What will it take to reverse the US-Israeli ‘descent into lawlessness’?
On April 21, Amnesty International Secretary General Agnès Callamard introduced the organization’s latest annual human rights report with this somber assessment:
“What marks this moment as fundamentally different is that we’re no longer documenting erosion around the system’s edges. This is a direct assault on the foundations of human rights and the international rules-based order by the most powerful actors for the purpose of control, impunity and profit. The spiraling conflict in the Middle East is a product of this descent into lawlessness. Following the initial unlawful US-Israeli attacks in violation of the UN Charter, which triggered Iran’s indiscriminate retaliation, the conflict has quickly morphed into an open warfare against civilians and civilian infrastructure, exacerbating the already catastrophic suffering of people across the region. It is now engulfing countries around the world, impacting populations everywhere, and threatening the livelihood of millions. This is what happens when the norms, institutions and legal framework painstakingly built to safeguard humanity are hollowed out for the purpose of domination.”
The war of choice against Iran
The struggle to assert absolute domination drives Trump’s erratic messaging and ‘do-what-we-want-or-we-will-destroy-you’ style of negotiation with Iran. On April 25, after appearing totally unprepared during their first talks with Iran, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff were preparing to head again to Pakistan for peace talks when their trip was cancelled by Trump. Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi had already left Islamabad after sharing Tehran’s negotiating demands with Pakistani officials and stating that Iran has “yet to see if the US is truly serious about diplomacy.” The war, which has to date cost over $62 billion or $432 per US taxpayer according to one estimate, has not brought Iran to its knees despite inflicting approximately $270 billion in war damages, killing 3,500 people and displacing a further 3.2 million from their homes.
Desperate to find a way to declare victory and extract the US from a war of its own making which is dramatically eroding his base of support at home, Trump has declared an indefinite extension of the trucewhile maintaining a navy blockade on the Strait of Hormuz that Iran had already largely closed, although it has allowed some ships to pass after paying a toll of as much as $2 million. Dozens of ships trying to enter or exit the Strait have been blocked by US forces, and one Iranian cargo ship was reportedly seized by Marines in the Gulf of Oman on April 19. While Trump is banking on the economic collapse of Iran, the standoff in the Strait is having an increasingly dire impact on the world economy. According to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization, the closure of the Strait threatens to cause a food catastrophe that could affect as many as 45 million people.
What is the latest explanation for why the US chose to go to war with Iran? In a memo issued by the State Department on April 21 that attempts to make the case that ‘Operation Epic Fury’ comports with international law, legal adviser Reed Rubinstein states that “the United States decided to act against the regime in collective self-defense of Israel.”
Israel bent on land grab in Lebanon
Israel appears to have successfully separated its assault on Lebanon from the joint Israeli-US war on Iran. On April 16, shortly after Israel carried out three double-tap strikes on ambulances killing four medical workers in Mayfadoun, attacked 60 different villages and slaughtered at least 13 people in the historic Lebanese city of Tyre, a 10-day ‘ceasefire’ began in Lebanon. This time period is supposed to enable talks for a “lasting peace” to proceed between Israel and the Lebanese government. The talks exclude Hezbollah whose disarmament is one of Israel’s chief priorities. There appears little consensus within Lebanon about the first direct talks between the countries, and there are fears that a new civil war could be ignited as Israel seeks to stoke sectarian violence. In the words of historian Ussama Makdisi, “Lebanon still struggles with sectarian tensions that both led to and are the legacy of its civil war. Israel is exploiting these divides not just to vanquish Hezbollah, but also to expand at the expense of religiously diverse Lebanon.”
Israel has invaded Lebanon seven times during the last fifty years, with Hezbollah being formed to defend the country during the 1982 invasion. During its current onslaught, Israel has killed over 2,300 people and destroyed as many as 40,000 homes, while its soldiers have helped themselves to televisions, paintings, sofas, rugs and motorcycles seized from looted houses. It declares it will stay in a six mile wide ‘buffer zone’in southern Lebanon defined by a new Gaza-style ‘yellow line.’ According to Jewish Currents, within Israel there is now both political and public support for the plan of one Israeli settler group, Uri Tzafon, to establish Israeli settlements all the way north to Lebanon’s Litani River. In 1918, David Ben-Gurion had termed the Litani river the “natural border” of a future Jewish state.
