الكاتب: kafej

The Israel-Gaza war has been raging for more than a month, killing over 10,500 civilians in Gaza, half of them children. Israel says it is acting in legitimate self-defence and is rooting out Hamas. Meanwhile, criticism over the deadly Israeli air strikes is mounting, with rights groups and some countries repeatedly calling for a ceasefire.

What are the limits to the principle of self-defence? What role can the United States and the international community play?

On UpFront, Marc Lamont Hill challenges David Friedman, former US ambassador to Israel under President Donald Trump, on whether Israel is respecting international law.

Thousands of people are holed up in Gaza’s largest hospital, which Israel claims is a Hamas command centre.

Israel’s military has closed in on the front gates of Gaza’s biggest hospital, where thousands of injured and displaced people are trapped amid intensive Israeli bombardment.

Israeli forces had fully encircled the al-Shifa Hospital as of early on Saturday morning, preventing ambulances from entering or leaving the facility, where medical supplies and food are running low.

“They are attacking and destroying the front gates of the main medical complex in the Gaza Strip as patients and thousands of Palestinians are still residing inside the yard of this hospital,” Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum said.

“Those people are really trapped right now by Israeli forces who are stationed in different sectors encircling the entire place. They are no longer able to move ambulances to bring victims and wounded people from the areas targeted. People are trapped and they lack food.”

Abu Azzoum said that Israeli snipers and artillery were also targeting anyone moving outside the hospital.

Al-Shifa director Muhammad Abu Salmiya described the area around the hospital as a “battlefield”, but said the hospital’s staff have pledged to stay with patients until the “last moment”.

“We will not leave, because we know if we leave the hospital, dozens of patients will die,” Abu Salmiya told Al Jazeera.

The escalating bombardment comes after an Israeli strike on the al-Shifa Hospital early on Friday killed at least 13 people and wounded several others, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-governed enclave.

Health officials said later on Friday that Israeli tanks were closing in on at least four hospitals in northern Gaza from all directions.

As fighting escalated on Friday night, Marwan Jilani, director general of the Palestine Red Crescent Society, condemned Israel for attacking hospitals at the UN Security Council in New York.

“Displaced people at the hospitals are getting shot at as we speak,” Jilani said.

“They are asking, ‘What can we do? Where can we go?’ Thousands of innocent lives are under imminent threat.”

World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus echoed his concerns, saying he was “extremely disturbed” by the situation at the al-Shifa Hospital.

“Many of the thousands sheltering at the hospital are forced to evacuate due to security risks, while many still remain there,” he posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“WHO is very concerned about the safety of patients, health workers and those sheltering in hospitals. They need immediate protection.”

We are extremely disturbed by reports of airstrikes in the vicinity of Al-Shifa hospital in #Gaza. Many health workers we were in contact with have been forced to leave the hospital in search of safety. Others report being unable to move due to grave insecurity. Many of the…

— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) November 10, 2023

Israel has claimed the hospital is used by Hamas as a command centre, which both the al-Shifa staff and the armed group have denied.

The area around al-Shifa has been bombed at least five times since Thursday, according to Gaza health officials, while Israeli forces have also struck al-Nasr Medical Centre, al-Quds Hospital and al-Rantisi Hospital.

The WHO has confirmed that half of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are not functioning and two-thirds of its primary care facilities are out of commission amid the fighting.

At least 11,078 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, according to Palestinian health officials.

More than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed by Hamas in the armed group’s surprise attacks on Israel on October 7, according to Israeli officials.

They dart across the football pitch in a blur of red, white, black and green, the colours of their jerseys echoing the Palestinian flags waving in the stands.

But the players of Club Deportivo Palestino are almost as far from Palestine as it is possible to be.

Located more than 13,000 kilometres (8,200 miles) away, the football club finds its home in La Cisterna, a suburb of Santiago, Chile — a sign of the unique role the South American country plays in the Palestinian diaspora.

Chile is home to the largest Palestinian population outside of the Middle East, with approximately 500,000 citizens of Palestinian descent. And as the latest war in Gaza unfolds, the rising death toll has hit close to home for many Chileans, for whom Palestinian culture is threaded into everyday life.

“We’re all subjects of this story,” Chilean rapper and musician Ana Tijoux told Al Jazeera, as she reflected on the ongoing war. “We all have to stand up.”

The conflict began on October 7, when the armed group Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, killing 1,400 people and capturing hundreds more.

Ever since, Israel has led a bombing campaign against Gaza, the narrow Palestinian territory home to an estimated 2.3 million people. Supplies have been cut off. Hospitals have shut down. And more than 10,000 Palestinians have died in the blasts, with nowhere to go for safety.

