Let's see what the residents of Gaza actually think of Hamas. The Voices Inside Gaza Turning Against Hamas — And Al Jazeera https://worldcrunch.com/focus-israel-palestine-war/gaza-hamas-al-jazeera
It should be obvious to every rational person by now that Hamas just views ceasefire negotiations as a delaying tactic. Hamas has no intent of agreeing to an internationally brokered ceasefire which would release hostages and allow more aid into Gaza. Hamas not ‘serious’ about hostage negotiations: Israeli spokesperson https://www.newsnationnow.com/world/war-in-israel/hamas-hostage-deal-israeli-spokesperson/
The ICC will be issuing arrest warrants for both Hamas and Israeli leaders. Since this is the ICC, we all know nobody will ever be held accountable. ICC seeks arrest warrants against Sinwar and Netanyahu for war crimes over October 7 attack and Gaza war https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/20/middleeast/icc-israel-hamas-arrest-warrant-war-crimes-intl/index.html The International Criminal Court is seeking arrest warrants for Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity over the October 7 attacks on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza, the court’s prosecutor Karim Khan told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an exclusive interview on Monday. Khan said the ICC is also seeking warrants for Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as two other top Hamas leaders — Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, the leader of the Al Qassem Brigades who is better known as Mohammed Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ political leader. The warrants against the Israeli politicians mark the first time the ICC has targeted the top leader of a close ally of the United States. The decision puts Netanyahu in the company of the Russian President Vladimir Putin, for whom the ICC issued an arrest warrant over Moscow’s war on Ukraine, and the Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi, who was facing an arrest warrant from the ICC for alleged crimes against humanity at the time of his capture and killing in October 2011. By applying for the arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas leaders in the same action, Khan’s office risks attracting criticism that it places a terror organization and an elected government on an equivalent footing. A panel of ICC judges will now consider Khan’s application for the arrest warrants. Khan said the charges against Sinwar, Haniyeh and al-Masri include “extermination, murder, taking of hostages, rape and sexual assault in detention.” “The world was shocked on the 7th of October when people were ripped from their bedrooms, from their homes, from the different kibbutzim in Israel,” Khan told Amanpour, adding that “people have suffered enormously.” The charges against Netanyahu and Gallant include “causing extermination, causing starvation as a method of war, including the denial of humanitarian relief supplies, deliberately targeting civilians in conflict,” Khan told Amanpour. When reports surfaced last month that the ICC chief prosecutor was considering this course of action, Netanyahu said that any ICC arrest warrants against senior Israeli government and military officials “would be an outrage of historic proportions,” and that Israel “has an independent legal system that rigorously investigates all violations of the law.” Asked by Amanpour about the comments made by Netanyahu, Khan said: “Nobody is above the law.” He said that if Israel disagrees with the ICC, “they are free, notwithstanding their objections to jurisdiction, to raise a challenge before the judges of the court and that’s what I advise them to do.” Israel and the United States are not members of the ICC. However, the ICC claims to have jurisdiction over Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank after Palestinian leaders formally agreed to be bound by the court’s founding principles in 2015. The ICC announcement on Monday is separate from the case that is currently being heard by the the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over an accusation from South Africa that Israel was committing genocide in its war against Hamas following the October 7 attacks. While the ICJ considers cases that involve countries and nations, and the ICC is a criminal court, which brings cases against individuals for war crimes or crimes against humanity. Monday’s announcement is not the first time that the ICC acted in relation to Israel. In March 2021, Khan’s office launched an investigation into possible crimes committed in the Palestinian territories since June 2014 in Gaza and the West Bank. Located in The Hague, Netherlands, and created by a treaty called the Rome Statute first brought before the United Nations, the ICC operates independently. Most countries – 124 of them – are parties to the treaty, but there are notable exceptions, including Israel, the US and Russia. That means that if the court grants Khan’s application and issues arrest warrants for the five men, any country that is a member would have to arrest them and extradite them to The Hague. Under the rules of the court, all signatories of the Rome Statute have the obligation to cooperate fully with its decisions. This would make it extremely difficult for Netanyahu and Gallant to travel internationally, including to many countries that are among Israel’s closest allies – including Germany and the United Kingdom.
