastated north. Moreover, some of the items that Israel was required to allow into Gaza under the terms of the ceasefire, such as mobile homes, appear to have been almost entirely barred from entering.

At the same time, Israel has quietly expanded its use of bureaucracy as a tool for controlling international organizations, tightening restrictions on the entry of aid workers into Gaza. About half of the doctors who received preliminary approval to enter the Strip through the World Health Organization (which requires all details to be submitted a month in advance), later discovered that Israel was denying them entry. Nearly all of these doctors had already entered the enclave since the start of the war, with prior COGAT approval.

A similar decrease in entry permits was observed among humanitarian aid workers. Arwa Damon, a former CNN journalist who founded the International Network for Aid, Relief, and Assistance (INARA), an organization providing medical and psychological assistance to children in Gaza, entered the Strip four times in 2024. In 2025, however, all five of her applications for entry have been denied.

This policy shift, which began in early February, appears to stem from Israel’s decision to impose new regulations on the approval and registration of international organizations. According to these criteria, Israel can deny entry to any organization that promotes BDS, supports international tribunals against Israeli officials or soldiers, or “denies the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”

A step toward direct control

Still, what followed at the start of March was a drastic shift. Israel’s decision to halt all humanitarian aid to Gaza as a means of pressuring Hamas to release the remaining hostages without any commitment from Israel to end the war — an action that amounts to the war crime of collective punishment — was widely condemned by international actors.

About a week after Israel sealed off the border crossings, Energy and Infrastructure Minister Eli Cohen additionally ordered a cutoff of the electricity that Israel sells to Gaza, crippling the operation of desalination plants. Senior Israeli officials even indicated plans to shut off water pipelines to Gaza. Unsurprisingly, food prices in the have Strip skyrocketed since the closure of the crossings, with the sharpest increases recorded in fresh produce like fruits and vegetables.

The impact of this intensified blockade is even more devastating than the one Israel imposed at the beginning of the war, after Gallant’s “no electricity, no food, no fuel” order; Gaza’s stockpiles were much higher back then than they are now, and Israel eventually relented to international pressure and allowed some aid in, albeit in much smaller quantities than what was needed. Yet the state’s latest response to the High Court of Justice — that it has no authority to rule on these matters — underscores its newfound confidence in its position, while the weak international pushback highlights the low political cost of employing starvation and deprivation as a form of collective punishment and a weapon of war.

Israel followed the aid ban with a resumption of its assault on Gaza in the early hours of March 18, killing more than 400 Palestinians in surprise attacks in the first few hours, including 178 children. Among the targets of these airstrikes were the civilian leadership of Hamas, specifically senior officials responsible for governance in the Strip. By crippling Hamas’ ability to manage civilian life in Gaza, Israel is intending to enable armed gangs — similar or identical to those that looted humanitarian aid — to take its place.

All the while, Israel has begun laying the groundwork to shift control of humanitarian aid management from international organizations to the Israeli military itself.

At the beginning of the month, COGAT published a report accusing the UN of disseminating biased, incomplete, or incorrect data. Shortly afterward, the new IDF Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamir, reversed his predecessor’s policy and removed the military’s objection to being the power responsible for distributing humanitarian aid in Gaza. The Israeli government and COGAT simultaneously launched a coordinated campaign — echoed by the prime minister’s supporters — alleging that Hamas steals humanitarian aid from international organizations and uses it to harm Israel, all while claiming that Israel is not supplying Gaza with enough food.

Transferring humanitarian aid management away from international organizations would serve several of Israel’s strategic objectives, aligning with its broader war policy. Direct control over aid would allow Israel to regulate assistance as it sees fit as part of a “carrots and sticks” approach — a policy with clear precedents in the decades preceding the current offensive. Additionally, removing aid organizations from Gaza would significantly reduce the flow of critical information about Israel’s actions in the Strip.

There have been some indications that this policy is having its intended effect. On March 24, the UN decided to “reduce its footprint” in the besieged enclave, partially in response to an attack on international UN personnel the previous week. Around 30 percent of the roughly 100 international UN staff were expected to leave within a week, with others likely to follow suit. An attack on a Red Cross building the same day further demonstrated that Gaza is not safe for international humanitarian workers.

If the army does take over the responsibility for distributing aid, this will increase friction with the local population and almost certainly lead to additional harm to civilians as well as higher casualties among Israeli soldiers. All the while, Israel will be the sole official source of information coming out of Gaza, allowing it to further obscure the reality on the ground from the eyes of the world.

A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.

By Quds News Network

Gaza (Quds News Network)- The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said on Sunday it had recovered the bodies of 15 rescuers killed a week ago when Israeli forces targeted ambulances in the Gaza Strip.

Bodies of eight medics from the Red Crescent, six members of Gaza’s civil defence agency and one employee of a UN agency were retrieved, the Red Crescent said in a statement.

It said one medic, Asaad Nasasra, from the Red Crescent remained missing.

The group said those killed “were targeted by the Israeli occupation forces while performing their humanitarian duties as they were heading to the Hashashin area of Rafah to provide first aid to a number of people injured by Israeli shelling in the area”.

“The occupation’s targeting of Red Crescent medics … can only be considered a war crime punishable under international humanitarian law, which the occupation continues to violate before the eyes of the entire world.”

In an earlier statement the Red Crescent said the bodies “were recovered with difficulty as they were buried in the sand, with some showing signs of decomposition”.

