London, 13th October 2023- ICJP is gravely concerned by Israel’s order to 1.1 million people to immediately leave their homes in northern Gaza and move south. This order, made without any guarantee of return, amounts to the war crime of mass forcible transfer, and may also amount to a crime against humanity, as it is part of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population of Gaza.
There has never been a clearer sign that Israel is on the verge of committing mass atrocity crimes in Gaza. This must be prevented at all costs.
Israel’s ultimatum is causing great panic and fear among the people of Gaza, who have been under continuous aerial bombardment and a total siege since Sunday. The situation is already catastrophic – people in Gaza have no food, electricity or water, which directly impacts and restricts hospitals from being able to function properly. Palestinians in North Gaza are faced with the choice of leaving their homes or being killed.
Moreover, the UN has stated that mass relocation of 1.1 million people in less than 24 hours is impossible, not least due to the constant barrage of fire and the destruction of roads and could have devastating consequences.
More than two thirds of the Gazan population are refugees who are now being displaced once again under horrifying circumstances.
The UK, the US the European Union, and other nations who have influence over the Israeli political leadership must immediately use all diplomatic and political means at their disposal to call for:
1. An immediate ceasefire
2. Israel to immediately lift the siege over Gaza
3. Israel to immediately rescind the order for 1.1 million Palestinians to leave their homes.
4. Israel to immediately provide access for food, water, fuel and other necessities to the people of Gaza.
There is still time for the international community to use its influence to reign in the Israeli regime from carrying out further war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. In February 2022, the international community did everything it could do to prevent a humanitarian disaster in Ukraine and a similar attitude must be applied here.
The UK government and other Western nations have strong diplomatic links with Israel, and therefore great influence. It must use this influence now to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Politicians should not encourage and support Israel’s assault on Gaza, which could constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity. Instead, the government must act quickly, and in compliance with a rules-based accountability system which is applied equally to Palestinians and Israelis.
Speaking on Good Morning Scotland earlier today, ICJP Director Tayab Ali spoke about the order, saying:
“One million people are being told to leave or die from what is effectively an open-air prison camp. There has never been a clearer sign that not only is Israel prepared to commit war crimes, its about to commit a crime against humanity.”
ENDS
Notes to Editors:
The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians is an independent organisation of lawyers, politicians and academics who support the rights of Palestinians and aim to protect their rights through the law.
For more information, or to arrange an interview with a spokesperson please contact: Jonathan Purcell, Public Affairs and Communications Officer, at Jonathan@icjpalestine.com
Approximately 12 hours ago the following further announcement was made by the ICJP on their website with regard to an official Notice of Intention to prosecute UK Government officials for their complicity in war crimes which was delivered to Scotland Yard's War Crimes Unit on Saturday in response to their request for evidence relating to war crimes in the Gaza region.
International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) has written a notice of intention to prosecute UK government officials, for aiding and abetting war crimes in Gaza.
Officials could be held individually criminally liable for their role in aiding and abetting war crimes.
The notice has been handed over to Scotland Yard’s War Crimes Unit, who have requested evidence relating to war crimes in the region.
London 14 October 2023- The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) has issued Prime Minister Rishi Sunak with a stark warning that UK government officials could be individually liable for their role in aiding and abetting Israeli war crimes. Sunak has been issued with the notice of intention to prosecute UK government officials, for their role in providing military, economic and political support to Israel, which has aided Israel’s perpetration of war crimes.
This remarkable development comes at a time when Scotland Yard’s War Crimes Unit have opened calls for evidence relating to war crimes in the region. In an incredible turn of events, this could lead to UK government officials being prosecuted for war crimes by Scotland Yard. Individuals could also be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court.
The decision to prosecute comes in response to Israel’s directive to 1.2 million people in Gaza to immediately leave their homes in northern Gaza and move south. This order will result in mass forced displacement which may amount to both a war crime and a crime against humanity. The siege of Gaza, restricting electricity, food, water and other basic necessities, constitutes collective punishment, which is also a war crime under the Geneva Convention. At the same time, Israel has continued to bombard Gaza with massive and indiscriminate airstrikes, killing over 1,799 people, including 583 children.
