Tag: israel

Israel and the US have battered the international legal order. The impunity must stop

The international legal order is in shambles. But from the ruins of impunity and lawbreaking, a group of nations is working to enforce accountability.

On Monday, the UN general assembly’s high-level meetings opened to news that Washington had drawn up sanctions against the international criminal court, targeting its bank accounts, software, insurers and staff.

On Tuesday, the US president stood at the podium and threatened Iran with annihilation. On Thursday at the same rostrum, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, wanted by the ICC for war crimes, cast all those seeking accountability as “barbarians who threaten our common civilization”. Palestinian officials were absent, denied travel visas by the United States.

Netanyahu has never pretended to respect international law. When South Africa brought its Genocide Convention case against Israel’s actions in Gaza, Netanyahu declared: “Nobody will stop us – not The Hague.” This summer, he mused on American television that, should his plane ever be forced down in a country that honours the warrant, Israel’s special forces could be given “a new task”. The American president has promised he will not be arrested on US soil “in any way, shape, or form”.

I was arrested protesting Netanyahu’s New York visit. Here’s why we took a standRead more

The message to the world is plain: crimes committed by the allies and acolytes of power will never be punished.

This impunity is not limited to Gaza. It’s playing out in the accelerating ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. It has travelled to Lebanon, where Israeli strikes have killed more than 4,000 people this year and displaced more than a million. In southern Syria, Israeli troops shell and raid villages in the countryside around Damascus. In Sudan, massacres are carried out with arms, technology and financing of the United Arab Emirates, an ally of the Israeli government.

Every commander with a patron has learnt the lesson of the past three years. Mass atrocity carries no price if your friends are strong enough.

States that resist encounter punishments in dizzying varieties – sanctions, tarriffs, threats and isolation. South Africa lost US aid after bringing its genocide case to The Hague. Colombia’s president had his visa revoked after speaking out on Gaza in the streets of New York.

This too will not remain confined to the global south. Instruments built for terrorists and drug cartels are now pointed at judges. More than a dozen ICC judges and prosecutors, including the court’s president, already live under US sanctions. A designation of the whole institution would reach every European bank, insurer and technology supplier serving a court that sits in the Netherlands.

Tools like these, once deployed, are never put back in the drawer. Governments in Europe that shrug today should ask how long before the same instruments are turned on their regulators, their competition authorities, their own courts.

What can countries do? History points to some answers.

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Netanyahu brings ‘killer pager’ to UN

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held up a pager at the UN General Assembly, invoking the deadly 2024 covert sabotage operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon, which killed dozens and severely wounded thousands, including women and children.

Thousands of pagers carried by Hezbollah members exploded across Lebanon on September 17, 2024, followed by hundreds of weaponized walkie-talkies the next day. The attacks killed dozens and injured up to 4,000 people, including numerous civilian bystanders, healthcare workers, and their families. Israel later acknowledged responsibility for the operation.

Speaking at the General Assembly on Thursday, Netanyahu held up a pager, saying: “You remember the beepers? Remember these? Hezbollah certainly remembers them.”

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One Hostage and One Million People Will Pay?

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has now said something that should disturb anyone. According to The Jerusalem Post, Katz threatened to destroy what remains of Gaza City and forcibly evacuate around ONE MILLION Palestinians if Hamas takes a single Israeli hostage. Think about what is being said. One person is captured and a million people may be driven from their homes while what remains of their city is destroyed. The Jerusalem Post itself acknowledged that such a statement could make Israel’s defense against genocide and war crimes accusations at The Hague more difficult because international law requires proportionality.

This is precisely why international humanitarian law prohibits COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that no protected person may be punished for an offense he or she did not personally commit. Collective penalties and measures of intimidation are prohibited. This principle exists because humanity has already traveled down this road. Governments cannot punish an entire village, city, ethnic population, or civilian society because one person or armed organization committed an offense. Otherwise there is no law of war. There is merely vengeance.

There is also a serious distinction between hostage taking and the capture of an enemy combatant during warfare. Israel deems taken soldiers “hostages” rather than “prisoners of war.” The Geneva Conventions contain an entire framework governing prisoners of war and people detained during armed conflict. The ICRC makes clear that POWs and other wartime detainees are protected by international humanitarian law. Hostage taking is prohibited, but so is collective punishment.

If Hamas deliberately seizes a civilian to compel Israel to act, that can constitute hostage taking. If a combatant is captured during hostilities, the legal analysis is different and depends upon the nature of the conflict and the person’s status. Governments cannot simply erase the laws governing wartime detention by changing the vocabulary.

Consider the scale of what Katz has threatened. Gaza today contains roughly two million people. Katz threatened to extinguish roughly HALF of the entire population of Gaza. He did not say he would punish the people responsible. He threatened to destroy what remains of their city and remove approximately one million human beings.

People seem to misunderstand what genocide actually means under international law. You do not have to exterminate every member of an ethnic or national population before the word becomes legally relevant. The Genocide Convention covers acts committed with the specific intent to destroy a protected group “in whole or in part,” and international courts have interpreted that “part” as having to be substantial. Numbers matter, but so does the significance of the population being targeted and the evidence concerning intent.

Look at Srebrenica. More than 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were murdered while the wider Muslim population was forcibly removed from the enclave. International tribunals concluded that genocide had occurred even though the victims represented only a fraction of Bosnia’s entire Muslim population. The courts looked at the targeted community, the killings, the expulsions and what those actions demonstrated about the intent to destroy that community.

Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that people cannot be punished for offenses they did not personally commit and expressly prohibits collective penalties. Article 49 prohibits mass forcible transfers from occupied territory except under narrow circumstances involving civilian security or imperative military necessity, with additional protections and an obligation to return evacuees when hostilities cease.

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 Actresses Susan Sarandon and Hannah Einbinder Handcuffed While Protesting Netanyahu’s UN Speech

Actresses Hannah Einbinder and Susan Sarandon were taken into custody Thursday outside the United Nations in New York during a protest against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the General Assembly.

Jewish Voice for Peace organized the protest, which took place a few blocks from the UN headquarters on Thursday.

Protesters wore matching shirts that read “Fund people not bombs” and carried banners including “Stop Arming Israel” and “End the Genocide.”

Chants captured on video included “Netanyahu, you can’t hide! We charge you with genocide,” “Let Gaza live,” and “Stop arming Israel.”

An NYPD spokesperson said Community Affairs officers warned the crowd to leave.

“They continued to block the intersection. Multiple individuals who didn’t comply were taken into custody,” the spokesperson said, without giving a final headcount.

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Netanyahu Threatens NYC Mayor Mamdani ‘I’m going to tell the truth about you’

Radical socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has repeatedly puffed up his chest with threats against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In July, Mamdan threatened to arrest Netanyahu during this week’s UN General Assembly.

“Netanyahu belongs in The Hague,” Mamdani said, referencing Prison Scheveningen in The Hague, Netherlands, home of the United Nations Detention Unit (UNDU) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) Detention Center.

In a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times, Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked Mamdani whether he would follow through on his campaign promise to “arrest Benjamin Netanyahu.”

A promise he later admitted he lacked the political power to follow through on.

Now, Netanyahu is pushing back.

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Pay Up, Shut Up, and Cheer: How Washington Gaslit America Into Netanyahu’s Forever War

The cost of diesel that hauls every loaf of bread, every pallet of medicine and every bag of fertilizer in this country just set an all-time record. The national average hit $6.44 a gallon, up 71 percent since the United States and Israel attacked Iran on February 28. Gasoline sits at $4.46, at least six states are already above $5, and Californians are paying $6.11. Shipping giant CMA CGM just slapped an emergency fuel surcharge on its cargo, and the Congressional Budget Office projects the war will add half a percentage point to inflation in early 2027.

But at least Iran doesn’t have a nuke, right?

The president’s response to this infuriating perpetuation of a new forever war sure seems like that’s his stance entirely as he tells you to pay up and smile. Last week Trump said Americans are “going to have to pay some extra for gas” to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and called it “a very inexpensive price to pay.” Back in March he was blunter, declaring that anyone who objected to the price spike was a fool: “ONLY FOOLS WOULD THINK DIFFERENTLY!” This is the same man who campaigned on two-dollar gas and who is still promising it will fall “below Two Dollars a gallon” once we “WIN.”

The problem is that you are being asked to pay for stopping a weapon that, according to most of the world, including Trump’s own intelligence community, Iran was not building. In March 2025, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told the Senate that the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon” and that Khamenei had not reauthorized the program he suspended in 2003. When reporters asked Trump about that testimony, he replied, “I don’t care what she said.” Days later he bombed Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan and told the nation the sites had been “completely and totally obliterated.” This blatant lie would then set the nefarious stage for an endless conveyor belt of lies that would run for well over a year down the throats of Americans.

If the program was obliterated in June 2025, what exactly were we bombing in February 2026? Trump claimed that without the strikes Iran would have had a bomb within two weeks, while the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said there was no evidence Iran was building one. Gabbard’s own 2026 testimony stated that the intelligence community assessed Iran was not rebuilding its enrichment capability after the 2025 attacks. As he said on our podcast, the nation’s top counterterrorism official, Joe Kent, resigned rather than support a war on a country that posed “no imminent threat to our nation.”

Gabbard’s own path tells the story of how Washington swallows people whole and how that assembly line of lies fills their worlds with half-truths and deceptions designed to keep Americans in the dark. In 2019 she warned that a war with Iran would make Iraq “look like a cakewalk,” and in Congress she introduced the No More Presidential Wars Act to require congressional authorization before any attack on Iran. In 2024 she told voters that a vote for Trump was a vote to end wars. Then, after Trump publicly dismissed her, she posted that the “dishonest media” had taken her out of context and that Iran could build a weapon “within weeks to months.” Shameful indeed. When Senator Jon Ossoff asked her point blank whether the intelligence community had assessed an imminent nuclear threat, she answered that only the president can make that determination. Her spine, like that of an earthworm, as she slipped away back to Hawaii, having betrayed all those who supported her.

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Bibi: Send More Bombs

As we approach the three-year mark of the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Israel has signaled that it has every intention of continuing its massive bombing campaigns against Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and possibly other countries. And Donald Trump has signaled that he is ready to help. On September 15, the Washington Post reported a decision by the Trump administration to provide Israel with some 40,000 of the US Air Force’s massive 2,000-pound bombs, the largest such transfer to any country in many years.

Bombs Away for Zion

Specifically, the administration announced that it was prepared to “sell” to Israel a $2.8 billion package of US Air Force 2000-pound bombs, consisting of 20,000 MK-84 bombs and another 20,000 BLU-117 bombs. The two versions are similar in size, weight, and functionality. Although both models are considered “general purpose” and “dumb” bombs, they can be configured with various guidance kits into precision guided munitions, aka “smart bombs.” Presumably, Israel will use its own guidance kits which it produces domestically. The administration’s package for Israel also includes 20,000 of the USAF’s I-2000 penetrator warheads, which function as a heavy-duty bomb body for the MK-84 or the BLU-117, effectively converting the munition into a hard target penetrator or “bunker buster.”

Israel’s profligate use of massive munitions on civilian populations has drawn international criticism since the opening weeks of the Gaza conflict. According to CNN, “In the first month of its war in Gaza, Israel dropped hundreds of massive bombs, many of them capable of killing or wounding people more than 1,000 feet away…. Satellite imagery from those early days of the war reveals more than 500 impact craters over 12 meters (40 feet) in diameter, consistent with those left behind by 2,000-pound bombs. Those are four times heavier than the largest bombs the United States dropped on ISIS in Mosul, Iraq, during the war against the extremist group there. Weapons and warfare experts blame the extensive use of heavy munitions such as the 2,000-pound bomb for the soaring death toll. The population of Gaza is packed together much more tightly than almost anywhere else on earth, so the use of such heavy munitions has a profound effect.”

“The use of 2,000-pound bombs in an area as densely populated as Gaza means it will take decades for communities to recover,” said John Chappell, advocacy and legal fellow at CIVIC, a DC-based group focused on minimizing civilian harm in conflict. Such massive bombs are “normally used sparingly by Western militaries, experts say, because of their potential impact on densely populated areas like Gaza. International humanitarian law prohibits indiscriminate bombing.”

Separately, a writer for the Concord Monitor has described the catastrophic effects of a MK-84 2000-pound bomb being dropped on a crowded residential area such as Gaza: “The detonation will create an instantaneous fireball that will lash out at temperatures exceeding 8,500 degrees Fahrenheit. The explosion will carve a crater 50 feet wide and 35 feet deep and hurl 10,000 pounds of rock and dirt debris at supersonic speed. The lethal radius will be a quarter-mile wide and will kill all the people within that area. But the destruction will not stop there. The bomb will rip through thick concrete and metal, creating a wider blast radius. The blast waves will be felt up to half a mile away, rupturing lungs and tearing off limbs. A single bomb will destroy entire city blocks.”

Israel regularly boasts about the professionalism of its military and likes to call the IDF the “most moral army in the world.” Its record in action tells a vastly different story. One curious decision by the IDF that apparently has never been challenged by the US is why it has opted for 2000-pound bombs against “soft” civilian targets, when 250-pound, 500-pound and 1000-pound munitions, which are readily available from the US, are far cheaper and cause far less collateral damage. Could it be that Israel’s real goal is simply genocide, a charge that it has claimed is unfounded

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Israeli-Ukrainian Man on Jewish Pilgrimage to Uman Is Captured by Kiev’s Man-Catchers and Forcibly Conscripted into the Army

From a religious pilgrimage directly to the front.

We have been reporting here on TGP on the absolute tragedy that is the forced conscription in Ukraine (also called ‘busification’).

Every day, new videos arise of man-catchers forcibly drafting men to fight and die for the Kiev regime.

Unlike in the early days of the war, when people lined up to fight, now no one is up to be sent to Volodymyr Zelensky’s meat grinder.

Those who haven’t fled Ukraine either live hidden inside their homes or else risk being caught and sent to the front lines.

Yesterday, it arose that a 49-year-old Hassidic Jew from Betar Illit, a father of six, was captured at the Ukraine-Romania border crossing.

The man was returning to Israel after a pilgrimage to spend Rosh Hashanah in the city of Uman, but was snatched and drafted into the Ukrainian army.

The Jerusalem Post reported:

“Jonathan Karlinsky Mashak from Jerusalem, a 49-year-old married ba’al teshuva who studies at a yeshiva, was born in Ukraine and immigrated to Israel about 14 years ago.

He was traveling on a bus operated by the ‘Derech Tzadikim’ company and was carrying an Israeli passport stating that he was born in the Soviet Union. However, according to a friend who was traveling with him on the bus, border officials identified him as also being a Ukrainian citizen after hearing him speak Ukrainian.”

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Is Europe Restraining Israel – or Merely Protecting the Two-State Illusion?

This time, Europe seems serious about holding Israel accountable – or at least that is what 11 European countries, together with Canada, want us to believe.

On September 8, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the UK announced their intention to introduce national restrictions, support European restrictions, or actively consider measures against trade in goods with illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Undeniably, the announcement represents a significant political and legal precedent. Dismissing it outright would be impulsive, particularly considering the participation of governments such as those of Canada and the UK, which have historically provided Israel with extensive political and diplomatic support.

Yet celebrating the announcement as an earth-shattering event without examining its context, timing and potential effectiveness would be equally rash. Worse, it could contribute to weakening the public pressure that finally compelled Western governments to take even these limited steps.

The political meaning of the initiative notwithstanding, several important qualifications must be considered.

First, most of the 12 governments have announced intentions, rather than binding and immediately enforceable restrictions.

The decision is therefore still vulnerable to political negotiations, legislative delays, pressure from pro-Israel groups and changing electoral calculations. Without firm deadlines and enforceable mechanisms, today’s declared intentions could become irrelevant by the time they are implemented.

Second, France and Canada have yet to publish detailed implementation schedules. The UK, on the other hand, has announced a comparatively extensive package, covering settlement goods and services related to finance, construction, infrastructure, real estate and advertising. However, its restrictions could take six to nine months to enter into force.

Even if these measures eventually exert meaningful pressure, Israel has been granted additional time to advance its annexation plans and create further irreversible facts on the ground.

Third, the joint commitment focuses largely on goods, while Israel’s settlement enterprise depends on a far broader network of financing, investment, construction, technology and services. These connections often operate through complicated corporate structures that conceal whether a company or transaction is directly linked to a settlement.

Fourth, the initiative is primarily concerned with settlements, particularly the E1 project. E1 is the strategically located area between occupied East Jerusalem and the Maale Adumim settlement bloc. Israeli construction there would further divide the occupied West Bank, sever Palestinian territorial continuity and isolate occupied East Jerusalem from surrounding Palestinian communities.

Europe fears that completing E1 would destroy the remaining geographical basis for a future Palestinian state. That concern is defensible insofar as the two-state solution remains Europe’s declared foreign-policy strategy.

Yet the joint declaration does not refer to the genocide in Gaza. Nor does it confront the wider system of Israeli military occupation that enables settlement expansion, forced displacement and land confiscation. It addresses one particularly alarming manifestation of the occupation while leaving the larger structure largely untouched.

Fifth, there is still no coordinated suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement and no collective European arms embargo against Israel.

This omission is especially consequential when measured against the broader economic relationship. European Commission figures show that total EU-Israel trade in goods increased in both 2024 and 2025, the first two full calendar years following the beginning of the genocide.

Therefore, any losses suffered by the settlements – which represent only a small part of Israel’s overall trade – could therefore be absorbed through Israel’s much larger economic relationship with Europe.

The military contradiction is even more glaring. According to SIPRI, Germany provided 31 percent of Israel’s major arms imports between 2021 and 2025, making it Israel’s second-largest supplier after the US. Israel continued receiving major weapons throughout this period despite the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the escalating violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.

European states are also major purchasers of Israeli military technology. Europe received 41 percent of Israeli arms exports during the same period, helping sustain an industry deeply integrated into Israel’s military establishment.

Europe is therefore attempting to restrict the settlements while continuing to maintain economic and military relationships with the state that finances, protects and expands them.

A counterargument with some legitimacy is that the announced measures constitute a first step and that greater accountability may follow. But this argument carries weight only if we understand why these governments acted in the first place.

If the restrictions are primarily intended to weaken Benjamin Netanyahu before Israel’s October elections, they may prove to be temporary political instruments whose future depends on the electoral outcome.

Some hope, however, can be found in the growing public solidarity with Palestine across Europe.

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Israel moves closer to Austria’s Freedom Party, founded by former SS members and Nazi Party affiliates

Since the October 7, 2023 attacks and the subsequent Israeli offensive in Gaza, Israel has stepped up contacts with various far-right parties in Europe and Latin America, including Spain’s Vox. However, last Thursday, the Israeli government took that policy a step further when its foreign minister, Gideon Saar, said the country seeks “a substantive, open and sincere dialogue” to establish ties with Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), the Israeli daily Haaretz reported.

The FPÖ, created in 1956, not only counted former SS members among its founders, but — according to leaders of Austria’s Jewish community — still includes numerous supporters of the ideology behind the extermination of six million Jews between 1933 and 1945.

Saar spoke after a meeting at the European Parliament headquarters in the French city of Strasbourg, organized by the Austrian far-right party and hosted by the extremist parliamentary group Patriots for Europe, which brings together parties such as Vox, Matteo Salvini’s Lega, the formation of former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, and France’s National Rally (RN), led by Marine Le Pen, among other populist far-right parties. In February 2025, Likud, the party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, joined the group as an observer member at Vox’s request.

In his speech, FPÖ leader and former Austrian interior minister Herbert Kickl condemned the Hamas attacks of October 7 as “a crime against humanity.” He also adopted the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, Saar noted. That definition is disputed because it equates most criticism of the State of Israel with antisemitism.

The FPÖ leader later acknowledged “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Judea and Samaria” — the biblical name for the Palestinian territory of the West Bank, occupied by Israel since 1967 — and expressed “his declared intention to move Austria’s embassy to Jerusalem” if the FPÖ enters government, as well as “his commitment to deepen practical cooperation and build a new partnership with Israel,” a move praised by Saar, as cited by Haaretz. Such a move would amount to recognizing Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem, which it has also held illegally since 1967. That is why most Western countries, with the exception of the United States, keep their diplomatic missions in Tel Aviv.

Until now, Israel had maintained a formal boycott of the Freedom Party because of its Nazi past and the history of its leaders who have expressed antisemitic views. Those relations have softened in recent years alongside Israel’s rapprochement with other European far-right parties. Saar’s remarks now point to a likely normalization with the FPÖ, despite Austria’s Jewish community’s outright rejection of the party.

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