So far, Israel appears no more committed to maintaining this truce than it did to observing the ‘ceasefire’ declared in Lebanon in November 2024, which the UN says that Israel had violated on more than 15,000 occasions. On April 17, Trump announced on Truth Social that Israel had been prohibited from bombing Lebanon by the USA. Minutes later an Israeli drone strike killed someone in southern Lebanon, and it has continued to attack villages in southern Lebanon with artillery fire and drone attacks since then on the grounds that the truce gives it the right to ‘self-defense.’ On April 21, the Israeli army blew up a public school that it had rigged with explosives in the southern town of Khiam. On April 22, a well-known Lebanese journalist, Amal Khalil, who had reportedly been subjected to Israeli death threats, was murdered while her photographer colleague Zeinab Faraj was wounded in a gruesome double tap strike in southern Lebanon. For six hours, Israeli forces using stun grenades and machine gun fire prevented medics from reaching the journalist as described here on Democracy Now! and here by Zeinab Faraj. Two bystanders were killed in the attack on Khalil, who is the ninth journalist Israeli forces have killed in the current invasion. After Trump announced on April 23 that the ‘ceasefire’ between Israel and Lebanon had been extended for three weeks following talks in Washington DC, Israel killed 6 Lebanese on April 24, and as many as 15 on the weekend of April 25/26 after Hezbollah sent two rockets into northern Israel.
Only one action undertaken by the Israeli army appears to have resulted in disciplinary action. On April 19, a photo was circulated online of a soldier wielding a sledgehammer defacing a statue of the crucified Christ in the Christian Lebanese village of Debl within Israel’s latest ‘buffer zone.’ Netanyahu – aware of the electoral importance in the US of pro-Israel Christian Zionists - immediately declared himself to be “stunned and saddened.” The crucifix was replaced with one provided by Italy after the owners of the property on which the destroyed statue had stood refused Israel’s offer to replace it. Two offending soldiers were sentenced to 30 days in prison.
No punishment for sexual violence
The dropping of all charges against five soldiers for severely brutalizing and raping a prisoner in the notorious Sde Teiman detention camp appears to condone the use of sexual violence as Israeli state policy, not just in Gaza but the West Bank as well. Patterns of torture and sexual violence used in Israeli prisons against detainees from Gaza are documented in a new report by EuroMed Monitor. Practices include the use of dogsto rape Palestinian prisoners. The number of Palestinians enduring harrowing conditions has risen by 83% since October 7, 2023.
On April 20, the West Bank Protection Consortium (WBPC) released a report documenting the use of sexual violence by soldiers and settlers to fracture family life and pressure communities to leave their homes and land in the West Bank. According to Sexual violence and forcible transfer in the West Bank, “more than 70% of displaced households interviewed identified threats to women and children, particularly sexualized violence,” as “the decisive reason for leaving.” Methods used against women and children include forced nudity – sometimes with photos taken that are publicly distributed, forced penetration, painful cavity searches, genital exposure at checkpoints, urination on bound Palestinians and other forms of humiliation.
Israel speeds up its West Bank land grab
Netanyahu, who is battling corruption charges, faces an election before October 27 which his coalition government has “a low chance of winning,” according to Palestinian journalist Qassam Muaddi. Hence his government “is approving the construction of new West Bank settlements at an unprecedented rate…It seeks to further cement its de facto annexation of the territory in a race against time to entrench its colonial project.”
Meanwhile, there has been no end to settler terror, vicious attacks and army raids resulting fatalities. On April 21, settlers raided the village of Al-Mughayyir and killed two ––one of them 14-year-old Aws Hamdi Al-Naasan –– when they fired their weapons near a school. The following day, 16-year-old Youssef Sameh Shtayyeh was shot dead when the army raided the city of Nablus. Since early 2025 settlers have reportedly stolen 12,000 livestock belonging to Palestinians and they continue the systematic takeover of Palestinian water resourcesto drive Palestinians from their homes and clear West Bank land for exclusive Israeli settlement. As well as embarking on an unprecedented building spree of new settlements, Israel is allowing settlers to move back to the four northern settlements that had been emptied in 2005 at the same time as settlers were removed from the Gaza Strip.