‘A Taliban-Like State’: Salman Rushdie Chides ‘Progressives’ Calling For a Palestinian State With Hamas Still in Power https://www.mediaite.com/news/a-tal...-palestinian-state-with-hamas-still-in-power/
Biden blasts ICC’s call to arrest leaders of Israel, Hamas The U.S. said the International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction over the war in Gaza and didn’t follow proper procedure. Nolan Stout / May 20, 2024 https://www.courthousenews.com/biden-blasts-iccs-call-to-arrest-leaders-of-israel-hamas/ President Joe Biden meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York on Sept. 20, 2023. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh) WASHINGTON (CN) — The Biden administration blasted Monday’s announcement that the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor will seek arrest warrants against the leaders of Hamas and Israel, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. ICC prosecutor Karim Khan accused Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Hamas leaders Yehia Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and Israel. None of the leaders face imminent arrest or prosecution. A three-judge panel will consider the warrant request and decide whether to issue them and let the case proceed in a process that can take two months. The ICC also has no police force and relies on member states to carry out warrants. The war emerged in response to the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas where militants killed roughly 1,200 people in Israel and took at least 240 hostages. Since then, Israel has launched a brutal invasion of Gaza, an operation that so far has killed more than 35,000 people. Khan seeks to charge Israeli leaders with “causing extermination, causing starvation as a method of war, including the denial of humanitarian relief supplies, deliberately targeting civilians in conflict,” he said. Hamas leaders face charges of extermination, murder, taking hostages and sexual assault for organizing the Oct. 7 attacks. Netanyahu called the charges a “disgrace” and said they were based in antisemitism, an accusation he has used frequently for criticism of the Israeli government. Hamas also denounced the move, saying the warrants “equate the victim with the executioner.” Israel’s actions in Gaza have strained historically rock-solid U.S.-Israel relations, led to increased isolation of Israeli leaders and spurred widespread protests in the United States, particularly on college campuses. The war and the U.S. response to it have become a defining moment of President Joe Biden’s first term in office and is potentially undermining his reelection bid in November. Despite the strain, Biden called the application for arrest warrants “outrageous.” “Let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas,” he said in a statement. “We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.” State Department officials expanded on Washington’s criticism of the charges, saying the prosecutor did not let the Israeli legal system conduct an investigation first and the international court has no jurisdiction over the war. The United States and Israel are not signatories to the ICC’s establishing statutes, but a panel of ICC judges ruled in 2021 that the court has jurisdiction over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, territories Israel has occupied since 1967. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in other prosecutions, the court has deferred to national investigations and operated as a court of last resort. However, in this case, it “did not afford the same opportunity to Israel,” with ICC officials reportedly canceling a planned trip to Israel. “Fundamentally, this decision does nothing to help, and could jeopardize, ongoing efforts to reach a ceasefire agreement that would get hostages out and surge humanitarian assistance in, which are the goals the United States continues to pursue relentlessly,” Blinken said in a statement. When asked about the substance of the charges, State Department spokesperson Matt Miller said the U.S. sees no evidence of Israeli crimes. For Hamas, Miller said the ICC has no jurisdiction over its leaders, but “you can conclude from what happened on Oct. 7 that Hamas intended to kill civilians.” “Absent the jurisdictional questions, it would absolutely be a war crime and a crime against humanity,” he said. “You cannot say the same about the state of Israel.” Hamas’ accountability, however, should come on the battlefield or in an Israeli court, Miller said. Officials faced criticism for assisting with evidence collection and welcoming an ICC warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin for his war in Ukraine but then crying foul over charges against Israel’s leaders. Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations, said Biden should not interfere with any ICC prosecution of Netanyahu or Israeli leaders. “War crimes are war crimes, regardless of whether they are committed by so-called American allies,” Awad said in a statement. "Benjamin Netanyahu is a racist mass murderer who has no intention of stopping his campaign of starvation and slaughter in Rafah and the rest of Gaza unless President Biden forces him to stop.” But the White House brushed off comparisons between Putin and Netanyahu, saying the situations are vastly different. “It is an actual war aim of Mr. Putin to kill Ukrainian people. He’s deliberately targeting civilians,” National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said. “[Israeli] soldiers are not waking up in the morning putting their boots on the ground with direct orders to kill innocent civilians in Gaza.” Congress lined up behind Biden’s criticism of the warrant, but Republicans also tied it to the president’s wavering of support for Israel. Biden has publicly criticized the civilian death toll, blocking of humanitarian aid and has withheld limited amounts of arms shipments to Israel, while still allowing billions of dollars in aid to flow. House Speaker Mike Johnson said the ICC charges were “advanced due to the Biden Administration’s pressure campaign against Israel.” “In the absence of leadership from the White House, Congress is reviewing all options, including sanctions, to punish the ICC and ensure its leadership faces consequences if they proceed,” he wrote online. “If the ICC is allowed to threaten Israeli leaders, ours could be next.” Congressional criticism mostly centered on any implication that Hamas and Israel share a semblance of similar culpability for the bloodshed. “The ICC announcement today is not only misguided and repugnant, it is also a terrible overreach of the body’s authority,” said Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat. “To make a false equivalence between the actions of a democratically elected government and those of Hamas — a brutal terrorist organization — is absurd.”
Biden has done the world one favour, that is, opened eyes to seeing American politics, is run and controlled by a large group of religous nutters. There's GOP infested with evangelical nutters. There's Democrats and Republicans controlled by zionist nutters who run very powerful lobby groups. The christians and jews corruptly all gravitate toward looking after Israels interests first and foremost. Whenever corruption coming from Israel is detected, "Quick sweep it under the rug".
The attitude from the sadists, "fuck 'em, they're not important, they're getting what they deserve", while the whole intent is to steal their land and make life so miserable the Palestinians are forced from their homes. You see 'God' promised this land for the jews, so they're entitled to it. Religous Bullshit.
The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel After 50 years of failure to stop violence and terrorism against Palestinians by Jewish ultranationalists, lawlessness has become the law. May 19, 2024 Ronen Bergman, Mark Mazzetti A member of a group known as Hilltop Youth, which seeks to tear down Israel’s institutions and establish ‘‘Jewish rule.’’,Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times. This story is told in three parts. The first documents the unequal system of justice that grew around Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. The second shows how extremists targeted not only Palestinians but also Israeli officials trying to make peace. The third explores how this movement gained control of the state itself. Taken together, they tell the story of how a radical ideology moved from the fringes to the heart of Israeli political power. PART I. IMPUNITY By the end of October, it was clear that no one was going to help the villagers of Khirbet Zanuta. A tiny Palestinian community, some 150 people perched on a windswept hill in the West Bank near Hebron, it had long faced threats from the Jewish settlers who had steadily encircled it. But occasional harassment and vandalism, in the days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, escalated into beatings and murder threats. The villagers made appeal after appeal to the Israeli police and to the ever-present Israeli military, but their calls for protection went largely unheeded, and the attacks continued with no consequences. So one day the villagers packed what they could, loaded their families into trucks and disappeared. Who bulldozed the village after that is a matter of dispute. The Israeli Army says it was the settlers; a senior Israeli police officer says it was the army. Either way, soon after the villagers left, little remained of Khirbet Zanuta besides the ruins of a clinic and an elementary school. One wall of the clinic, leaning sideways, bore a sign saying that it had been funded by an agency of the European Union providing “humanitarian support for Palestinians at risk of forcible transfer in the West Bank.” Near the school, someone had planted the flag of Israel as another kind of announcement: This is Jewish land now. Such violence over the decades in places like Khirbet Zanuta is well documented. But protecting the people who carry out that violence is the dark secret of Israeli justice. The long arc of harassment, assault and murder of Palestinians by Jewish settlers is twinned with a shadow history, one of silence, avoidance and abetment by Israeli officials. For many of those officials, it is Palestinian terrorism that most threatens Israel. But in interviews with more than 100 people — current and former officers of the Israeli military, the National Israeli Police and the Shin Bet domestic security service; high-ranking Israeli political officials, including four former prime ministers; Palestinian leaders and activists; Israeli human rights lawyers; American officials charged with supporting the Israeli-Palestinian partnership — we found a different and perhaps even more destabilizing threat. A long history of crime without punishment, many of those officials now say, threatens not only Palestinians living in the occupied territories but also the State of Israel itself. After Oct. 7, some settler reservists began manning unauthorized roadblocks in full I.D.F. uniform, an open but usually unpunished violation of orders.Credit...Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times Many of the people we interviewed, some speaking anonymously, some speaking publicly for the first time, offered an account not only of Jewish violence against Palestinians dating back decades but also of an Israeli state that has systematically and increasingly ignored that violence. It is an account of a sometimes criminal nationalistic movement that has been allowed to operate with impunity and gradually move from the fringes to the mainstream of Israeli society. It is an account of how voices within the government that objected to the condoning of settler violence were silenced and discredited. And it is a blunt account, told for the first time by Israeli officials themselves, of how the occupation came to threaten the integrity of their country’s democracy. How we reported this article: The reporters spent years interviewing more than 100 former and current Israeli government officials — including... Article in full...
The IDF is making solid progress in eliminating Hamas in Rafah. It's is interesting to note that they have now destroyed many of the tunnels to Egypt that have been used to smuggle weapons in. This further shows Egypt's complicity in arming Hamas. IDF succeeds in evacuating almost 1 million from Rafah in 2 weeks IDF controls most of Philadelphi Corridor, 30% of Rafah • Military unsure where Sinwar is https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-801903 The IDF has succeeded in evacuating around 950,000 Palestinian civilians in only two weeks since May 6, the military revealed on Monday. In addition, around 30-40% of Rafah is now under IDF control, not merely a small portion of the eastern sector, and about 60-70% of Rafah has been completely evacuated. The remaining Rafah civilians, estimated at around 300,000-400,000, are almost all near the Gaza coast Tel al-Sultan area. This is despite US predictions that the civilian population could not be evacuated without a huge death count or without leaving around four months to do so. Of those evacuated, the overwhelming majority moved northwest to al-Muwasi, while a smaller number moved to central Gaza. A much less significant number returned to Khan Yunis, though that had been discussed as a real possibility for potentially hundreds of thousands of civilians. Regarding the battle, though there certainly is significant resistance from the four Hamas battalions in Rafah, the IDF said it had mostly taken them by surprise. After initial early and more unified resistance, the impression is that the battalions have started a process of being taken apart, fleeing, or hiding to try to fight a guerilla-style battle at a later date. Another possibility is that Hamas's battalions will put up more of a fight for Tel al-Sultan, but generally to date, the terror group's battalions have not put up as hard a fight as Hamas did in the initial battles for Gaza City in October-November or for Khan Yunis in December. IDF has taken over most of the Philadelphi Corridor Next, the IDF has taken control of the majority, though not all, of the Philadelphi Corridor with Egypt. The military has already destroyed many cross-border tunnels on the Corridor, Hamas' main remaining method for receiving new weapons, but still is not sure yet how many tunnels remain. In other parts of Gaza, it has taken months for the IDF to get a fuller picture of the tunnel challenge. Despite Egypt's anger at Israel for the Rafah operation and its closing the Rafah Crossing regarding humanitarian aid, the IDF said that military relations on the ground with Cairo have remained strong, and there have been no violent incidents between the sides. Other than a tiny number, there have also been no Palestinians penetrating into Egypt, which had been Cairo's biggest fear. The IDF said that it has observed its understandings with Egypt of how to carry out the Rafah operation with utmost precision. IDF less sure than ever about Sinwar's whereabouts Unfortunately, the IDF provided no updates on the status of the hostages held in Rafah, and seemed less sure than ever about where Gaza Chief Yahya Sinwar is hiding. It was also possible that Hamas may have moved the hostages out of Rafah as part of the large number of civilians who fled, and the same could be true for Sinwar. The IDF said the Rafah operation was incredibly complex and that it had achieved significant victories despite many restraints on how it could fire on Hamas to avoid even the possibility that a misfire might hit nearby Egyptian troops. In addition, the IDF said it had seized and destroyed a very large quantity of rockets and rocket platforms in Rafah, the last place where it said Hamas might still have a larger quantity of rockets, including long-range rockets. Besides Rafah, the IDF said it caught Hamas by surprise when it reinvaded Jabalia. There, it said that the civilians were moved in a much shorter time than from Rafah, with warnings issued in the morning, and the invasion starting in the afternoon on the same day. The IDF has found additional tunnels in Jabalia and took apart an attempt by Hamas to establish a new command center there for unified fighting. Unlike in Rafah, the Hamas fighters in Jabalia are not viewed as having as much of an opportunity to flee, though the IDF still did not give a set timeframe for finishing the latest Jabalia reinvasion. If for months, there was reference to one to two Hamas battalions operating in central Gaza, the IDF said that these battalions are also being taken apart, by a mix of airstrikes and targeted invasions. A smaller force contingent is needed for these attacks because the central Gaza forces were much smaller than the forces remaining in Rafah, but the bottom line was that the IDF could be converging on a point where all 24 Hamas battalions would be dismantled. IDF sources suggested that this would signal achieving the first goal of the war, toppling Hamas as a military organization, even if other goals of the war, removal of Hamas as a political authority and return of the hostages, may still remain open questions. According to one prediction, fighting a Hamas insurgency will require significant military resources at a minimum until October of this year, and possibly even somewhat beyond.