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ICC prosecutor handed it in, has to be signed by the court and then only does the rest follow:
On the basis of evidence collected and examined by my Office, I have reasonable grounds to believe that Yahya SINWAR (Head of the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) in the Gaza Strip), Mohammed Diab Ibrahim AL-MASRI, more commonly known as DEIF (Commander-in-Chief of the military wing of Hamas, known as the Al-Qassam Brigades), and Ismail HANIYEH (Head of Hamas Political Bureau) bear criminal responsibility for the following war crimes and crimes against humanity committed on the territory of Israel and the State of Palestine (in the Gaza strip) from at least 7 October 2023:
- Extermination as a crime against humanity, contrary to article 7(1)(b) of the Rome Statute;
- Murder as a crime against humanity, contrary to article 7(1)(a), and as a war crime, contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i);
- Taking hostages as a war crime, contrary to article 8(2)(c)(iii);
- Rape and other acts of sexual violence as crimes against humanity, contrary to article 7(1)(g), and also as war crimes pursuant to article 8(2)(e)(vi) in the context of captivity;
- Torture as a crime against humanity, contrary to article 7(1)(f), and also as a war crime, contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i), in the context of captivity;
- Other inhumane acts as a crime against humanity, contrary to article 7(l)(k), in the context of captivity;
- Cruel treatment as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i), in the context of captivity; and
- Outrages upon personal dignity as a war crime, contrary to article 8(2)(c)(ii), in the context of captivity.
I again reiterate my call for the immediate release of all hostages taken from Israel and for their safe return to their families. This is a fundamental requirement of international humanitarian law.
On the basis of evidence collected and examined by my Office, I have reasonable grounds to believe that Benjamin NETANYAHU, the Prime Minister of Israel, and Yoav GALLANT, the Minister of Defence of Israel, bear criminal responsibility for the following war crimes and crimes against humanity committed on the territory of the State of Palestine (in the Gaza strip) from at least 8 October 2023:
- Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the Statute;
- Wilfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health contrary to article 8(2)(a)(iii), or cruel treatment as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i);
- Wilful killing contrary to article 8(2)(a)(i), or Murder as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i);
- Intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population as a war crime contrary to articles 8(2)(b)(i), or 8(2)(e)(i);
- Extermination and/or murder contrary to articles 7(1)(b) and 7(1)(a), including in the context of deaths caused by starvation, as a crime against humanity;
- Persecution as a crime against humanity contrary to article 7(1)(h);
- Other inhumane acts as crimes against humanity contrary to article 7(1)(k).
Now, more than ever, we must collectively demonstrate that international humanitarian law, the foundational baseline for human conduct during conflict, applies to all individuals and applies equally across the situations addressed by my Office and the Court. This is how we will prove, tangibly, that the lives of all human beings have equal value.
(There is more text in the link)
If anything does happen (it won't), this is going to take years before there will be any action and even then Bibi and his loyal squad of genociders will just hole up in Israel forever or they'll flee to the US on a military plane and do some backroom dealing to get US citizenship so that they can be protected under The Hague Invasion Act.
But the US is going to stop this by any means necessary because it's desperately trying to stop the cracking veneer from completely crumbling and that's exactly what this sort of thing threatens to cause.
Unfortunately they're not really scared by the communists and the anti-Zionist/anti-genocide protests, not yet anyway, they're actually scared of grand reveal, of the next "Let them eat cake" moment, when most liberals are going to get hit over the head with the reality that the US is harboring war criminals and they're willing to go to war against the whole fucking EU or to threaten to leave the UN and all just so they can shield Netanyahu from a fraction of a percent of the justice that scumbag truly deserves.
It's that sort of moment where it's gonna get real fucking hard for liberals to handwave reality away. Maybe it will take a Trump reelection and a couple of years of having people constantly reminding them that Biden is more committed to being an active participant in genocide than he ever was committed to beating "fascism" at the ballot box (🙄). But I think most people have these political points-of-no-return that exist for them and once there's a sufficient number of people who find themselves ejected from the liberal paradigm, that's when shit's gonna get real fucking serious.
One thing that really left me shook in all of this was that at the early days of the anti-Zionist occupations that sprang up, the general awareness of the Kent State Massacre was astoundingly low amongst the average people - even supporters of the occupation protests. Of course I was agitating as hard as I could to raise awareness of this moment in history because it's extremely radicalising and, tbh, it's kind of a matter of when and not if (provided that these protests sustain themselves for long enough). I mean, I've name-dropped a particular Sinologist and historian here and I've seen his name appear on this site, Ken Hammond is the guy I'm talking about here, but idk if that many people are aware that he was also the leader of the SDS at Kent State when the massacre went down (!!) and that he was indicted by the government over the massacre. I guess this is the thing though - I've written mini essays on how we as communists need to agitate and educate, how we need to be the ones keeping track and facilitating people to connect their current concerns and material conditions to the broader systemic situation that we find ourselves in and how a big part of this effort is to guide people into the process of locating their woes and their struggle in the broader historical context. So I was just trying to take the opportunity that this moment in history presented me with to actually do the thing that I get on my soapbox about needing to be done.
I genuinely don't want to see any of this shit unfold the way I foresee it playing out but unfortunately I'm not the guy who's holding the comically-oversized spoon and the best I can do is know that when the Kent State Massacre 2.0 does happen, either now or some time in the not too distant future, that there's dozens of people who have been exposed to the idea that this time around won't be all too different from the last time, and that it's not all that different from the MOVE bombing, or the bombing of black wall street, or the Haymarket Massacre, or the Battle of Blair Mountain and so on.
If only ten of those people actually take up the charge and start signal boosting this message though, that's still going to go out to hundreds of people in their social circles. And maybe that's when we can start talking to them about the real nature of bourgeois democracy. And maybe someone is going to remember that comment I wrote on here where I linked car-centric urban design to anti-communism to the intentional creation of a racialised economic under"class" and how all of that ties into the government's violent suppression of the Bonus Army and how this same playbook has emerged time and time again throughout US history. (Pepe Silvia shit, I know but it's not nearly the crackpot fodder that it probably sounds like). And maybe that person will signal-boost how this critical situation in US history ties into so many of the current messes (or should I say contradictions inherent to the US which it is fundamentally incapable of resolving under the framework of liberalism?) that we are living right now and maybe someone will make a 60s tiktok about this which will drive more class consciousness than I have ever managed to in my life.
Idk. I'm yapping again. I guess I just see this work as the necessary precondition towards inventing the future, y'know?