By Brett Wilkins / Common Dreams
Citing Israel’s “blatant” human rights violations in Gaza, Ireland’s second-highest-ranking official said Wednesday that the country will join the South Africa-led genocide case before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Irish Tánaiste Micheál Martin—the equivalent of a deputy prime minister in other parliamentary nations—said that Ireland decided to intervene in the case after analyzing the “legal and policy issues” pertaining to the case under review by the United Nations’ top court.
“It is for the court to determine whether genocide is being committed,” Martin—who also serves as Ireland’s foreign and defense minister—said in a statement. “But I want to be clear in reiterating what I have said many times in the last few months; what we saw on October 7 in Israel, and what we are seeing in Gaza now, represents the blatant violation of international humanitarian law on a mass scale.”
Martin continued:
The taking of hostages. The purposeful withholding of humanitarian assistance to civilians. The targeting of civilians and of civilian infrastructure. The indiscriminate use of explosive weapons in populated areas. The use of civilian objects for military purposes. The collective punishment of an entire population.
The list goes on. It has to stop. The view of the international community is clear. Enough is enough. The U.N. Security Council has demanded an immediate cease-fire, the unconditional release of hostages, and the lifting of all barriers to the provision of humanitarian assistance at scale. The European Council has echoed this call.
South Africa’s case—which is supported by over 30 countries, the Arab League, African Union, and others—incisively details Israel’s conduct in the war, including the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians, mostly women and children; the wounding of tens of thousands more; the forcible displacement of 90% of the besieged enclave’s 2.3 million people; and the inflicting of conditions leading to widespread starvation and disease. The filing also cited numerous genocidal statements by Israeli officials.
On January 26, the ICJ issued a preliminary ruling that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza and ordered its government and military to prevent genocidal acts. Palestinian and international human rights defenders say Israel has ignored the order, pointing to more than 30,000 men, women, and children killed or wounded in Gaza since January 26.
A draft report released this week by the U.N.’s Human Rights Council found “reasonable grounds to believe” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a move that came on the same day as the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire in the ongoing war.
“The situation could not be more stark; half the population of Gaza face imminent famine and 100% of the population face acute food insecurity,” said Martin. “As the U.N. secretary-general said as he inspected long lines of blocked relief trucks waiting to enter Gaza during his visit to Rafah at the weekend: ‘It is time to truly flood Gaza with lifesaving aid. The choice is clear: surge or starvation.’ I echo his words today.”
In a St. Partick’s Day White House meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden—a staunch supporter of Israel—Irish Toaiseach (Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar, who announced earlier this month that he would soon step down, said that “the Irish people are deeply troubled about the catastrophe that’s unfolding before our eyes in Gaza.”
“And when I travel the world, leaders often ask me why the Irish have such empathy for the Palestinian people,” he added. “And the answer is simple: We see our history in their eyes—a story of displacement, of dispossession and national identity questioned and denied, forced emigration, discrimination, and now hunger.”
By Zehra Imam / Mondoweiss
As Palestinians are slaughtered by the thousands in Gaza and violently attacked during night prayers in the al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel, the West Bank endures massacres that at times go unnoticed during this holy month. I have spent my Ramadan in conversation with a friend from Jenin.
Much has changed since I visited Aseel (not her real name) in August 2023. There are things I saw in Jenin that no longer exist. One of them is my friend’s smile and her spark.
Usually, they say Jenin is a small Gaza. During Ramadan, because the attacks generally happen at night, people are an easy target because they are on the streets late at night. In the past, it was rare for the IOF to enter during the day. Now, they attack during the day; their special forces enter, and after people discover them, their soldiers come within minutes.
Every 2-3 days, there is a new attack in Jenin. In our minds, there is a constant ringing that the IOF may come. We don’t know at what time we will be targeted or when they will enter. There is no stability in our lives.
Even when we plan for something, we hedge it with our inshallahs and laugh. There are a lot of ifs. If they don’t enter the camp. If there are no martyrs. If there is no strike.
On the second day of Ramadan, they attacked my neighborhood again. We thought it was a bombing because it started with an explosion, but the house was shaking. We were praying fajr, and everyone was screaming outside. The sound of the drone was in our ears. “No, these are missiles,” we realized.
There was panic in the streets. Women fainted. People had been walking back from praying at the mosque, and some were still in the street. Alhamdulillah, no one was hurt, we say.
The balcony to the room at my uncle’s house where we slept had fallen. It no longer had any glass, and a bullet entered my uncle’s bedroom and reached the kitchen. The drone hit the trees in front of our house. The missiles destroyed the ceiling, and the rockets reached my neighbor’s house on the first floor, exactly in front of our house.
