The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) has been approached by the “Movement to Save the Prisoners” with an urgent request to highlight the current crisis faced by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Under the directive of the Kahanist illegal settler Itamar Ben Gvir, the Israeli Minister of Internal Security, Israeli prisons and detention centers holding Palestinian prisoners have been transformed into torture centers. In the last few months, seven Palestinian prisoners have been murdered by their jailers through torture and neglect.
Family members of the prisoners explain: “These crimes are continuing in light of Arab and international silence that gave the green light for the Israeli occupation to commit crime after crime against our prisoners. Moreover, these crimes occur with no punishments due to the absence of international accountability to those who ordered and committed them.”
Families of prisoners demonstrating in Ramallah. Credit: ISM.
Palestinian prisoners held by Israel have experienced brutal beatings, strip searches, threats of sexual assaults, denial of freedom to worship, pray and recite the Qur’an, deprivation of medical care, overcrowding, the reduction of already poor nutrition meals, starvation, the cutting of water and electricity, denial of warm clothes, and the deprivation of visits from family members, legal representatives, and humanitarian groups. Gaza prisoners face all these in addition to continuous torture where other prisoners hear their heart breaking screaming day and night. Some prisoners are missing and it is unknown if they are even still alive.
Family members of prisoners carry a banner that says. “The Movement to Save the Prisoners: Our prisoners are in danger. Let us be a light in their darkness!”
“While the world focuses on 136 Israelis held in Gaza they ignore 7,000 Palestinians held and abused by Israel. This discrimination is a grave injustice.” The ISM is passing the call of the families to you: “For all the free people, be the light of the prisoners’ darkness and their loud voice in all forums, they are addressing your consciences from the borders and edges of death.”
Palestinian children in Wadi Tiran in Masafer Yatta, threatened with murder by extremist settlers if they don’t leave their village
I am still perpetually on the verge of crying or crying most of the time. Throughout my travels in Palestine, I have learned from the wisdom of children. Children everywhere know when they are very young that their tears are not something to repress, but rather their crying out helps bring about what they are needing.
Where my Arabic and their English are inadequate to be able to communicate, playing together is a way to speak a deeper language of companionship and encounter. Our smiles and laughter together is a defiant blossoming of life surrounded by the threat of life’s extinction.
Last week a young child kissed my hand and put it to their head. I didn’t know the most appropriate way to respond.
But forty miles away, a new acronym has had to be created for children just like her, WCNSF, wounded child, no surviving family. Everything I do, even if I stay up through the night to keep watch so a family can sleep more soundly, still feels so inadequate in the midst of such catastrophe.
More than 10,000 children have been killed in Gaza in these last 100 days. Surrounding Gaza there is a fence, and armed guards ready to shoot anybody who comes near it, keeping them from coming to me and me from going to them. UNICEF warns “All children under five in the Gaza Strip—335,000—are at high risk of severe malnutrition and preventable death as the risk of famine conditions continues to increase. UNICEF estimates that in the coming weeks, at least 10,000 children under five years will suffer the most life-threatening form of malnutrition, known as severe wasting, and will need therapeutic foods.”
Ceasefire Now Gaza by Sanya Hyland
In Florida, where I am from, when a hurricane hit and I knew of children suffering from dehydration, I could empty every pharmacy in my vicinity of pedialyte and drive it to them in a matter of hours. But there is an army, supported and financed by my government and tax dollars, keeping me from doing the same for these children.
I learned a new Arabic phrase since I’ve been here and have used it often. People in Palestine are so heartbreakingly welcoming. There is rarely a “hello (marhaba)” in Arabic, just “welcome and welcome again” (ahlan wa sahlan). The implied longer meaning, that ahlan wa sahlan is a shortened version of, communicates: “You left your own people, but you are among family, and you are safe here.” But when a Palestinian asks me where I am from, I always tell the truth. “I am from America (Ana min Amrika).” I have seen people shake with the deepest hurt and speak about what the United States of America has done to their family. And saying “I am sorry (assif)” in Arabic is much too little. To me, it implies that I am expecting Palestinians’ understanding, forgiveness, or ablution. I am not. So I have learned to say “I seek forgiveness from God (astaghfirullah)” as the second part of responding about where I am from.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was put in a concentration camp during the holocaust and later hanged by the Nazis, warned, “Silence in the face of evil is evil itself: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
Amid such horrors and one’s inability to stop them, I think I understand how to be imprisoned, to be beaten, to be killed even, would be a balm for one’s soul, knowing that others weren’t suffering alone, and when people were thrown into a furnace, there was another in the fire.