PRCS President Younis al-Khatib condemned Israel for targeting its paramedics as they “fulfil their humanitarian mission”.

“Those souls are not mere numbers. If this incident [happened] anywhere else, the whole world would have moved heaven and earth to expose this war crime,” al-Khatib said on Sunday.

Last week, the Israeli military said that it had fired on ambulances and fire trucks – calling them “suspicious vehicles” – that arrived at a scene where it was carrying out attacks.

Hamas political bureau member Basem Naim slammed the attack on the ambulance and said the “targeted killing of rescue workers – who are protected under international humanitarian law – constitutes a flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions and a war crime”.

The PRCS shared images of its teams saying goodbye to their slain colleagues.

[https://twitter.com/PalestineRCS/status/1906407923489636744]

The Palestinian Health Ministry confirmed in a statement that the bodies of eight paramedics were recovered today after contact with them had been lost over the previous days.

It added: “Some of these bodies were bound and shot in the chest. They were buried in a deep hole to prevent their identification.”

The ministry called on “UN organisations and relevant international bodies to conduct an urgent investigation into these crimes and hold the occupation accountable for committing them.”

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) said the attack is the single deadliest attack on Red Cross/Red Crescent workers anywhere in the world since 2017.

“These dedicated ambulance workers were responding to wounded people. They were humanitarians. They wore emblems that should have protected them; their ambulances were clearly marked. They should have returned to their families; they did not,” IFRC Secretary_General Jagan Chapagain said in a statement.

“Even in the most complex conflict zones, there are rules. These rules of International Humanitarian Law could not be clearer – civilians must be protected; humanitarians must be protected. Health services must be protected,” Chapagain said.

OCHA chief Tom Fletcher said since Israel broke the ceasefire in Gaza on March 18 and resumed its war on the enclave, Israeli air attacks have hit “densely populated areas”, with “patients killed in their hospital beds, ambulances shot at, first responders killed”.

Since Israel resumed its attacks on Gaza, more than 900 Palestinian civilians have been killed in the territory, adding to the more than 50,000 killed since October 7, 2023, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

Red Cross Federation ‘Outraged’ at Israel’s Murder of Red Crescent Medics in Gaza

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) has condemned Israel’s killing of 14 medics in Gaza. The victims, including nine from the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) and five from Gaza’s civil defense, were executed and buried in a deep pit to hide their bodies. Their hands were bound, and they were shot in the chest.

Their bodies were recovered a week after Israeli forces attacked their ambulances in Rafah’s Tel al-Sultan neighborhood. The medics had been responding to injured civilians when they came under fire.

“I am heartbroken,” said IFRC Secretary-General Jagan Chapagain. “These ambulance workers were humanitarians. Their vehicles were clearly marked. They should have returned to their families—but they did not.”

Israel admitted to firing on the ambulances, calling them “suspicious vehicles.” It claimed Hamas fighters were inside. No evidence was provided to support the claim. Humnitarian groups insist the victims were medics performing their duties.

The IFRC demanded accountability and stressed that international law protects medical workers. “When will this stop?” Chapagain asked. “All parties must stop the killing.”

Since the war began in October 2023, at least 30 PRCS medics have been killed.

31 March 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

On the first day of Eid al-Fitr, Israel turned Gaza into a slaughterhouse. Warplanes bombed homes, refugee camps, and even rescue workers. At least 76 Palestinians were murdered, including entire families, women, and children.

This was not just another day of war. It was part of a pattern. Killing on Eid has become an Israeli ritual, one designed to shatter the spirit of an occupied people.

A Calculated Massacre

Among the victims, a family was wiped out in a refugee camp west of Khan Younis. In Hamad City, north of Khan Younis, Israeli bombs killed nine people, including children and women. In Juhor al-Dik, six more perished in another airstrike. Homes, already surrounded by destruction, were erased in seconds.

Even the dead kept multiplying. In al-Shuja’iya, eastern Gaza City, another strike killed more children. Two more Palestinians died in Abasan al-Kabira. Bodies were pulled from the rubble all day, but no one was left to grieve them properly—because grief itself had become too constant, too exhausting.

Slaughtering the Rescuers

Not even those trying to save lives were spared. In Rafah’s Tel al-Sultan neighborhood, rescue workers had disappeared more than a week ago. On Eid morning, their bodies were found.

Israeli forces had executed 14 Palestinian Red Crescent and Civil Defense workers. Their hands were bound, their chests riddled with bullets, their bodies dumped in a deep pit to hide the evidence. The health ministry called it an “escalation in war crimes.” But was it? Or was it just the next step in a genocide where every limit is meant to be broken?

The Science of Psychological Warfare

Israeli journalist Muna Al-Omari described the philosophy behind these killings: “Israel doesn’t just kill—it kills methodically, with a deep understanding of how to break people.”

Her words capture the strategy behind Eid massacres. Killing on a holy day is not random. It is designed to make Palestinians feel that no moment is sacred, no occasion is safe. The goal is psychological: to destroy the idea that there can ever be a life beyond war, beyond occupation.

Al-Omari explained it simply: “When you kill children on Eid—children who suffered hunger, who smiled over a new pair of shoes or a bracelet—you don’t just take their lives. You take away the meaning of joy itself.”

From Gaza to Al-Aqsa: No Space for Celebration

The massacre in Gaza was not the only message. In the occupied Palestinian capital city of Jerusalem, Israeli forces stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque on Eid morning. Heavily armed officers pushed through worshippers, standing among them as a silent warning: “You will not celebrate in peace.”