Among the methods used by Israel to justify seizing Palestinian land and destroying Palestinian homes is the weaponization of archaeology. According to the Israeli archaeologist Yoni Mizrahi, who founded the group Emek Shaveh to oppose archaeology being used as a tool to assert Israeli dominance, archaeological sites around Jerusalem that are identified with the Judean Kingdom are used to demonstrate that “our ancestors were here thousands of years ago, and we are not intruders, or colonialists, or newcomers…we are actually indigenous, people with deep roots in the history of the land.”
The expulsion of Palestinians from areas in Silwan and other parts of East Jerusalem by declaring them to be heritage sites, and covert methods being implemented by the Jewish National Fund to register land on which Palestinian homes sit as ‘state land,’ are, in the words of ten UN experts, “components of a systematic project of demographic engineering and domination to entrench exclusive Jewish control.”
Crushing the West Bank economy
Israeli police have released a video showing the opening of the waste compartment of a garbage truck that had crossed from the West Bank into Israel on April 13. About seventy men desperate for work were crammed in the compartment.
Since October 2023 the West Bank economy has been in free fall. There have been no work permits for most of the 200,000 West Bank residents who used to work in Israel (with or without permits), largely in construction and agriculture. Since then, thousands have depended on smugglers or scaled the apartheid wall in order to feed their families. Some of their stories are here.
The denial of work permits, refusal of Israel to hand over the customs duties and taxes owed to the Palestinian Authority which represent two thirds of the PA’s total revenues, and severe restrictions on movement imposed by nearly a thousand checkpoints and other barriers that bar access to markets, resources and employment opportunities, have led to a decline of about 25% in the annual West Bank GOP and left tens of thousands of households without any steady income. The strangulation of the West Bank, while not as severe as the genocidal throttling of the Gaza Strip, appears similarly designed to deny Palestinians a future in their own land.
The ongoing genocide in Gaza
According to the 63-page report Gaza Strip: Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment which the EU and UN released on April 20, Gaza will need some $71.4 billion for recovery and reconstruction. The economy of the Gaza Strip has contracted by 84% and “the scale and extent of deprivation across living conditions, livelihoods/income, food security, gender equality, and social inclusion, have pushed back human development in the Gaza Strip by 77 years.” Drawing on research conducted jointly with the World Bank, the report found that 371,888 housing units had been destroyed or damaged, more than half of the hospitals are not working, and nearly all of Gaza’s schools are destroyed or damaged. It breaks down the amount of funding that will be needed to restore essential services, the infrastructure, housing, the health sector, agriculture and food and water systems, with just the removal of 68 million tons of contaminated debris predicted to cost more than $1.7 billion. As well as detailing costs, it describes the “catastrophic humanitarian impact” of the war, with women bearing “an immense share” of the burden, and “virtually 100 percent” of children requiring mental health support. According to UN figures, at least 47 women and girls were killed on average each day of the war.
The steady slaughter which is now, as Seymour Hersch writes, “a humdrum story for the Western media,” has become routine despite Trump’s request that it be scaled back to allow negotiations with Hamas to bear fruit. On April 14, seven people were killed in Israeli attacks, including 14-year-old Adam Ahmed Halaa and three-year-old Yahya al-Malahi. On April 16, a child was among four killed in separate Israeli attacks, one of which took the lives of two brothers. Three children were among the five people whose lives were extinguished by an air strike targeting a mosque compound in northern Gaza on April 22. On April 24, at least 13 people were killed in airstrikes, including siblings aged 4 and 13 years old, bringing to more than 790 people the number whose lives have been extinguished by Israeli forces since the ‘ceasefire’ began six months ago.
Hundreds have been killed for being too close to Israel’s self-declared, poorly marked ‘Yellow Line’ which now marks off the nearly 60 % of the Gaza Strip under Israeli control. An Al-Shabaka report describes how the ‘Yellow Line’ has been moved steadily west, squeezing Palestinians into an ever-shrinking part of the Gaza Strip. “Day by day, it advances,” Ahmad Ibsais writes, “burying evidence of genocide against people and land while the destruction continues.”
