Israeli Human Rights Lawyer Attacked While Documenting Settler Raid on Gaza Aid Convoy

Aid agencies are running out of food in southern Gaza amid Israel’s ongoing offensive in Rafah and the shutdown of the two main border crossings in the south. Some 1.1 million Palestinians are on the brink of starvation, according to the United Nations, while a “full-blown famine” is taking place in the north. Meanwhile, some Israelis have been blocking aid from reaching the Gaza border, including a violent attack on trucks carrying humanitarian relief through the occupied West Bank earlier this week, when settlers threw food packages on the ground and set fire to the vehicles at the Tarqumiyah checkpoint near Hebron. “They did whatever they want,” says Israeli lawyer and peace activist Sapir Sluzker Amran, who documented the attack on the aid convoy. She says Israeli soldiers appeared to be working with the settlers, refusing to intervene. “They were just standing aside like there is nothing that they can do, like it’s normal, what’s happening.”

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"Most Thorough Legal Analysis' Yet Concludes Israel Committing Genocide in Gaza

The University Network for Human Rights on Wednesday released and sent to United Nations offices a 105-page report that it called "the most thorough legal analysis" yet to find "Israel is committing genocide" against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip…

"These violations give rise to obligations by all other states: to refrain from recognizing Israel’s breaches as legal or taking any actions that may amount to complicity in these breaches; and to take positive steps to suppress, prevent, and punish the commission by Israel of further genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza," the document adds.

Read the article here.

A woman at a grave at the Rafah camp in the southern Gaza Strip on April 10, the first day of Eid al-Fitr.,Haitham Imad/European Pressphoto Agency

Gaza’s apocalypse “symbolizes utter moral failure” of the post WW II system of international law

The “harvest of terrifying consequences from escalating conflict and the near breakdown of international law” are documented by Amnesty International in its annual The State of the World’s Human Rights report released on April 23, 2024. “What we saw in 2023 confirms that many powerful states are abandoning the founding values of humanity and universality enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” writes its Secretary General, Agnès Callamard.

How else can one comprehend the quip of President Biden that this is “a good day for world peace,” as he signed a $95.3 billion weapons package into law? “It’s going to make the world safer,” the President stated. “And it continues America’s leadership in the world, and everyone knows it.”

Tell that to the more than 2,200 students who have been arrested in the weeks since police raided the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ set up by Columbia University on April 17 and arrested 108 students for ‘trespassing.’ What resonates for them are the words spoken by Howard Zinn when he praised the use of civil disobedience at an anti-Vietnam war rally on the Boston Common 53 years ago (May 5, 1971): “We need to do something to disturb that calm, smiling, murderous president in the White House…they’ll say we’re disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war.”

Read the article by Nancy Murray of the Alliance here.