I have 109 prayer beads on my wrist. This about matches the amount of children killed each day in Gaza. What I have done and am doing has not been enough for 10,000 children. And 10,000 more. I don’t know what will be enough. But I will seek it.
12 January 2024 | International Solidarity Movement | The Hague, Netherlands
One day after a chilling presentation by South Africa’s legal team, constructing a sweeping case against Israel for genocidal intent and acts amounting to genocide of the Palestinian population in Gaza, Israel took its place before the 15 judge panel to try and convince the world that 3 months of mechanized, relentless mass-killing should escape the designation. Despite a trove of documentary evidence to the latter, Israel contended before the court that it is not committing genocide in Gaza.
Israel’s legal team in the International Court of Justice. Photo credit: The Independent
The “right to self-defence” was the main argument that the Israeli legal team, lead by British lawyer Malcolm Shaw KC, brought forward at the second and final day of the preliminary hearings at the International Court of Justice for the case brought by South Africa while denying that Israel is carrying out a genocide in the brutal attack on Gaza.
Opening statements in today’s hearing were made by Co-Agent of Israel, Tal Becker who expressed what he termed as Israel’s ‘singularity’ in understanding the birth of the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide for which the state is evidenced to be committing.
Becker’s claim that Israel is “defending itself in a war it did not start” showed yet again the blatant denial of a 75-year history of land grab, abuses, violation of human rights, illegal occupation, as well as an illegal 16 year blockade on Gaza. “Israel is in a war of defense against Hamas, not against the Palestinian people.”
The duality of Becker’s statements on what he states to be the “outrageous” nature of the use of the word genocide to explain Israel’s actions in Gaza stood out sorely in juxtaposition to Professor Malcom Shaw who next assumed the floor to dismiss statements of genocidal intent distributed from the highest political offices in Israel, offices which are directing military operations on the ground in Gaza.
From Becker’s court address, “We live at a time when words are cheap. In an age of social media and identity politics, the temptation to reach for the most outrageous term, to vilify and demonize, has become for many irresistible. But if there is a place where words should still matter, where truth should still matter, it is surely a court of law.” Indeed. The point was made the day prior when South Africa legal team lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi stood before the International Court of Justice presenting testimony related to Israel’s genocidal intent expressed by Israeli authorities of the highest order.
Ngcukaitobi platformed the frequent and routine nature of genocidal discourse spoken explicitly and how it translates into real-world violence on the ground by occupation foot soldiers. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Isaaz Herzog and the Israeli Minister of Defense’s explicit exterminationist rhetoric were highlighted to support the case for intent. Yet, that incontrovertible evidence was dismissed in court today by Professor Shaw as not legally significant. “Sometimes statements are made which are nothing more than a part of the recent war-time rhetoric intending to put the blame and shame on the other side.” Shaw further stated that they were “not to be ascribed an importance…nor of legal significance.” To counter, using Tal Becker’s words, “if there is a place where words should still matter… it is surely a court of law.”
Galit Raguan addressed the panel on Israel’s behalf to argue the “facts on the ground.” Most shocking of all was her claim that “hospitals have not been bombed” when, in fact, Israel struck several hospitals including the Indonesian Hospital, the International Eye Care Centre, the Al-Nasr Children’s Hospital among others.
With three quarters of Gaza’s hospitals profoundly destroyed to the point of relegation to non-functional status, Raguan stated that while “Hospitals have not been bombed; rather, the IDF sends soldiers to search and dismantle military infrastructure, reducing damage and disruption.” If the reduction of damage and disruption are what Israel’s military in Gaza were seeking to achieve, they have failed beyond measure. We have seen successful Israeli military surgical operations unfold which spared civilian life in the very recent past during its breaking of another international law when it assassinated Hamas Deputy Leader Saleh al-Arouri in a residential structure in Beirut, Lebanon. One imagines if Hamas fighters were positioned in a hospital in Israel, operations would be similarly surgical in nature.