The UK government has provided military assistance and economic and political support. Now that war crimes have been carried out, continuation of such support and assistance would mean that UK Government officials would be complicit in the commission of war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity. This complicity, formally known as ‘aiding and abetting’ war crimes, may mean that UK government officials are individually criminally liable for breaking international law.
ICJP Co-Director is Crispin Blunt MP, former Chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and former Justice Minister. He is a strong supporter of Prime Minister Sunak and wishes to divert him from a serious policy error and, enable him to express strong emotional support to Israel in the face of an appalling war crime that was a planned terrorist part of Hamas’s direction of last Saturday’s operation against Israel, whilst guiding Israel to accept the restraints that international law place on the democracies.
ENDS
Notes to Editors:
The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians is an independent organisation of lawyers, politicians and academics who support the rights of Palestinians and aim to protect their rights through the law.
The full letter to the Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary and Attorney General can be found at the bottom of this page..
For more information, or to arrange an interview with a spokesperson please contact: Jonathan@icjpalestine.com
The Notice of Intention addressed to Rishi Sunak and James Cleverly specifically refers to "an arrest warrant issued at Westminster Magistrates Court in London for the arrest of Tzipi Livini, the Former Foreign Minister of Israel for her part in alleged war crimes against civilians in Gaza arising out of the 2009 Israeli military operation codenamed Operation Cast Lead. Lawyers at ICJP acted in those proceedings and we intend to apply the same principles in this case."
I also recommend listening to the following interview with ICJP co-director, Crispin Blunt MP who spoke to Sky News this morning to discuss their warning to the Prime Minister.
Eva Bartlett was there, on the ground in Gaza when Israel unleashed its barbaric “Operation Cast Lead.” Her blogs on her In Gaza and Beyond website begin with December 2009 here.
The following is one article Eva wrote that was published by The Electronic Intafada. It includes comments regarding then Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni’s response to the United Nations Security Council call for an immediate ceasefire of Operation Cast Lead in 2009. As you will recall, Tzipi Livin was specifically named in the ICIP Notice of Intention.
Bread is baked with a small electric stove. (Eva Bartlett)
It’s 2:50am and I can’t sleep.
Some mornings I wake up from a new explosion and realize I’ve somehow managed to fall into a sleep despite the blasts. Other mornings, I wake up disoriented, first wondering where I am, as I’m sleeping in some hospital waiting room or ambulance office, or the house of a driver since the Red Crescent office in eastern Jabaliya was first shelled and then made off-limits by the invading Israeli forces in the eastern Jabaliya region… and then in the north, the northwest, the east, the south …
Yesterday morning I awoke to an eerie near-quiet: for the time there were no bomb blasts, just the Israeli drones continuing to lord over the sky. Then the blasts came. At 8:38am I noted “resumption of loud, reverberating explosions. In the Saraya area again (the former British prison has been hit a number of times already)? 8:59 am: four very loud explosions with deep reverberations.”
At 12:15pm I’d noted and photographed the white stream of chemical clouds billowing over large expanses of eastern Gaza. At 1:05 pm: “Since last night until now, 23 persons have been killed, all civilians,” reporter Yousef al-Helo told me, adding, “This afternoon, two people — including women and children — were killed in a shelling on Beit Lahia.”
Yousef read me Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni’s response to the United Nations Security Council call for an immediate ceasefire: “Israel has acted and will continue to act according to its calculation in the interest of the security of its citizens and its right to self-defense.”
Yousef and I had discussed the violations of Israel’s unilaterally-imposed three-hour-ceasefire (which a Lebanese journalist summed up: “How would you like it if I was shooting at you and then told you I’d give you a minute to dance around before I kill you?”). John Ging, director of the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) in the Gaza Strip, sums it up more diplomatically: “For three hours, the people of Gaza have some safety. That’s all it is.” During the first day of the supposed ceasefire between 1 and 4pm, Israeli forces killed three sisters (ages two, three and 10), one woman (31), two elderly men (60 and 87), and targeted paramedics, shooting one in the leg, as the explosions continued all over the Gaza Strip. At 6pm, two hours after the “ceasefire,” the official killing did indeed continue: a family of five dead in northern Gaza, returning from the bread lines with a prize bag of bread, bombed in their car, including three children aged 10 to 15, a 20-year-old cousin and 45-year-old father. And later, after 9pm, another medic was shot in the leg while trying to perform his duties.