Al-Omari predicted what comes next: Next year, they will fire tear gas at worshippers. The year after, fewer people will come. Then, in the future, access will be restricted, just like the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.

It is not just about violence. It is about erasing Palestinian presence, piece by piece, until nothing remains but occupation.

Hamas condemned the attacks, stressing that Israel uses the holiday to escalate its massacres, knowing that the world will look away. “What enables Netanyahu—the war criminal—to keep defying international law is the silence of the world and the absence of accountability,” the resistance movement stated.

Al-Omari described it even more bluntly: “Israel no longer waits for condemnation because it knows no one will condemn. It no longer cares about appearances because it no longer needs to.”

And so, the massacres continue. Every year, every war, every Eid.

The message is clear: For Palestinians, there will be no safe days, no sacred moments, no space to exist in peace. Unless the world stops looking away.

31 March 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

Palestinian Territory – The Israeli Supreme Court’s ruling to deny a request to allow humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip is a crucial component of a well-functioning colonial system designed to perpetrate the crime of genocide against the Strip’s people.

The ruling made yesterday (Thursday 27 March)is further evidence that the Israeli judiciary—which has never served as a tool of justice for Palestinians—functions as a part of a system in which all state institutions participate, whetherIsrael’s government, army and other security forces, military prosecution, courts, or media. All of these institutions blatantly violate international legal and humanitarian norms by committingcrimes against Palestinians, aiding in thecommission of such crimes by coordinating their activities, and/or providing a false legal cover.

The Israeli Supreme Court has explicitly and directly legitimised Israel’s illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip. This blockade has denied food, water, medicine, fuel, and electricity to over two million people—half of whom are children—for nearly 18months. Meanwhile, human rights organisations have warned that Israel’s refusal to allow humanitarian aid and basic supplies into the enclave for more than three consecutive weeks has accelerated famine in the Strip and led to the deaths of infants from starvation. One of the most obvious examples of the complicity of all Israeli state institutions in the crime of genocide is the use of starvation as a declared weapon against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, which has nowbeen made an official policy through a “political”decision validated by a court ruling.

To support its ruling, the Israeli court used the argument that the State of Israel is exempt from the obligations of belligerent occupation under international law in all cases pertaining to the Gaza Strip. This blatantly violates established international legal norms that are acknowledged to apply to the Occupied Palestinian Territory. It also goes against the International Court of Justice’s 2024 advisory opinion and gravely breaches the ICJ rulings in South Africa’sgenocide case against Israel.

The Fourth Geneva Convention, which applies to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including the Gaza Strip, is gravely violated by the Israeli court’s recent decision. The occupying power is required by the Convention to provide food and medical supplies to the occupied population. It isalso required to permit relief efforts for the benefit of these populations in the event that local resources are insufficient, and to allow for the supply of facilities, including those conducted by states or humanitarian organisations, especially those involving food aid, clothing, and medical supplies.

Euro-Med Monitor emphasises that the decision is a flagrant disregard of the rulings of the International Court of Justice in the South Africa v. Israel genocide case. In January and March of 2024, the Court mandated that Israel take prompt and decisive action to allow for the delivery of humanitarian aid and essential basic services to alleviate the terrible circumstances faced byPalestinians in the Gaza Strip. In coordination with the United Nations, these measures includedproviding food, water, electricity, fuel, shelter, humanitarian aid, clothing, hygiene, and sanitation needs, as well as medical supplies and medical care to Palestinians across the Strip, including by expanding the number and capacity of land crossing points and keeping them open for as long as possible.

The International Court of Justice affirmed that Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip constituted a real and immediate threat of genocide to the Palestinian people there, as well as the possibility of irreversible harm and violations of Palestinians’rights to be protected from genocide under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

The Israeli court’s rationale is therefore in direct opposition to the advisory opinion issued on 19 July 2024 by the International Court of Justice, the highest court in the world. The ICJ unequivocally affirmed that Israel’s legal obligations were not terminated by its military withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, as Israel still maintains effective control over key areas of the Strip, such as the buffer zone, the land, sea, and air borders, restrictions on the movement of people and goods, and tax control. Since 7 October 2023, this control has become much more intense. As a result, Israel continues to be the occupying force in accordance with international law and is responsible for providing humanitarian aid and other necessities to the civilian population in the Strip.

The rejection of these fundamental legal preceptsby the Israeli court is not just a misreading; rather, it is a deliberate judicial intervention aimed atdenying the existence of the Israeli occupation and undermining the laws that safeguard the rights of the people who are subject to it. Viewed within the larger framework of institutional complicity that helps to enable and carry out Israel’s crime of genocide against the Palestinian people, this intervention turns the international legal system from a tool of protection into a cover for impunity.

Israel has a legal duty to the people it governs, and this duty extends beyond its legal relationship with the territory. Instead, it necessitates asteadfast obligation to uphold and defend human rights and the principles of preemptive international law under all conditions. Israel’s responsibilities under fundamental human rights conventions, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and other international instruments, extend beyond the regulations of occupation law and include duties pertaining to preventing population starvation and allowing the entry of humanitarian aid. Regardless of a state’s legal standing under international law, its effective control over a territory serves as the foundation for its legal accountability for actions that impact this territory’s residents.