In an attempt to justify the atrocities committed, Galit Raguan claimed that “urban warfare will always result in tragic deaths, harm and damage,” saying that these are the “desired outcomes of Hamas.” While Raguan explained away three months of mass civilian murder, ascribing the most morally sound intentions and actions on occupation forces, her only roadblock to successfully making the case were the countless occupation foot soldiers who have filmed themselvescommitting atrocities on deceased Palestinian bodies, blowing up entire residential blocks as birthday gifts to their family, looting Palestinian civilian homes, raising the Israeli flag over the wreckage of Mosques, holding skits where they lie in Palestinian children’s beds in homes they have bombed and dancing gleefully amid the wreckage and body parts of Gaza’s people while singing explicit songs about ethnic cleansing.
Throughout the hearing, no address was made as to why clearly marked journalists, ICRC medics, UN staff, humanitarian aid workers and Palestinian Civil Defense rescue workers were massacred in targeted killings. No argument was made to explain the moral navigation involved in documented occupation forces committing of extrajudicial executions or the rounding up, blindfolding, stripping, shackling and abduction of Palestinian civilians, nor of the doctored videos where Palestinian civilians were directed to act on film as though they were surrendering Hamas fighters.
Further, Raguan’s assertion several times that Israeli occupation forces had acted to explicitly mitigate civilian harm flies in the face of prolific genocidal rhetoric from the Israeli political and military directors of this onslaught which is being acted out on the ground in real time. While Raguan touted the supposed Israeli humanitarian mobilization to bring critical supplies into Gaza, it would seem counterintuitive for the very same politicians and ministers of the Israeli government to be simultaneously touting their starvation and total siege of the “human animals” of the Gaza Strip.
Omri Sender assumed the floor to address the condition of risk of irreparable harm and urgency. Sender’s opening sentiments were the wholesale blaming of what he recognized as a “grave” humanitarian situation, on Hamas “prosecuting war from under, and within, the civilian population.” Sender’s statement continued to fly the torch carried by his predecessors speaking in Israel’s defense in that it painted Hamas as an agent of terror that Israel was battling to protect Palestinian civilians from. A common sentiment expressed publicly among Israeli political and social society is that “there are no innocent civilians in Gaza.”
Sender touted its opening of the Kerem Shalom crossing for aid delivery to enter three months, thousands of dropped bombs and tens of thousands of murdered civilians later. Gaza’s population is now starving. As Sender’s statement to the court focused on Israel’s direction of aid in recent history to enter through Gaza’s border crossings, the entire problem was missed; the fact that Israel is controlling the land, air and sea borders of another people and has unilateral say over what comes in and what goes out, when it wants to starve the population and when it will open a crossing under conditions of a looming famine to allow a truck to enter for which its entry will be used to exhibit Israel’s kindness to the Palestinians it is mass murdering at the very moment the words were spoken to the court.
Christopher Staker was the next speaker for the Israeli defense. He did so to denounce the context for requested provisions as made by South Africa on the first day of the hearing. His argument centered around the sentiment that neither South Africa, nor Palestinians, “have a plausible right” to request provisional measures and went point by point through South Africa’s 9 provisional requests in this manner.
The final speaker was Co-Agent of Israel, Gilad Noam who concluded Israel’s arguments through requesting the International Court of Justice “(1) Reject the request for the indication of provisional measures submitted by South Africa; and (2) Remove the case from the General List.” With the final words of their arguments brought to a close, Israel has now requested the judges of the ICJ to refuse the words of every humanitarian agency who has worked on the ground in Gaza, the millions of Gazans who have filmed their own destruction and the tens of millions of horrified people across the world who have watched this massacre unfold for over 90 days, and to instead find Israel not guilty of violating the 1948 Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.
The final day of the court hearing occurred during another day of the active destruction of Gaza itself as she is reduced to mass rubble fields, indistinguishable from the universities, hospitals, schools, shops, residential blocks, utilities buildings, Mosques, Churches and shelters which once comprised her streets. With Oxfam noting that the “Israeli military is killing 250 Palestinians per day with many more lives at risk from hunger, disease and cold,” during the course of the two-day hearing on whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, 500 Palestinians were massacred.