Since October 7, Jenin has become a target. There is a clear escalation in the camp and the city. The IOF has used many different weapons to kill us here. They have even been aggressive toward the infrastructure, as though every inch of our city was resisting them.
They destroyed much of the camp, and there is no entrance now. The arch is gone, and there is no sign reminding us that Jenin refugee camp is a temporary place. There is no horse. Only the street is left. You have the photographs. You were lucky. They changed the shape of the camp, and everything has been destroyed.”Aseel
The first time Aseel and I met in person was in Nablus at the Martyrs Roundabout. As we caught up, we ate a delicious concoction of ice cream, milk, nuts, and fresh fruit that was a perfect balm to the heat. She took me to some of her favorite places nestled within the old city of Nablus. A 150-year-old barber’s shop that felt like you had entered an antique store where plants reached the ceiling and where the barber was a massive fan of Angelina Jolie. A centuries-old house now called Tree House Cafe looked like a hobbit home from Lord of the Rings, where we hid away as she sipped her coffee and I drank a mint lemonade. We visited one of the oldest soap factories in the world with ingredients such as goat’s milk and olive oil, jasmine and pomegranates, even dates and Dead Sea mud.
We happened to chance upon a Sufi zawiya as we walked through a beautiful archway decorated with lanterns, light bulbs, and an assortment of potted plants, after which we saw a cobalt blue door on our left and an azul blue door with symmetrical red designs, and Quranic ayat like incantations on our right as doors upon doors greeted us.
The air was welcoming yet mingled with the memory of martyrs whose memorials took over the landscape, sometimes in the form of larger-than-life portraits surrounded by complex four-leafed magenta-white flowers; posters above a water spout next to a heart-shaped leaf; a melted motorcycle that, too, was targeted in the neighborhood that hosted the Lions’ Den. We stopped to pray at a masjid, quiet and carpeted.
After a bus ride from Nablus to Jenin, on our walk before entering Jenin camp, Aseel showed me the hospital right outside the camp. She pointed out the barricades created to keep the occupation forces from entering specific streets. This is the same hospital that the occupation forces blocked during the July 2023 attack, which now seems like a lifetime ago.
What caught my eyes again and again were the two Keys of Return on top of the entrance of Jenin Camp that symbolized so much for Palestinians.
“This is a temporary station,” Aseel read out loud to me. “That’s what it says. We are supposed to return to our homes.”
“Netanyahu said he is planning another big attack, so the resistance fighters are preparing because it can happen any day,” she had told me that evening as we shared Jenin-style knafeh, baked to perfection. Then she stopped, looked at the sky, and said humorously, “Ya Allah, hopefully not today!” And we both laughed because of its potential reality.
Dinner on the terrace at her uncle’s home was a delicious spread of hummus, laban, fries, cucumbers pickled by her aunt, and arayes — fried bread stuffed with meat. Then we moved the furniture to sleep on mattresses in a room that extended to the rooftop terrace with a breeze, overlooking Jenin Camp and the rest of Jenin City. We could hear gunshots in the distance. The drones were commonplace, and the heat did not relent. Temperatures soared, and the electricity was out when we woke up at 5 a.m. I heard her pray, and later, as we sipped on coffee and had wafters in the early morning at her home, my eyes went to a piece of tatreez, or embroidery, of a bird in flight framed on the wall. Her eyes followed mine and when I said I loved it.
“It used to be my grandfather’s,” she told me. “Of course it’s beautiful — the bird is free.”
Unexpectedly, Aseel’s mother gifted me a Sprite bottle full of olive oil beholding the sweet hues of its intact health, which I would later ship secretly from Bethlehem all the way to Boston. And then Aseel came to me with a gift, too: a necklace that spoke succinctly about the right to return and live on this earth. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was held together with intricate calligraphy carved in the shape of Palestine’s landscape, and I was completely overwhelmed.
“You are in Palestine, my dear,” she had smiled. “And you are now my family. This is your country, this is your second home, really.”
When I ask her about what brings her hope these days, Aseel tells me about her eight-year-old nephew.
He wanted to eat two meals. I told him that in Gaza they don’t have food. He was complaining about the food, and I told him, they don’t have water. And he heard me because he said, “today, we will only have one meal.”
I’m amazed at how mature he is. He even said, “We won’t make a special cake on Eid because of the Gazans.” For me, this is a lesson to be learned. He is only eight years old, but he knows.
We have lost a lot of people in Gaza, but here in the West Bank, we are succeeding because our new generation knows a lot. Ben Gurion would not be happy. He said of Palestinians, “the old will die and the young will forget.” No, the young ask even more questions. The new generation brings us hope. Hope is the new generation.
/sp
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Brett Wilkins
Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.