[Philip Marlow]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3ggpe3qj6wo.amp

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has applied for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas's leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, for war crimes.

A range of extraordinarily normal reactions have followed.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Reactions such as "what about Hamas?", no doubt.

[Tubby Isaacs]

[Oboogie]

Reactions such as "what about Hamas?", no doubt.

Hamas are included.

"The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has applied for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas's leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, for war crimes.

Karim Khan KC said there were reasonable grounds to believe that both men bore criminal responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity from the day of Hamas's attack on Israel on 7 October onwards.

Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant and Hamas's political leader Ismail Haniyeh, along with the group's military chief Mohammed Deif, are also wanted for arrest."

[Tubby Isaacs]

Reactions such as "what about Hamas?", no doubt.

Hamas are included.

That was my joke.

[Philip Marlow]

This is the most aggressively unhinged reaction I’ve seen so far, but then I’ll confess that I haven’t looked all that hard.

https://x.com/CarolineGlick/status/1792 ... gr%5Etweet

Biden and Blinken appear to be going with ‘How dare the court suggest there is any equivalence between Israel and the terrorists!’ Partly because that’s always what gets said in these circs, and partly because, if Netanyahu has a case to answer, then that presents the possibility that Biden and Blinken have been facilitating the supply of weaponry and treasure to a state in the midst of committing war crimes. This would never happen, for Biden and Blinken are honourable men…

[Rosvanian]

Not of heard of Glick before. I suspect new opportunities churning out similarly rational, nuanced, insightful commentary for the likes of Spiked and Unherd await her.

[Philip Marlow]

RULES BASED INTERNATIONAL ORDER

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/artic ... -red-lines

The US and the UK will reject the international court of justice order directing Israel to end its offensive on Rafah after slowly blurring their red lines that once stated that they could not support a military offensive in Rafah.

The line was first adapted by saying they could not support a major ground offensive without a credible plan to protect civilians, but since then the definition of what constitutes a major offensive has become more flexible.

[Philip Marlow]

I don’t express sincere admiration as readily as I should, perhaps, but someone escaping Gaza with her children, only to voluntarily go back alone is something else to me, in the bravery stakes.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/june/blood-and-numbers

Marwa lived through shelling in Gaza City with her daughters. In late November, she walked for ten hours, through bombed-out buildings and dead bodies, to get her daughters to safety with their father in Jordan. She returned to Gaza to resume her work with a humanitarian organisation earlier this year.

[Philip Marlow]

Grim stuff from Haaretz. Said it before on here, but the fact that Netanyahu has essentially been able to tell the last two Democratic presidents of Israel’s most important ally to fuck themselves, repeatedly, without fear of meaningful consequences is pretty darned astonishing.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/202 ... e717240000

That it took the United States over eight months of being swindled and conned by a man they know and have studied for over 15 years is nothing short of staggering. The idea that the United States seriously thought it could partner, trust, rely on, rein in and expect different behavior from a man who for years has exercised mendacity and manipulation as his default mode – and exhibits derision toward the United States – is located on a spectrum anywhere between naivete and gullibility, flawed and arrogant assessments, or full and inexcusable diplomatic negligence.

[Philip Marlow]

…And Adam Shatz brings his usual parcel of cheery news to the LRB.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12 ... -s-descent

Over the last eight months, Israel has killed more than 36,000 Palestinians. An untold number remain under the debris and still more will die of hunger and disease. Eighty thousand Palestinians have been injured, many of them permanently maimed. Children whose parents – whose entire families – have been killed constitute a new population sub-group. Israel has destroyed Gaza’s housing infrastructure, its hospitals and all its universities. Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been displaced, some of them repeatedly; many have fled to ‘safe’ areas only to be bombed there. No one has been spared: aid workers, journalists and medics have been killed in record numbers. And as levels of starvation have risen, Israel has created one obstacle after another to the provision of food, all while insisting that its army is the ‘most moral’ in the world. The images from Gaza – widely available on TikTok, which Israel’s supporters in the US have tried to ban, and on Al Jazeera, whose Jerusalem office was shut down by the Israeli government – tell a different story, one of famished Palestinians killed outside aid trucks on Al-Rashid Street in February; of tent-dwellers in Rafah burned alive in Israeli air strikes; of women and children subsisting on 245 calories a day. This is what Benjamin Netanyahu describes as ‘the victory of Judaeo-Christian civilisation against barbarism’.