Israel-Affiliated Organization Launches Lawsuit in US Against Hamas for War Crimes — Lawsuit Says Nothing About Israel's Mass Murder in Gaza Last August

During Israel's massacre in Gaza last August, the Israeli military killed 2200 Gazans, the vast majority of whom were civilians including hundreds of children.  Hamas responded by killing 72 Israelis - 64 of whom were soldiers.

Photo by Elvert Barnes.

By MiddleEastEye
Twenty-six Americans filed a complaint on Tuesday to the US Attorney General requesting the justice ministry prosecute Hamas leaders for "war crimes," the Israeli legal group representing them said.

RELATED STORY: Israel Fact Book -- Israel Created Hamas, Uses Children as Human Shields, and Uses Snipers to Kill Teens in Cold Blood

The litigation, inspired and organised by Israeli legal group Shurat HaDin, was announced a day before the Palestinians officially became members of the International Crime Court, where they hope to see Israeli officials prosecuted for similar offences.

"We can't sit idly by. We need to fight back," said Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, the director of the non-governmental organisation.

RELATED STORY: Israeli Soldiers Were Recorded Shooting A Palestinian Teen Playing On His Rooftop — And Then Celebrating Afterwards (Video)

She alleged that "the Palestinians committed war crimes," and stressed that courts other than the ICC had "the authority to try them, including in the United States".

The 26 US citizens, some of whom also hold Israeli passports, asked that Hamas leaders be prosecuted for firing rockets at Israel's Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv during the 2014 war, when militants in Gaza fought Israeli forces.

RELATED STORY: Israel's Gaza Doctrine - The Worsening of Life for People in Gaza Is A Deliberate Goal of the Israeli Military — And That's A War Crime

Some of them were among people forced to run for shelter when rockets launched at the airport hit a short distance away, said Shurat Hadin.

Others were passengers on board a Delta flight from New York that was forced to land in Paris, after US flights were diverted from Israel as a result of the rocket fire.

The airport is located 60 kilometers north of the Gaza Strip. There were no direct hits on the terminal, but missiles fell in the nearby city of Yehud, destroying a residential building.

RELATED STORY: Israeli Army Whistle-Blower Arrested After Revealing Orders To Murder Gaza Civilians on Facebook

Over the course of last summer's 50-day conflict, approximately 2,200 Palestinians were killed — Israel contends that half were combatants, while the Palestinians say that most were civilians — and 72 people were killed on the Israeli side, including 64 soldiers.

According to US law, a person can be imprisoned for performing an "act of violence" at an international airport if the victim is a US citizen, said the NGO.

Read More

Israel Collected Millions in Tax Revenues That Were Supposed to Go Back to Palestinians — And Then Stole It

Whenever the Israeli government wants to make Palestinians suffer for not following its dictates, it withholds money that belongs to Palestinians. Israel's seizure of Palestinian taxes is sparking economic devastation and mounting resistance.

Israel's retaliatory freezing of Palestinian tax revenue sparked a growing boycott in the West Bank. (Photo: Paolo Cuttitta/flickr/cc)

By Sarah Lazare
As Israel continues to withhold $130 million a month in revenue from the Palestinian Authority, officials warn that the West Bank's already choked economy is teetering over the edge, with most public employees facing salary cuts of 40 percent or more and the government close to default.

"We have informed the Palestinian Authority that we have reached the limits permitted to them, or are about to get there, and that banks will not be able to continue to fund it," Palestinian central bank Governor Jihad al-Wazir told Reuters on Wednesday.

"The situation in general is very tough," al-Wazir continued. "Suspending the tax transfers is leading to a rapid economic deterioration."

Ordinary people are bearing the brunt of these policies. Reuters reports:

Nidal Sadqa is a 47-year-old father of four who works for the Palestinian economy ministry in Ramallah and for the past three months he has been paid 60 percent of his usual salary. Half of what's left each month pays bank loans and other debts.

"I haven't paid the rent for three months and I owe the supermarket for things I've already taken," he said, describing circumstances familiar to the nearly 160,000 people employed by the Palestinian Authority in Gaza and the West Bank.

Israel froze the tax revenue in early January in retaliation for the PA's formal application to join the International Criminal Court. Since then, it has withheld over $500 million. These funds account for approximately two thirds of the PA's budget and are used to pay tens of thousands of public employees, according to Haaretz.

In response, Palestinians are reinvigorating a boycott of Israeli companies, specifically targeting Tnuva, Elite, Strauss Osem, Prigat, and Jafora. This escalation is a "first step against arbitrary Israeli procedure," according to a statement from the Palestinian Farmers' Union. While not a new tactic, reports indicate that the latest boycott marks an escalation, with Palestinians taking the step of confiscating and dumping Israeli goods.

Read More

Israel's Racist Prime Minister Netanyahu on Verge of Being Taught a Lesson?: US Won't Rule Out Using UN to Create Palestine

Obama-Netanyahu Tiff Worsens: U.S. Won’t Rule Out Using U.N. to Create Palestine

By Juan Cole
President Obama put some further hints out there on Tuesday about how he might proceed on Israeli-Paletinian relations in his final two years.

Asked if he’d be willing to go through the United Nations to achieve Palestinian statehood, he replied, “We’re going to do that evaluation . . . We’re going to partly wait for an actual Israeli government to form.”

It is huge that Obama did not say “no.” The Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have been bilateral. The US and Obama liked it that way. The question was whether the talks could now become multilateral, which is what would happen at the UN. Since bilateral talks are no longer plausible, the UN may be what’s left. Only 2 1/2 years ago, the Obama administration petulantly opposed granting Palestine non-member observer status at the UN, insisting that bilateral relations were the way to go instead. (Palestine now has standing to take Netanyahu to the International Criminal Court).

Obama declined to comment on a Wall Street Journal report that Israel spied on the US negotiations with Iran and then conveyed classified material to Congress in hopes of derailing the talks. It is of course outrageous that a foreign power should be encouraging congress to tie up a president’s foreign policy initiative.

Read More

Israel Committed 'War Crimes' Says International Criminal Court But It Won't Do Anything: It's Too Busy Accusing Third World Leaders

According to lawyers, the court's decision confirms that Israel has a 'special status' in regards to international law.

Photo by Alkan Boudewijn de Beaumont Chaglar.

By telesurtv
International Criminal Court (ICC) lawyers believe that Israel is guilty of “war crimes” for the raid on an aid ship bound for Gaza in 2010 that killed nine Turkish activists. However, they have also decided that the case does not meet their criteria for prosecution, according to court papers seen by Reuters on Wednesday.

RELATED STORY: Mass Media Blacks Out Reports Of Israeli Crimes -- The International Criminal Court Charges Kenyatta Instead of Netanyahu and Israel's
Gaza Massacre is Forgotten

On May 31, 2010, the Israeli military forcefully boarded six civilian ships from the “Gaza Freedom Flotilla” that were traveling from Turkey to deliver humanitarian aid and construction materials to the besieged region. The army boarded the ships in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea.

The activists on board say they did not put up a fight, however the Israeli army insists that they were met with resistance – which led to several activists being killed, including eight Turkish nationals and an American of Turkish origin on the Mavi Marmara boat.

The ICC does not have jurisdiction over crimes committed in either Turkey, where most the boats were registered, or Israel, since neither are members of the ICC. However, the Mavi Marmara was registered to the Comoros Islands, which is a member, making the crimes on board eligible for ICC investigation.

"The information available provides a reasonable basis to believe that war crimes under the Court's jurisdiction have been committed in the context of interception and takeover of the Mavi Marmara by IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) soldiers on 31 May 2010," read the papers.

But the papers also added that prosecutors had decided the crimes “were not of sufficient gravity to fall under the court's jurisdiction,” reported Reuters. Their evidence and criteria for making this decision however, remained vague.

Read More

Mass Media Blacks Out Reports Of Israeli Crimes: The International Criminal Court Charges Kenyatta Instead of Netanyahu and Israel's Gaza Massacre is Forgotten

Harvy Levin - Founder of TMZ: After Israel's attack on Gaza, America was focused
on Israel's war crimes. Then TMZ aired a video of NFL player Ray Rice knocking out
his wife (a video TMZ may have had for many months) and changed the subject to
black men and the NFL's domestic abuse problem. Big media conveniently forgot
about Israel's war crimes.

By William Hanna
As a consequence of the corporate mass media’s blackout of the news about Israeli crimes against humanity; as a consequence of the International Criminal Court’s cowardly disregard of crimes committed by Israeli leaders while instead charging Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta with crimes against humanity; and as a consequence of the West’s Israeli orchestrated preoccupation with the necessity to wage war against ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) — which came into being with covert encouragement and assistance from the real axis of evil of the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia — Israel’s latest barbaric assault euphemistically codenamed Operation Protective Edge but in reality intended to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people, has been quietly and quickly forgotten.

Collective corporate mass media amnesia comes as no surprise considering that in the U.S. alone 90% of what Americans read, watch and listen to is controlled by just six corporations whose combined revenue in 2010 was $275.9 billion. Furthermore, all six of those corporations like for example Rupert Murdoch’s [not the actual] News Corp (Fox News, Wall Street Journal, and New York Post) have Israeli aligned global news tentacles that distort, mislead, and even suppress the true facts. Mass media bias towards Israel is even prevalent at the supposedly dispassionate and honest taxpayer funded BBC where coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict requires finding “a balance” that is in actual fact strongly tilted towards Israel.

As part of its “balance” the BBC’s director of television, Danny Cohen (surprise, surprise), has announced plans to air a series of special programs next year that will commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The programs are to be broadcast around Holocaust industry Memorial Day on January 27, 2015 and will range from interviews with survivors of the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau camp to a new drama about the 1961 trial in Israel of Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann who was seized in Argentina by Israeli agents and smuggled back to Israel on an El Al airliner. Cohen’s announcement was welcomed with “We are delighted that the BBC will be ensuring that Holocaust Memorial Day is marked by the widest possible audience,” declared Olivia Marks-Woldman, chief executive of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. The question is have fine Jewish people of status like Olivia felt the slightest twinge of conscience over the recent horrific images coming from the Gaza Strip as a result Israel’s Operation Protective Edge: an operation that had Israeli Jews chanting “tomorrow there’s no school in Gaza, they don’t have any children left.”?

Such passionate racist hate can only beget hate from the victims and global condemnation form compassionate people. But are such reactions anti-Semitic or simply the consequence of Apartheid Israel’s incitement to genocide of the Palestinian people who — contrary to what Israeli Jews keep telling us — are human beings and not beasts; are a people in their own right; and do exist on their own land with an inalienable entitlement as follows:

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Read More

Don't Investigate Israel's War Crimes, US Tells International Criminal Court: ICC Turns Out To Be Merely A Political Tool of the West

Lawyers and former court officials say that western pressure has influenced decision not to open probe on Israel's Gaza massacre

Photo by Alkan Boudewijn de Beaumont Chaglar.

By JPOST.COM STAFF
The US and other western powers have exerted pressure on the International Criminal Court at the Hague to prevent a war crimes probe of Israel's operation in the Gaza Strip, The Guardian reported on Monday, quoting former court officials.

During Operation Protective Edge, the Palestinian Authority has threatened  to request that the court look into allegations that the civilian deaths in Gaza during the IDF's operation constitute a war crime.

According to the report, the issue is among the matters being discussed at cease-fire talks in Cairo.
Palestinians requested that the court probe Israel for war crimes in 2009 , following Operation Cast Lead, however that request came before the Palestinians were recognized as a non-member observer state at the United Nations in 2012.

The ICC itself is divided on whether or not it has jurisdiction to probe the matter based on the 2009 request, or whether a new request would have to be submitted, according to The Guardian. The Palestinian factions would have to agree on submitting a new request, a difficult task, as Hamas would also be opening itself up to a war crimes inquiry.

The Guardian reported that western pressure has prevented the ICC from taking the view that the 2009 request gives the court jurisdiction to open a war crimes investigation into Israel's actions.

Read More

Israel Wants Its Paid Agents Within the US Congress To Help It Fend Off War Crimes Charges

Palestinians are planning to join the International Criminal Court and accuse Israel of crimes against humanity.

Photo by Alkan Boudewijn de Beaumont Chaglar.

By Haaretz
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has asked United States legislators to assist Israel in fending off charges that Israel committed war crimes during its month-long operation in Gaza, the New York Post reported on Wednesday.

“The prime minister asked us to work together to ensure that this strategy of going to the International Criminal Court does not succeed,” Democratic congressman Steve Israel told the Post by phone from Tel Aviv.

Israel was one of a group of American lawmakers who met with Netanyahu in Israel on Wednesday.

Palestinian leaders met with ICC officials in The Hague this week, preparatory to making a formal application to join the international tribunal.

Read More