The presence of a state of occupation alone does not negate the duties of an occupying power toprevent the occupied population from living in substandard conditions or from suffering from severe physical or mental injury.

Instead, these duties are enforced by preemptive standards of customary international law, such as the outright ban on crimes against humanity, such as apartheid and genocide. Whether in times of peace or conflict, these standards require all states to uphold these rights and guarantee their protection at all times.

All Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are experiencing a dire humanitarian situation, especially since Israel’s genocidal campaign of direct killings in the Strip resumed on 18 March. This occurs at a time when Israel has been using other tools of genocide against the Strip’s people for a year and a half now. These tools include starvation, blockade, deprivation of virtually all means of survival, severe physical and psychological suffering, and the imposition of living conditions that are destructive, all of which are intended to destroy the Palestinian people there.

Not only does the ongoing situation in the Gaza Strip violate Israel’s legal obligations, but it also directly calls into question all other states’adherence to their own obligations, whether these states are directly involved in the genocide or have not acted decisively to stop Israel if in a position to do so. The Fourth Geneva Convention, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and customary international law all bind these states. These regulations require states to actively work to prevent genocide and to abstain from any actions that facilitate, encourage, or open the door for its occurrence.

The international community must stop enslaving the Palestinian people to a state that is using all of its official institutions to destroy their lives, drive them off their land, and threaten their shared national identity. Given its decades-long failure to uphold international law and apply it equitably to, and without discrimination against, Palestinians, the international community is directly responsible for the disastrous reality that Palestinians face today, wherever they may be. This failure revealsthe biased foundations upon which the international system was established, as this system has deprived Palestinians of their most fundamental rights, most notably their right toexist.

All states must take up their individual and collective legal obligations and act quickly to put an end to the genocide in the Gaza Strip. They must do everything they can to protect Palestinian civilians there, i.e. enforce all necessary measures to force Israel to immediately and fully lift the blockade; permit unhindered freedom of movement of people and goods; open all crossings without arbitrary conditions; and take decisive action to protect Palestinians from forced displacement and swift or slow-motion killing. This entails launching an immediate response to address the population’s pressing and pertinent needs, such as offering suitable temporary housing for displaced people.

The international community must impose economic, diplomatic, and military sanctions on Israel due to its systematic and serious violations of international law. These sanctions, which willincrease pressure on Israel to stop its crimes against Palestinians, should include barring arms exports to Israel; stopping military cooperation with Israel; freezing the financial assets of officials involved in crimes against Palestinians; and suspending trade privileges and bilateral agreements that give Israel economic benefits.

In addition to acting to stop Israeli policies that violate the most fundamental humanitarian principles and endanger the lives of millions of civilians, the States Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention should fulfil their duty under Common Article 1 to uphold and guarantee adherence to the Convention under all circumstances.

The International Criminal Court must issue arrest warrants for Israeli officials involved in international crimes in the Gaza Strip, and expedite its ongoing investigations. Additionally, the Court ought to acknowledge and specifically address Israel’s crimes as genocide. The Rome Statute’s States Parties should fulfil their legal duties to assist the Court in every way possible;make sure that arrest warrants against Israeli officials are carried out; bring these officials to international justice; and make sure to end the policy of impunity that has been granted to these officials thus far.

Along with fulfilling its legal obligations, the international community must take immediate action to end the root causes of the suffering and persecution endured by the Palestinian people forthe past 76 years: Israeli occupation and settler-colonialism in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The international community must compel Israelto guarantee the Palestinians’ right to live in freedom, dignity, and self-determination in accordance with international law; to dismantle the system of apartheid and isolation imposed on the Palestinians; to lift the illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip; to hold Israeli perpetrators and allies accountable and prosecute them; and to ensure Palestinian victims’ rights to compensation and redress.

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

29 March 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Clarence Lusane,

During the 2024 election campaign, candidate Donald Trump’s most controversial rally occurred at New York’s Madison Square Garden. A comedian on the program referred to the island of Puerto Rico — and by implication Puerto Ricans — as garbage. He and the Trump campaign were rightfully pilloried and called out for his disgusting bigotry.

Little notice was given, however, to another noxious racist moment at the same event. On Trump’s playlist for the rally was the Confederate and White nationalist anthem “Dixie.” Notably, that song was played as Trump loyalist and harsh defender Representative Byron Donalds (R-FL) was coming on stage. Donalds is African American and perhaps Trump’s most visible Black sycophant. While Black social media and journalists crucified Trump and Donalds over the incident, for Black MAGA supporters, the episode was simply put in the memory hole.

They were muted as well when Trump and vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance spread racist falsehoods about Haitians supposedly eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. They seemed to be the only people in the country who didn’t hear what everyone else had heard — a fabrication of stunning proportions.

Trump and MAGA’s White Nationalist Rampage

The silence of Black MAGA supporters in the face of Trump’s and Vance’s bigotry during the campaign has carried over to the second Trump era. Now that he’s president again, their voices are being quelled as his White-power, autocratic government takes shape.

The president has spent almost every day of his second term in office so far raging against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), issuing executive orders of a White nationalist flavor, attacking a federal workforce that’s disproportionately people of color, and making it clear that rolling back civil rights and Black social and education advances is one of his top priorities. Nearly every move of his has involved nods to racist themes and aims. That includes his effort to defy the Constitution and try to eliminate birthright citizenship, his mass firings and funding freezes while he vanishes DEI programs across the federal government, his plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants (of color), and even his take on the wildfires in Los Angeles and the Washington area airplane-helicopter disaster.

Trump thinks of his racialized and racist perspective on such events as “common sense.” Consider that a shield for his bias against and antipathy to science and evidence, as well as his visceral inability to see Black people and other people of color in any position of authority and expertise outside of sports and entertainment.

His vitriol against the world’s most marginalized and poor has led him to try to completely shut the door on illegal (and even legal) immigration — with a single exception. Recently, he spread his arms and opened America’s visa gates to Afrikaners, the Whites whom he (along with Elon Musk) has determined are an oppressed minority in South Africa. Falsely claiming that their lands have been seized by the South African government and that they face genocide, in an executive order he called them “victims of unjust racial discrimination.” He also wrote on social media, “Any Farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to Citizenship.” Perhaps it’s a coincidence that Elon Musk, Trump’s co-president, who traffics in racist themes about race and intelligence online, is South African Apartheid-era born.

It must be strongly emphasized that Trump’s executive order and his multiple social posts on the subject are not only blatant lies but align with the work of South African and American White supremacists who have falsely charged that a “genocide” is indeed occurring there. And speaking of White supremacists, add to that list his decision to release the White supremacists and neo-Nazis who were among the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 (with, of course, Trump’s blessing and encouragement). With the stroke of a pen, he absolved violent and White nationalist criminals who had carried signs supporting the Holocaust and yelled racist epithets at Black Capitol police officers.

His war against Black agency has been happily joined by his MAGA allies in Congress. Representative Andrew Clyde (R-GA), for example, threatened to cut off millions of dollars in aid to the District of Columbia unless Mayor Muriel Bowser removed street art that read “Black Lives Matter” and renamed the area adjacent to it (previously known as Black Lives Matter Plaza) Liberty Plaza. Clyde claimed that the art was a “divisive slogan.” It went unmentioned that, if he genuinely wanted to get rid of divisive racial symbols, he could start at home. According to the Equal Justice Institute, Clyde’s state of Georgia is host to “more than 160 monuments honoring the Confederacy.”

Silence Is Not Golden

All of this is part of Trump’s lawless and corrupt war on democracy and the strategic divisiveness that is both his brand and his currency. The convicted-felon-in-chief’s usurpation of power has been as shameless as it is brazen, as he attempts to impose a government that could be characterized as racially authoritarian. In fact, racism should really be considered the central characteristic of Trump 2.0.

And what has been the response of Black Republican members of Congress to such behavior? Where is the pushback from his (once upon a time) only Black cabinet member, former HUD Secretary Ben Carson? Has there been any reaction from Snoop Dogg, Nelly, or other pro-Trump rappers who claim affinity with the Black grassroots? The answer, of course, is not a peep. Most have run for cover, pretending that Trump is not who he has always been: a serial racist attempting to reshape the nation into a far-right, anti-democratic, White, Christian nationalist stronghold.

Some of his prominent Black acolytes have, in fact, gone on the record opposing “equity” and DEI in general. Byron Donalds, for example, says he has issues with “equity” because it puts a person’s demographic ahead of his “actual qualifications.” It should be noted that, during the 2024 campaign, Donalds, whom Trump was then supposedly considering as a vice-presidential candidate, stated that the Jim Crow segregation era hadn’t actually been so bad because “the Black family was together” and “Black people voted conservatively.”

But qualifications or even competency are not really the issue. As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote, “Donald Trump does not care about merit.” It couldn’t be plainer or simpler than that. In late February, with the encouragement and full support of Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Trump fired Gen. CQ Brown, Jr., from his position as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There is little doubt that Trump got rid of him because he was Black and had been outspoken on issues of race and inclusion. Hegseth accused him of having a “woke agenda.” Brown, a four-star general, is to be replaced by Dan Caine, who, you undoubtedly won’t be shocked to learn, is White and a three-star general.

On the rare occasions when Black MAGA denizens have actually addressed the president’s pathological drive to resegregate the country, it has been to protect him and his policies from criticism. The Black Conservative Federation (BCF), for example, issued a statement, riven with White House talking points, defending Trump’s (probably illegal) federal funding freeze, even as it was being condemned broadly by so many, including some of his Republican allies. Echoing Trump, it stated without evidence that the freeze would do no harm to programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Medicare, and Social Security while ignoring the massive negative impact it was going to have on Head Start, Medicaid, and other programs. To the BCF’s embarrassment, the president was forced to rescind the order 48 hours after it was issued.

Their one-sided loyalty to Trump knows no bounds. Last year, BCF created and presented him with the “Champion of Black America” award at their gala. And that was no joke. He gleefully accepted the award while making awkward racial remarks to the mostly White crowd. The BCF also held an inauguration event for him with tickets ranging in price from $5,000 to $100,000 dollars, which, according to the group, was soon sold out.

The BCF declared on its Facebook page that it is proud to celebrate Black History Month (BHM) and encourages everyone to “celebrate the rich tapestry of contributions made by African Americans throughout history.” Yet there was not one word addressing the cancellation of BHM events at numerous departments across the federal government following the orders of the nation’s White-supremacist-in-chief to quash DEI and any programs that seemed related to it. The Defense Department issued a memo declaring “identity months dead,” while the Transportation Department gleefully announced that it “will no longer participate in celebrations based on immutable traits or any other identity-based observances.”

Far-right political scientist and Trump booster Carol Swain, best known for the Islamophobic rant that forced her to leave her tenured position at Vanderbilt University, wrote a mumble-jumble article hailing his attack on DEI. Although like some other Black conservatives she benefited from affirmative action, she now wants to pretend that DEI is an evil distortion of civil rights. She advocates for the neutral language of “nondiscrimination,” “equal opportunity,” and “integration,” suggesting that they are acceptable conservative values unlike “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion.” She seems pathetically unaware that Trump has no love for civil rights, voting rights, or affirmative action.

Out of Touch with the Black Majority

It must be noted that Black MAGA is overwhelmingly out of sync with the Black community in general. In large numbers, African Americans support DEI, affirmative action, and other hard-won programs that provide opportunities historically denied thanks to racial prejudice and discrimination. Black opposition to Trump is not just due to the racist slander and bile he now aims at people of color, but also to a well-documented history of bigotry. His long record of housing discrimination and advocacy for voting suppression flies in the face of the Fair Housing Act and the Voting Rights Act of the 1960s, signature victories for the civil rights and Black power movements that Trump and his Black supporters now disparage.

Trump garnered only single-digit support from Blacks in his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. Despite an effort to scam Black voters with Trump-created Black groups and false claims of surging Black support, he won only six percent of the Black vote in 2016 and eight percent in 2020.

In the 2024 election, Trump won between 13% and 16% of the Black vote. This was a rise from, but not a great leap above, that eight percent (documented by the Pew Research Center) in his 2020 loss to Joe Biden.

More recent data shows Trump rapidly losing whatever Black support he had. A YouGov and the Economist poll in February found that only 24% of Black Americans approved of Trump’s job performance so far, while about 69% disapproved. In that poll, White approval was 57% and Hispanic approval 40%.

Denied a Role in Trump’s New Administration

In the new Trump administration, Black Republicans have essentially no perch from which to speak out (even if they wanted to). Trump has one African American in his cabinet, HUD Secretary Scott Turner, as was true with Ben Carson in his first term. Both were ghettoized at HUD. And Turner has recently bent the knee and essentially surrendered HUD to Elon Musk’s rampaging “Department” of Government Efficiency. Turner, in fact, even formed a DOGE Task Force that will certainly lead to staff cuts at HUD (but no guarantee whatsoever of any savings). In the meantime, HUD canceled $4 million in DEI contracts.

Trump also nominated former football star and disastrous Senate candidate Herschel Walker to be ambassador to the Bahamas. Walker, who had to be chaperoned to interviews during his 2020 Senate campaign by Senator Lindsey Graham and others due to his striking inability to make it through an interview without numerous gaffes, has no qualifications whatsoever to be an ambassador.

While some of Trump’s Black supporters have grumbled privately about being ostracized and marginalized, they dare not speak out publicly or demonstrate anything less than 100% fealty. And they are hardly the only Blacks suffering job losses because of Trump.

His goal to get rid of tens of thousands of federal workers will have an immediate impact on the economic and social health of the Black community. After all, African Americans constitute a disproportionate number of federal workers, a key area of employment that helped build the Black middle class. While African Americans constitute about 12.5% of the population, they are about 19% of the federal workforce. And being central to DEI, they are essentially guaranteed to be first on the chopping black.

Yet Black MAGA gathered for a Trump-led Black History Month celebration at the White House, clearly unphased by the irony of such a grim Saturday Night Live-style moment. Like his previous BHM events, it was, of course, mostly about Trump. Some of his favorite old and new Black sycophants were there, including far-right Christian activist and niece of Martin Luther King, Jr., Alveda King; golfer Tiger Woods (rumored to be dating Trump’s ex-daughter-in-law); HUD Secretary Scott Turner; Senator Tim Scott; and Trump youth organizer C.J. Pearson.

In an interview, Pearson stated that “President Trump’s anti-DEI policies aren’t promoting racism but what they are doing is manifesting the dream of the great Martin Luther King, Jr.: a nation where one isn’t judged by the color of their skin but instead by the content of their character.” Pearson was making this claim while, across the federal government, departments and agencies were canceling Black History Month celebrations and “identity” events.

As the crowd drank wine and ate snacks, neither Trump nor any of the attendees mentioned the elephant in the room: the president’s savage anti-DEI campaign.

Unless there is organized and mobilized political resistance, President Trump will continue to throw racist tantrums and engage in dangerous, even potentially disastrous, racist policies for the next three years and 10 months while Republicans, including Black MAGA types, stand by in a distinctly cowardly fashion. And count on one thing, as is likely to be true of so many other aspects of Donald Trump’s policies: their capitulation will not age well.

Clarence Lusane, a TomDispatch regular, is a political science professor and director of the International Affairs program and majors at Howard University, and Independent Expert to the European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance.

28 March 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By CODEPINK

Trump Administration allies, along with their bipartisan co-conspirators in Congress, are actively undermining and rendering useless the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. This week alone, they have repeatedly defamed our women’s peace organization, claiming we are funded by or take orders from foreign governments or groups like Hamas. The false accusations, given under oath, that claim CODEPINK and other organizations are funded by a foreign government are laying the groundwork for shutting down civil society organizations – and not just ours. CODEPINK is in Congress every single day, calling for peace, elevating the popular demands of the American people, and educating the public on war and militarism. Because we are loud and effective, they are attacking and trying to silence us with smears and intimidation. We do not believe they will stop at us.

These attacks come as the Trump administration target students who’ve spoken out against the genocide in Gaza. Secretary Rubio and President Trump are extrajudicially revoking student visas and attempting to deport any student they wish, without any due process. Their crime? Disagreeing with the U.S. government’s support for genocide. Students are being kidnapped by masked officers in broad daylight – that should sound the alarm for every American who might openly disagree with President Trump.

These gestapo-like tactics and McCarthyist smears of peace organizations are leading the country down a dark path of unchecked fascism and dictatorship. Between the intimidation of peace groups and blatant attacks on students,every person in the U.S. should stand against this repression – or prepare to face it themselves down the line. Individuals may not like CODEPINK or our messaging around Palestine or China, but that doesn’t exclude them from repression if they let the Trump Administration set this precedent. If they disagree with him on anything at all, they may face the same smears and repression we have. After the groundwork is laid, it’s only a matter of time.

To be clear: CODEPINK is not funded by any foreign government. Protesting war and genocide is not supporting terrorism. Not only are they lying, they are defying the U.S. Constitution to muzzle the burgeoning student movement.

The slanderous statements made by elected officials can have immediate and dangerous consequences for those being lied about, as well as their friends and family. It appears that the United States government is not only committed to waging war abroad, but it is also intent on waging war domestically against U.S. citizens and non-citizens, both of which are also protected by the Constitution.

It is not a coincidence that both Senator Cotton and Secretary Rubio referred to peace activists and students as “lunatics” – they have clearly received their talking points. However, what is actual lunacy is how those elected to serve the American people are ignoring the fact that a majority of Americans do now want wars or war crimes being carried out in our name.

28 March 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Richard Falk

[Prefatory Note: The post below was published in a modified form as an opinion piece by the Andalou Agency in Turkey on February 27 with the title Trump’s Riviera Proposal for Gaza’s ‘Day After. Trump’s brazen imperial outreach, articulated with neither qualifications, embarrassment, nor some claim of benevolence. In similar evasions of  the sovereign rights of Panama, Greenland, Canada, and Mexico Trump early in his second term as the US President has shaken the stability of the Westphalian world order, at least as it emerged from World War II..

This rebirth of overt Western imperial expansionism seems part of a geopolitical shakeup that looks also to bypass the long Atlanticist partnership with  Europe, denigrates alliance diplomacy, implements anti-immigrant exclusionary policies, as well as pursues a regressive form of economic nationalism that wields tariffs as a weapon and tacitly aspires to be a market-driven economic superpower that either challenges or eclipses a state-guided Chinese economic superpower, while these rivals each engage openly in anti-democratic patterns of domestic governance.

Against this background, the removal of the rubble and the people of Gaza and in their place  create a new fantasy playground for affluent (and insensitive) tourists is a metaphor for the crassest imaginable human sensibility that avows banishing a people decimated by genocide from their homeland, a shock display of human cruelty when empathy is absent and greed takes over. However enacted, Trump’s plan inflicts a permanent punishment on the survivors of the Gaza death camp in collaboration with the main perpetrator of a transparent genocide.

The wider Trump plan for Palestine can be summed up in a single word: erasure. it was recently signified by the mandatory US adoption of the biblical name for the West Bank long in use in Hebrew discourse within Israel–Judea and Samaria. This together with other signals from Washington suggesting that Israel’s annexation of part or even all of the West Bank would be endorsed by the US Government in defiance of the international and UN understanding of the legal and political status of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).]

 

The US President, Donald Trump, surprised the world with his proposal for the reconstruction and development of Gaza after the Israeli genocide subsides. The main features of the plan were forced transfer of the surviving Palestinian population to foreign countries and the takeover of the Gaza Strip by the United States to manage the formidable reconstruction effort, with financing mainly extracted from the Arab governments in the region, especially the rich Gulf countries, as the price of sustaining the geopolitical protection services provided for decades for regimes isolated from their own citizenry. As the Saudi ruler, Mohamed bin Salman put it succinctly some months ago, “I don’t care about the Palestinians, but my people do.”

Since its issuance on February 4, 2025 at a White House press conference at which Trump was standing next to the visiting Israel Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the global response to the plan was largely one of shock unaccompanied by awe. Even the Israelis seemed initially puzzled by how to respond, Netanyahu displaying a soft form of support, likely pragmatically driven, for the general contours of the proposal, but with an explicit endorsement only of its most objectionable feature–the clear commitment to the ethnic cleansing of the entire Palestinian population of Gaza, which currently numbers over two million severely traumatized Palestinians. How could it be otherwise? To date, Israel has officially refrained from responding to the real estate and imperial aspects of the plan, that is, this bizarre vision of a Middle Eastern Riviera and an imperial US grab of land over which they had neither a prior claim nor a present connection.

From the perspective of human rights and international law population transfer was the characteristic of the plan that unsurprisingly generated the most opposition, first of all from the Palestinians, but also from persons and governments of minimal conscience all over the world. A weak form of justification was offered by Trump and his most loyal supporters, mainly in the US, in the form of insisting that no approach to Israel’s Gaza problem has previously had worked, so it was time to try something different. Yet an outlandish, one-sided proposal that serves Israel’s interests by depopulating the Occupied Palestinian territory in a manner that would exceed the largest and most dramatic previous forced removal of Palestinians since the nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 when upwards of 750,000 Palestinians were coerced and terrorized to leave their homes, many soon to discover that their villages were being demolished, and learn that their right of return bestowed by international law and human decency was to be forever denied.

