The Powerful Who Stand behind Israel

Based on the new U.N. special rapporteur’s report, the International Criminal Court should be obliged to file arrests warrants, at a minimum, against Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, Olaf Scholz, Friedrich Mertz, Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

Caroline Willemen of Médecins Sans Frontières said Sunday that Israel continues to use the need for humanitarian aid in Gaza as “means of pressure.”

“The humanitarian situation in Gaza has not improved significantly,” she told the press, “as water and shelter shortages persist and hundreds of thousands of people continue to live in tents as winter approaches.”

Israel’s armed forces have now annexed more than half of Gaza’s land and are dumping vast amounts of debris into that zone, turning it into a mountain of garbage. To move the rubble without experts and equipment is very dangerous, as about 10-to-12 percent of the Israeli bombs dropped on Gaza have not exploded.

“Every Gazan person is now living in a horrific, unmapped minefield,” said Nick Orr of Humanity and Inclusion, a non-governmental organization at work in Palestine. “The UXO [Unexploded Ordnance] is everywhere. On the ground, in the rubble, under the ground, everywhere.”

As Palestinians dig through the hills of concrete, they risk triggering a dormant bomb — creating more casualties of the Israeli genocide.

One-Directional Violence

Over the past two years, Israel has dropped at least 200,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, a tonnage equivalent to 13 atom bombs of the scale dropped on Hiroshima by the United States on Aug. 6, 1945.

This is unimaginable, particularly given the fact that Palestinians have no air defense systems, no air force and no ability to defend themselves from high-altitude and drone bombing or to strike back in any comparable way. Genocides are, by their nature, asymmetrical.

But to describe these past two years as asymmetrical is obscene: this was one-directional violence, the Goliath-like Israelis using their immense advantages against the David-like Palestinian resistance.

The opaqueness of official arms transfers means we have no precise idea how much of this tonnage came to Israel from its major suppliers during the war: the United States, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. However, we have enough evidence to know that most of the bombs came from the United States, with smaller supplies from the other countries.

An Oct. 20 report from Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, entitled Gaza Genocide: A Collective Crime makes it indisputably clear that the countries supplying Israel with military equipment, or assisting it in any way — including through diplomatic support — are utterly complicit in the genocide.

In other words, the obligation to abide by the U.N. Convention on Genocide is not discretionary; the duty to do what they can to stop the genocide is mandatory. The participation makes them wholly culpable. The report notes that the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza makes this “an internationally enabled crime.”

The level of complicity is extraordinary. Take the case of the United Kingdom, whose Prime Minister Keir Starmer is a human rights lawyer and indeed wrote the textbook on European human rights law (1999).

On Aug. 6, Matt Kennard told Palestine Deep Dive about how U.K. military aircraft left RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus and escorted an unidentified plane over Gaza. Six days later, Iain Overton at UK Declassifiedrevealed that amongst these planes was an RAF Shadow R1 surveillance plane flying alongside a Beechcraft Super King Air 350 owned by the Sierra Nevada Corporation (from the United States) with a call sign CROOK 11. What were these aircraft doing? Who had sanctioned them this work? Who is CROOK 11?

In December 2024, Starmer told troops at RAF Akrotiri:

“There’s a lot of different work that goes on. I’m also aware that some, or quite a bit, of what goes on here can’t necessarily be talked about all of the time …We can’t necessarily tell the world what you’re doing here … because although we’re not saying it to the whole world for reasons that are obvious to you.”

The obvious reason is that this is a genocide, and the U.K. is complicit, so they cannot talk about it.

The record for the United States is even more ghastly. One paragraph from the special rapporteur’s report is damning enough:

“Since October 2023, the U.S. has transferred 742 consignments of “arms and ammunition” (HS Code 93) and approved tens of billions in new sales. The Biden and Trump Administrations reduced transparency, accelerated transfers through repeated emergency approvals, facilitated Israeli access to U.S. weapons stockpile held abroad, and authorized hundreds of sales just below the amount requiring congressional approval. The U.S. has deployed military aircraft, special forces and surveillance drones to Israel, with U.S. surveillance purportedly being used to target Hamas, including in the first raid on Al Shifa hospital.”

In November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) filed a warrant for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. Based on this recent U.N. report, the ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, should be obliged to file warrants against Rishi Sunak, Starmer, Olaf Scholz, Friedrich Merz, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump – at a minimum. Anything less makes a mockery of the rules-based international system, namely the United Nations Charter.