12 January 2024 | International Solidarity Movement | East Jerusalem
Video showing the attack by the IOF on worshippers at Wadi Al Joz. Credit: ISM
The arbitrary restrictions on Palestinian Muslims accessing the holy site in Jerusalem for prayers have now been in place for over four months. These restrictions continue to be imposed by means of an excessive and intimidatory presence of Israeli Occupation Forces around the access points to the Old City where the Al Aqsa Mosque is, especially around the time of Friday prayers.
Worshippers have responded steadfastly to the occupation forces’ denial of their rights by praying in the streets close to the Old City and Al Aqsa, in the Palestinian neighbourhood of Wadi Al Joz. The occupation forces appear to view this as a threat of the highest order, one which cannot be tolerated, and respond with extreme brutality.
Worshippers praying in the Street in Wadi Al Joz.
At today’s (12th January) Friday prayers, twenty five worshippers laid down makeshift prayer mats on a side road in Wadi Al Joz, in a very calm, dignified and non-threatening manner. However, within two minutes, IOF soldiers could be seen running down the road towards them brandishing weaponry, from the direction of the Old City. Volleys of tear gas were launched towards the worshippers forcing them to abandon their prayers and run further into the residential area, pursued by their attackers and a skunk truck, a weapon used for its nauseating bad smell.
“Skunk truck” in action at Wadi Al Joz. Credit: ISM
The IOF prevented ISM volunteers and most of the Israeli activists, as well as the media, from following and documenting what happened. But ISM understands that in their pursuit of the worshippers – a phrase that in itself shows the absurdity of the occupation forces’ behaviour –, IOF soldiers fired excessive amounts of teargas including inside residents’ homes before withdrawing from the neighbourhood.
IOF blocking access to the mosque to media and activists.
IOF brutality in the service of enforcing a collective punishment on the Palestinian Muslim community in East Jerusalem will not deter the Al Aqsa faithful. For four months they have endured this, and every Friday they have continued to resist.
11 January 2024 | International Solidarity Movement | The Hague, Netherlands
It came through a series of damning statements. A striking case for genocidal intent and acts tantamount to genocide by Israel against the totality of Gaza’s Palestinian population, was presented in a powerful, if gut wrenching, presentation by South Africa’s legal team this morning in a landmark case in the International Court of Justice. The charge, submitted to the ICJ on December 29th, seeks provisional measures for Israel to end its onslaught in Gaza related to clear violations of the 1948 Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. A final ruling may be years in the making.
A fifteen judge panel heard the case laid out sharply by South Africa’s robust legal team. The most incriminating evidence could arguably be the presentation of the systematic normalization of genocidal rhetoric conveyed by Israel’s highest political offices and understood as state policy by the foot soldiers of the occupation army on the ground who made props and tiktok backdrops of their razing of entire residential blocks, universities and hospitals. Occupation forces on the ground comfortably filmed themselves committing shocking and prolific atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza without any attempt to hide their identities, painting a picture of collectively understood intent and impunity.
Here are the points of the case as laid out by South Africa before the International Court of Justice at the Hague.
Opening the hearing, lawyer Adila Hassim outlined, point by point, a case for Israel’s actions in Gaza as tantamount to genocide including the intentional destruction of infrastructure, the blocking of aid delivery, humanitarian mission denial and the intentional creation of conditions that would ravage survivors of bombardment with forcible starvation and infectious disease. Hassim cut to the bone of the ethnic cleansing project the world has witnessed in horror, “Reproductive violence against Palestinian women, children and babies,” held the intention of Israel’s war purveyors to, “impose measures to prevent birth in a group.”
Hassim carefully laid out the sheer breadth of the devastation Israel has wrought onto Gaza through “large-scale homicidal destruction,” before addressing the court for the closure of her remarks, “In sum, Madame President, all of these acts individually and collectively, form a calculated pattern of conduct by Israel indicating a genocidal intent.”
Lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi followed up with more pointedly platformed statements of genocidal intent by high ranking members of the Israeli government. He referenced the “extraordinary features” of explicit language expressing intent to exterminate the Palestinian population of Gaza. Presenting a litany of exemplary evidence of rhetoric born in high political offices of the Israeli government, he then noted that the sentiments were, in turn, “repeated by Israeli soldiers on the ground in Gaza.”
Making a case for the normalization of rhetoric of intent, Ngcukaitobi presented quote after quote distributed from the upper echelons of Israel’s political and social bodies utilizing explicit exterminatory discourse with regards to the Palestinian population of Gaza, not of Hamas, which he then expertly threaded to statements and actions on the ground by occupation forces; the correlation of violence vocalized and violence committed. “Genocidal utterances, are therefore not in the fringes, they are embodied in state policy.”
Israeli society and occupation forces alike have an understanding of their government’s intent for the destruction of Gaza interwoven so deeply that, as Ngcukaitobi explained, they rose up in anger at talks of a limited trickle of aid entering the embattled Strip because it was a violation of Israel’s promises to starve Gaza’s population.
Arguing the question of jurisdiction and the existence of a dispute between South Africa and Israel, International Law Professor John Dugard assumed the floor and noted the recognition that Gaza “is now turned into a concentration camp where genocide is taking place.” He traced the steps which led from South Africa’s condemnation of Israel’s genocidal acts in the Security Council to the emergency special session of the General Assembly to its filing on December 29th with the ICJ seeking provisional measures for immediate cessation of genocidal acts on Gaza’s Palestinian population.
On outlining the pathway to the ICJ, Professor Dugard concluded his statements on the Republic of South Africa’s charge, “Despite these harsh accusations, Israel has persisted in its genocidal act against the population of Gaza.”
South African advocate Professor Max Du Plessis addressed the court for a statement on “the rights that South Africa seeks to preserve through its application.” He painted a picture of a trapped population existing piecemeal to this point on rights deprivations imposed by the occupying force “for more than half a century” in a world where Israel has operated as though it were “above and beyond the law.”
Arguing South Africa’s intention against turning the court “into a theater for spectacle,” the presentation of videos representative of convention violations were decided against. However, an unobjectionable case was made for provisional measures as the reality on the ground in Gaza reflects, as Professor Du Plessis pointed out, beyond a doubt, genocidal act definitions warned against in the 1948 convention including defined-group persecution of which Palestinians in Gaza represent and are being slaughtered as members thereof. Invoking provisional measures rulings in the cases of Ukraine, Bosnia and Gambia, Du Plessis contended that “Palestinians in Gaza are no less worthy of this court’s considerable protective power… to issue provisional measures.”
He then called Tshidiso Ramogale speaking to the “urgency and irreparable harm” conditions needed for the provisional measures bar to be met. Contexts on the ground in Gaza were expressed before the court in shocking detail. Food insecurity, looming specter of famine and daily births in a war zone.
“It is becoming ever clearer that huge swathes of Gaza; entire towns, villages, refugee camps are being wiped from the map.” From death littered streets to mass amputations to the fact that two mothers an hour are massacred in this aggression, Ramogale constructed rubble-wrought Gaza in the courtroom, in explicit retelling, to support South Africa’s case.
“There is an urgent need for provisional measures to prevent imminent, irreparable prejudice to the rights and issue in this case.” Hers was an aching expression of the real time genocide being narrated by Israel and witnessed by the world at large. “The situation could not be more urgent.”
Also making the case for precedent set by the court in prior rulings, the irreparable prejudice argument was exhibited aptly through stories “expressing scenes from a horror movie” through the stripping and humiliation of rounded up Palestinians to associated harms of infrastructure destruction to impromptu abductions by occupation foot soldiers.
Professor Vaughan Lowe appeared next, making the case that requirements of the convention have been met in order to urgently usher in provisional measures to halt the onslaught and promote the “right of the group to not be physically destroyed” as the death toll arches to 25,000 with masses of Palestinians still missing and presumed trapped in the rubble.
Stated plainly, Professor Lowe asserted that “Israel’s actions have violated its obligations under the genocide convention, they have continued to violate them and Israel has asserted that it intends to continue them.”
Palestinians gather in Ramallah’s Mandela Square in the occupied West Bank in support of South Africa’s genocide charge. Photo credit: ISM
Friday’s hearing will conclude with Israel’s utilization of the 3-hour case presentation allowable by the court to convince a horrified world that their prolific incitement to genocide and genocidal acts committed on the ground against the Palestinian population of Gaza is an act by any other name.