These days Palestinians disagree about whether this phase of massive ethnic cleansing should be treated as a second nakba or the nakba be viewed as a continuous process of the denial of the most basic rights of the Palestinian people and is continuing. It commenced in 1948 (or earlier) and continues into the present, denominated by Ilan Pappe as ‘incremental genocide.’ Both perspectives have merit. A focus on the most traumatic events is illuminates the high points of oppression and abuse while giving attention to the continuity of abusive denial of rights in apartheid structures and genocidal policies and practices of the Israel occupation also captures the essence of the Palestinian narrative of ethnic repression, exploitation, and resistance in their own homeland.

No abuse is more continuous in this tragic history of the Palestinian people than is the denial of their most basic right of all, the right of self-determination, a legal entitlement of all peoples, enshrined as common Article 1 in both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights that both entered into force in 1966, and were preceded by expressions of international consensus that stressed the affirmation of a right of resistance against colonial rule that included armed struggle.

It is also significant that the UN, often the target of Israel’s defamation due to its record of symbolic support of Palestinian rights over the years, was itself responsible for a crucial denial of Palestinian human rights by its proposed solution of the emergent struggle for the future of Palestinian in 1947 by way of decreeing partition of mandate Palestine, which amounted to a continuation of British colonizing tactics of ‘divide and conquer.’ The Zionist movement accepted the partition proposal, as set forth in General Assembly Resolution 181, while the Arab governments and the representatives of the Palestinian people rejected it leading to the 1948 War. Such a division was to be expected as all along the Zionist Project was opportunistic in taking what it could get in various political climates but never abandoning its ambition to have all of Palestine. The Palestinian refused to go along with a sequel to the quasi-colonial administration of Palestine after World War I that was couple with the British pledge in the Balfour Declaration to support the Zionist Project at least to the extent of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It is important to recognize that this encroachment on Palestinian basic rights preceded by more than a decade the rise of Hitler in Germany.

This tactical ploy by the leadership of the International Zionist Movement of pretending to be satisfied by an improvement of their position in relation to their goals was a master stroke of international public relations. In this sense ‘partition’ was an improvement on the UK colonialist Balfour Declaration that pledged support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine but not a state, while partition offered the Jewish people a state of their own. From a Palestinian perspective the UN was furthering the colonialist goals of Britain, which sought to neutralize Palestinian nationalism by the counterweight of Jewish immigration, and its competing nationalist vision, which indeed backfired by producing a Zionist phase of anti-colonial struggle seeking the removal of British hegemonic presence in Palestine under the guise of being the mandatory power with a supposed ‘sacred trust’ from the League of Nations to promote the wellbeing of the people under its protective control.

Trump’s proposal is an extremist version of this practice of denying Palestinians any agency over their own future as a people or a nation. The initiative issuing from the White House presumes an imperial prerogative and a reminder that Orientalism persists in the 21st Century here taking the form of self-proclaimed superior Western civilizational management and entrepreneurial skill when if comes to global problem-solving. As if to be unashamed of such an approach Trump makes not the slightest claim that he has consulted with respected Palestinian leaders or even sought genuine Arab or Turkish advice, much less their overt endorsement, although he did claim with evidence or concrete references enthusiasm for the plan among those had previously discussed these intentions.

The only possible saving grace is to suggest that this is an application of Trump’s preoccupation with deal-making in international relations. Seen in this transactional light, he purpose of the Riviera proposals is to agitate other political actors to put forward alternative plans of their own. It was not so implausible as it might at first seemed. The Gulf governments held a meeting prior to an Arab Summit in Cairo with Gaza on the top of the agenda, both in relation to assuming some economic responsibility for restoring viability to the social existence in the Gaza Strip and offering to allow substantial number of Gazans to be transferred to their respective countries. Even if this dynamic produces a more plausible plan for Gaza its evolution seems to exclude Palestinian participation or consent, and if anything, will likely stir a new cycle of militant resistance. The Palestinian people, more generally, have suffered too severely and too long to swallow an arrangement devised by others that does away with its long deferred legal and moral entitlement to self-determination, although it is wrong to be too sure, given the deep trauma, the extension of genocidal tactics to the West Bank and several of Israel’s neighbors, and an undoubted Palestinian ‘realism’ in adjusting to the obstacles standing in the way of liberation.

Subtly embedded in the Trump proposal are valuable ‘get out of jail’ cards for Israel. It is notable that Israel is not even held accountable for reparations or bearing any of the economic or ecological burdens of the multiple challenges of social reconstruction in Gaza, much less are Israeli leaders made accountable for the commission of genocide and related crimes. Instead, the core perverse idea prevails in the West that the victims should pay for the crimes of the perpetrators, yet again prolonging the underlying injustice inflicted for more than a century on the Palestinian people, and certainly not acting in accord with the moral imperatives of law. human dignity, and justice, or even the prudential virtues of regional stability. If anything resembling the Trump Riviera Plan becomes the sequel to the Gaza Genocide, it will most likely produce a range of Palestinian resistance strategies, including forms of armed struggle. Despite the dark shadows hovering over the current situation of the Palestinian people, either long confined to refugee camps or now traumatized by genocidal agendas of forced dispossession, including in the West Bank, the future of Israel is not assured, nor is the Palestinian struggle for liberation and self-determination foreclosed.

Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years.

28 March 2025

Source: countercurrents.org