With the medics last night, we’d arrived at the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, to the smoking skeleton of a multi-story, multi-family house, evaporated. Fire trucks were there ahead of us, though we all collectively ran at one point, expecting the second strike that often follows the original destruction.
Later in the night, we kept passing the ruins of buildings bombed in the last days. I’ve lost track of what was bombed when. We come to a newly-bombed building, a newly-homeless family, the adjacent building facing a similar fate soon enough as it appears the structure has been so badly damaged it will eventually collapse.
3:20 am: I’ve left the bed and given up on feigning sleep. Am watching the darkness explode with the political hatred that not only kills but silences truth. Hatred in every blast pounding Gaza.
“They will not finish until the martyrs reach 1,000,” the nurse predicts, taking a break on his night shift. “They want to make Gaza into Guantanamo,” he goes on. “All of this will not break the Palestinian people.”
In the hospital room where I tried to sleep between an ambulance shift and morning obligations, the tank shelling and firing is in the room, landing on my pillow.
It’s the shells, which crack and blast. The staccato gunfire. The drones’ whine, in menacing pitches. The fighter plane’s sudden, thundering presence.
The drone ramps up the decibels, a train wreck of disharmony.
And the inevitable whoosh before the explosion, an F-16 launch which erupts a crater where someone’s house, or a market, or a mosque once stood. The blast an hour ago was a market, another nurse tells me. “It was a beautiful market, sold everything, everything we need,” she says.
Hours later, after the sun finally rises, women are walking onto the hospital premises, large towel-covered platters on their heads. A small electric stove is plugged in, and they take turns baking bread for their families: no gas, no electricity at home. They are lucky to have the flour to bake with, and I guess that a trickle of that little aid comes in has reached them. But it’s never enough.
The shelling continuing, I get to see Osama, who I’ve not seen for weeks, although he lives near the hospital where I spend much time. His family, like most, have taken all the windows out of their house (those not already blown out), and the house is frigid with cold. We talk, ask the same questions that everyone is asking every day, about when it will end, why it must be so, what value a Palestinian life has …
A new series of explosions, we go out to see, the latest strike just a couple of streets away, but that’s nothing. Osama’s family live in front of a house slated for attack at any time. “What can we do?” they ask, everyone asks.
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian human rights advocate and freelancer who spent eight months in 2007 living in West Bank communities and four months in Cairo and at the Rafah crossing. She is currently based in the Gaza Strip after having arrived with the 3rd Free Gaza Movement boat in November. She has been working with the International Solidarity Movement in Gaza, accompanying ambulances while witnessing and documenting the ongoing Israeli air strikes and ground invasion of the Gaza Strip.
The following is information published 16 February 2017 by Human Rights Watch regarding Israel’s Operation Cast Lead.
On 27 December 2008 Israel launched a major military offensive – nicknamed Operation ‘Cast Lead’ – in Gaza. It prevented the media and aid agencies from entering the area.
In the following three weeks, the Israeli military killed at least 1,383 Palestinians, including 333 children. Palestinian armed groups killed thirteen Israelis, including three civilians, in rocket attacks on Southern Israel.
Four years on, still no justice
This January marked the fourth anniversary of the end of the conflict. Despite a UN Fact Finding Mission Report (The Goldstone report) documenting war crimes and other serious human rights violations committed by both sides in the 22-day conflict, the victims have yet to receive justice or reparations.
The Israeli authorities, as well as the international community, have failed to conduct independent investigations into alleged war crimes by Israeli forces.
We will not stop working on this issue until all victims of the conflict get the justice they deserve, and those found responsible for grave violations are held to account.
We continue to call on the United Nations Security Council to take concrete measures to ensure an international justice solution for the victims.
I will be sharing more information about the ongoing crisis situation in Gaza in due course.
Please pray for the safety of all of the good kind-hearted people of all ages who live in Gaza, Palestine’s West Bank along with neighbouring countries including Syria, Egypt, Lebanon (which was being targeted by Israel last night) and others. Please pray for peace. 🙏