In his superb London Review of Books piece on the demolition of Gaza, “All they will find is sand,” Forensic Architecture’s Eyal Weizman describes an ongoing genocide in Gaza where the 48 military outposts with tall towers bristling with surveillance equipment built in the Israel-controlled zone behind the ‘Yellow Line’ no longer appear provisional ‘ceasefire’ arrangements but “permanent instruments of occupation.” West of the ‘Yellow Line,’ he writes, “the surviving population of Gaza has been reduced to a condition of bare existence, subject to unrelenting hunger and thirst under the ever present hum of killer drones and bomber jets. By keeping control of how much aid can enter -it was temporarily shut off in March after the US-Israeli attack on Iran began – Israel can continue to calibrate the conditions of life. It wants Palestinians to leave or to die slowly.”
On April 12, the Gaza Government Media Office used the term “engineered starvation” to describe Israel’s restriction on the entry of basic food items like flour to less than half of what was needed to feed the population. Under the sham ‘ceasefire’ 600 trucks containing humanitarian supplies were supposed to be entering Gaza every day, but only a third of that number have done so on average during the last six months. In the words of Claire San Filippo, the emergency manager for Doctors without Borders (MSF), “Six months on, the ceasefire has failed to end the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, with Israeli authorities continuing to impose conditions intended to destroy conditions of life.”
In direct talks between Board of Peace member Aryeh Lightstone and Hamas negotiator Khalil al-Hayya held in Cairo on April 14, Al-Hayya reportedly said that in order for talks to move forward, more humanitarian aidmust be allowed to enter Gaza and Israel’s lethal strikes must be stopped. According to Israel’s Channel 14, given the failure to disarm Hamas, Israel is preparing to resume its war against Gaza “as early as next month.”
Struggling to keep hope alive
Despite the daunting odds they face, many residents appear determined to build their lives anew in what remains of Gaza. On April 21, an opening ceremony was held for the Phoenix Library in Gaza City. It now houses books that its founders, Omar Hamad and Ibrahim Massri, had gathered from the wreckage of destroyed libraries as they were forced to move from place to place. And on April 25, residents of Deir el-Balah in Gaza joined West Bank Palestinians in casting ballots in municipal elections organized by the Palestinian Authority. Hamas supervised the elections but declined to take part in them, as did many West Bank Palestinians. Before the vote, Israeli intelligence officials sent messages to the phones of Deir el-Balah residents telling them that Israel will remain in charge of the town no matter who won the elections.
Without an international brake being applied to Israel’s genocidal actions, it is hard to imagine a Gaza Strip where Palestinians can thrive ever rising like a phoenix from the ashes of war. Western countries are being pressured by their citizens to do something. The call by Spain, Slovenia and Ireland to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement had the support of more than 350 former European officials, 70 prominent European organizations and over a million people who signed the European Citizens’ Initiative petition. But the effort to review the trade pact given Israel’s human rights violations was blocked by Germany and Italy on April 21, with Italy’s Foreign Minister arguing that suspending the Agreement would “end up affecting the general Israeli population, who often have nothing to do with the acts committed by the military.” A week earlier, after Israel had shot at Italian peacekeepers in Lebanon, Italy had suspended its defense cooperation pact with Israel.
In the US, on April 15 an unprecedented 40 senators in Congress supported a resolution disapproving of a proposed sale of certain weapons and Caterpillar D9 bulldozers to Israel put forward by Sen. Bernie Sanders. This represented a 13-vote increase over last year’s effort by Sanders to stop the transfer of weapons to Israel. Seven Democratic senators voted with Republicans to defeat the measure. The pressure being exerted on elected representatives to end weapons shipments to Israel is described here.
So although attitudes are changing, Israel’s absolute impunity is still unchallenged by significant state action. As journalism professor Mohamad Bazzi writes, “While US and western public opinion on Israel has dramatically shifted against it, there’s been no meaningful accountability, leaving the path wide open for the lawless new order that Trump and Israel are pursuing.”
Nancy Murray, Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine