Based on the new U.N. special rapporteur’s report, the ICC should be obliged to file arrests warrants, at a minimum, against Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, Olaf Scholz, Friedrich Mertz, Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
President Donald Trump bidding farewell to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he boards Air Force One at Ben Gurion International Airport in Israel on Oct, ober 13, 2025, en route to Sharm El Sheikh International Airport in Egypt. (White House/Daniel Torok)
By Vijay Prashad
PeoplesDispatch
Caroline Willemen of Médecins Sans Frontières said Sunday that Israel continues to use the need for humanitarian aid in Gaza as “means of pressure.”
“The humanitarian situation in Gaza has not improved significantly,” she told the press, “as water and shelter shortages persist and hundreds of thousands of people continue to live in tents as winter approaches.”
Israel’s armed forces have now annexed more than half of Gaza’s land and are dumping vast amounts of debris into that zone, turning it into a mountain of garbage. To move the rubble without experts and equipment is very dangerous, as about 10-to-12 percent of the Israeli bombs dropped on Gaza have not exploded.
“Every Gazan person is now living in a horrific, unmapped minefield,” said Nick Orr of Humanity and Inclusion, a non-governmental organization at work in Palestine. “The UXO [Unexploded Ordnance] is everywhere. On the ground, in the rubble, under the ground, everywhere.”
As Palestinians dig through the hills of concrete, they risk triggering a dormant bomb — creating more casualties of the Israeli genocide.
One-Directional Violence
Gaza rubble, 2023-2025. (Jaber Jehad Badwan /Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 4.0)
Over the past two years, Israel has dropped at least 200,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, a tonnage equivalent to 13 atom bombs of the scale dropped on Hiroshima by the United States on Aug. 6, 1945.
This is unimaginable, particularly given the fact that Palestinians have no air defense systems, no air force and no ability to defend themselves from high-altitude and drone bombing or to strike back in any comparable way. Genocides are, by their nature, asymmetrical.
But to describe these past two years as asymmetrical is obscene: this was one-directional violence, the Goliath-like Israelis using their immense advantages against the David-like Palestinian resistance.
The opaqueness of official arms transfers means we have no precise idea how much of this tonnage came to Israel from its major suppliers during the war: the United States, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. However, we have enough evidence to know that most of the bombs came from the United States, with smaller supplies from the other countries.
An Oct. 20 report from Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, entitled Gaza Genocide: A Collective Crime makes it indisputably clear that the countries supplying Israel with military equipment, or assisting it in any way — including through diplomatic support — are utterly complicit in the genocide.
Chancellor of Germany, Olaf Schulz meeting with Israel’s President Isaac Yitzhak Herzog in Tel Aviv, Oct. 17, 2023. (Amos Ben Gershom/ Press Office of Israel/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 3.0)
In other words, the obligation to abide by the U.N. Convention on Genocide is not discretionary; the duty to do what they can to stop the genocide is mandatory. The participation makes them wholly culpable. The report notes that the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza makes this “an internationally enabled crime.”
The level of complicity is extraordinary. Take the case of the United Kingdom, whose Prime Minister Keir Starmer is a human rights lawyer and indeed wrote the textbook on European human rights law (1999).
On Aug. 6, Matt Kennard told Palestine Deep Dive about how U.K. military aircraft left RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus and escorted an unidentified plane over Gaza. Six days later, Iain Overton at UK Declassified revealed that amongst these planes was an RAF Shadow R1 surveillance plane flying alongside a Beechcraft Super King Air 350 owned by the Sierra Nevada Corporation (from the United States) with a call sign CROOK 11. What were these aircraft doing? Who had sanctioned them this work? Who is CROOK 11?
U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer visiting troops at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, Dec. 10, 2024. (Tim Hammond / No 10 Downing Street, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
In December 2024, Starmer told troops at RAF Akrotiri:
“There’s a lot of different work that goes on. I’m also aware that some, or quite a bit, of what goes on here can’t necessarily be talked about all of the time …We can’t necessarily tell the world what you’re doing here … because although we’re not saying it to the whole world for reasons that are obvious to you.”
The obvious reason is that this is a genocide, and the U.K. is complicit, so they cannot talk about it.
The record for the United States is even more ghastly. One paragraph from the special rapporteur’s report is damning enough:
“Since October 2023, the U.S. has transferred 742 consignments of “arms and ammunition” (HS Code 93) and approved tens of billions in new sales. The Biden and Trump Administrations reduced transparency, accelerated transfers through repeated emergency approvals, facilitated Israeli access to U.S. weapons stockpile held abroad, and authorized hundreds of sales just below the amount requiring congressional approval. The U.S. has deployed military aircraft, special forces and surveillance drones to Israel, with U.S. surveillance purportedly being used to target Hamas, including in the first raid on Al Shifa hospital.”
In November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) filed a warrant for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. Based on this recent U.N. report, the ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, should be obliged to file warrants against Rishi Sunak, Starmer, Olaf Scholz, Friedrich Merz, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump – at a minimum. Anything less makes a mockery of the rules-based international system, namely the United Nations Charter.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are On Cuba: Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle (with Noam Chomsky), Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism, and (also with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power.
This article was originally produced by Globetrotter.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Good news is they can’t kill us all without killing themselves also. The bad news is they are proving they are capable and willing to do so.
The remainder of Americans have a Constitutional responsibility to protect and honor the U.S. Constitution. Many of us took an oath that never expires to do. so helping us out would be advisable at the present time.
Make news your selves. Unite, Resist and Overcome, Or perish forever. Defiance till death!
My country, Canada, is included in the list of complicit countries in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians. As PM Carney said following the UN signing of Canada’s recognition of Palestine as a state “Palestine must be a Zionist state”. What does that even mean? The man (and those who advise him) is so ignorant of geopolitical affairs he doesn’t even know what Zionism is. So embarrassing. But he is just a banker, so what do you expect?
“A Zionist Palestinian state, which is what we want.” Mark Carney, Canadian prime minister. (Not the comedian, Art Carney.)
hxxps://www.youtube.com/shorts/Sjg8r43vPMc
It is much worse than when the Romans occupied and stole a religion to counter religious opposition to an occupying force and created a defamation of character lasting millennia. One that went on as a transnational empire using cultural defamation to control entire continents and approve slavery for amassing vast wealth and technological military power aiming for western full spectrum military, economic, cultural, and religious powers for permanent war.
The problem is, ALL these people don’t care about international law. They care about it only when they feel they can use it against their expressed enemies. The #1 example at the moment of that is probably Russia.
Vijay, you are absolutely correct in all of the above. I would only add that the list of names is far too short. Blinken, Sullivan, Witkoff, Kusher are just a few more Americans just Americans whose names should be added to the list.
At what point do we (those with the conceit that ‘we’ are informed) allow that Palestine, Sudan, Yemen and so many more are not isolated actions with their own individual histories and solutions (which, of course, they have), but look increasingly to be part of systematic efforts to create (recreate) a political/social structure of absolute plutocratic dominance worldwide. Prashad seems to be hinting at this sort of conclusion; national and international justice systems are ignored, opaque distribution of weaponry, apparent unreported alliances among powerful actors and cabal like relationships among world leaders and those controlling technological and information systems.
In such a future the world’s human billions become a single item (both resource and impediment) to be used and disposed of at the need and whim of the few in control of food, water, land (space) and the means by which the many can acquire life’s essentials. As much as I try to rationalize a less enveloping scenario from present events, this one is consistently peering at me from the shadows. If it even has a small probability of being true, the time for recognition and action is now, not later.
I agree ^^
There is an “elite” to be individually identified, and taken out of power.
Before it is too late.
If Russia and China would not be as powerful, it would probably be too late already.
Your intuition is correct. Check out this article on what the psycho billionaire cabal has in store for humanity.
hxxps://bettbeat.substack.com/p/the-empires-favorite-child-how-israel
Francesca Albanese is a gem of conscience for human
rights.
US-Israel/West may have turned a rules-based international
order into a mockery of truth and justice; but this woman’s
voice will “. . . scatter the proud in the imagination of their hearts”
(Lk.1.51).
These are all wealthy people and fear they will lose their wealth and access to other countries resources. I hope their worlds collapse and they are placed in a hell they fostered on others.
The religious concept of “divine retribution” on display:
The saying goes: “Hope springs eternal” but how is it going to change the global situation that you so rightly detest?
According to the tenets of 3 monotheistic religions there ‘should’ be peace on Earth. Such is hyperbole of hypocrisy!
According to the obscene, arbitrary and unilateral attitudes of the amoral American regime, the U.N. Special rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese, the one person who actually deserved a ‘Noble’ Peace prize and ‘should’ have been awarded it; she did not deserve to freely give her report in a speech in front of the United Nations organizations body, in celebration and commemoration of its 80th anniversary, in service to all of humanity – the global population, so they simply denied her entry into the U.S. to give her presentation of the facts on the ground in occupied Palestine.
Once again South Africa did the right thing at a very crucial moment in dramatically and rapidly changing global developments, by inviting this quite remarkable human – facing personal threats and more, in the face of boldfaced U.S. aggression, against her persevering in her efforts; against all odds in attempting to shine a light on and bring peace to Palestine and all of western Asia – being given a chance to lecture and present her reports on international law, in commemoration of the unstinting service Nelson Mandela gave to humanity,
Perhaps the United Nations ‘should’ move out of the U.S. and go to a more openminded country, farthest away from the city whose name begins with a ‘J’ unless of course, Jamaica, being a significant headline in the news today, it ‘should move there.
It ‘would’ surely accomplish a lot more positive from there, than what with the barbaric manmade savage storms ravaging innocent humanity is doing and what the U.N. is able to accomplish in amelioration, from New Amsterdam, against the ogres of Washington D.C., in command of its policies.
What’s in a simple name change, after all – Tel Aviv; Jerusalem, unless of course one yearns to be recognized as Palestinian in one’s own state called Palestine.