Tijoux, a Latin Grammy winner, has participated in one of the country’s largest pro-Palestinian rallies to date, a concert to raise funds for the remaining hospitals in Gaza and the West Bank.

The history of violence and displacement that Palestinians have faced resonates with Tijoux, who has Indigenous roots in Chile.

One of the best-selling Spanish-language rappers of all time, Tijoux has even collaborated with the Palestinian British artist Shadia Mansour, with whom she released an Arabic-Spanish protest anthem, 2014’s Somos Sur.

“Why does what is happening in Palestine affect us? It has to do with colonisation, genocide, racism and ethnic cleansing. The same patterns of imperialism repeat,” Tijoux said.

Those patterns have, in part, shaped the large Palestinian diaspora in Chile. Three waves of migration have occurred since the end of the 19th century, according to Ricardo Marzuco, a professor at the Center for Arab Studies at the University of Chile.

The first came with the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the late 1800s, as Palestinian merchants sought opportunities in Latin America. After the empire’s collapse, in the interwar period, a second outpouring occurred.

Then another major exodus began in 1948, when the state of Israel was formed and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced, in an event they refer to as the Nakba or “catastrophe”.

As a result of the economic losses, instability and political persecution they faced, many Palestinians travelled to the Americas to seek opportunities in emerging economies.

“It was the idea of the American dream,” said Marzuco.

Each successive generation that arrived in Chile created opportunities for more to follow, he added.

“It is related to the Arabic concept of extended family, the profound feeling of hospitality and solidarity,” Marzuco said. “The first that arrived and prospered invited relatives to work in their businesses, consolidating into an important community.”

A second-generation Palestinian Chilean, Marzuco said many Palestinians were also attracted to Chile for its mild coastal climate, similar to the Mediterranean environment of their homeland.

“They adapted well in Chile,” Marcuzo said. “There was an affinity with the weather, the environment, and certain elements that belonged to the Chilean landscape.”

Those early waves of Palestinian arrivals encountered xenophobia and racism in Chile, though. They were often lumped together with other Arab immigrants as “Turcos” or “Turks”, a term that grew to have a pejorative meaning.

But nowadays, Chileans of Palestinian descent are represented in some of the highest government offices. They include current mayor and former presidential candidate Daniel Jadue and Senator Francisco Javier Chahuán — politicians from opposite sides of the political spectrum. One is communist, the other right-wing.

“Solidarity with Palestine is expressed across political sectors,” said Marzuco.

Football also served as a means to build acceptance, according to Diego Khamis, the executive director of the Palestinian Community in Chile, an umbrella organisation that represents different Palestinian groups and businesses across the country.

Khamis is a loyal supporter of the Club Deportivo Palestino, a team founded by Palestinian immigrants in the 1920s.

“They thought one of the best ways to make Palestine visible is by creating a professional football club, so that ‘Palestine’ will appear in the newspaper at least once a week,” Khamis explained.

The team is part of the Palestinian Community in Chile. Since 1947, it has competed in the professional leagues and is regularly a leading contender in Chile’s Primera División, the country’s top league.

That gives it a platform to braid together Palestinian activism with football fandom, making slogans like “Free Palestine” a part of everyday life for its legions of supporters.

“At a time when the world was saying that Palestinians didn’t exist, in Chile, we knew it did. How can you say that something doesn’t exist when it’s so present here?” Khamis said.

The visibility of Chile’s Palestinian community has in turn shaped the country’s foreign policy, particularly in recent weeks.

Chilean President Gabriel Boric has repeatedly expressed support for Palestinian human rights since his inauguration in 2022, even withdrawing the country’s ambassador to Israel in condemnation of the current military offensive in Gaza.

“They’ve been among the first to take diplomatic action to protest what is happening,” Khamis said of Boric and his government.

Agustina Manzur, a 24-year-old makeup artist, has been surprised at just how great the outpouring of support has been since the start of the war.

A fourth-generation Chilean of Palestinian descent, she recently attended a protest outside the Israeli embassy in Santiago, Chile.

Dressed in her keffiyeh — a traditional Palestinian scarf — and carrying a Palestine flag, she arrived early. She was stunned to see the number of protesters already there.

Hundreds of people had gathered outside the embassy. The crowd grew so large that protesters spilled off the sidewalk and onto the busy road, cutting off traffic.

“It was comforting to see so many of us fighting for the same cause,” Manzur said. Lately, her social media has been awash with the devastation from Israeli attacks. “I couldn’t sleep. It totally consumed me.”

But she has found hope among members of Chile’s large Palestinian community and its supporters, all raising their voices against the war. She plans to protest again soon.

“We have to speak up because people in Gaza cannot. They don’t even have internet, light, or water,” Manzur said. “We cannot physically get Palestinians out, so the least we can do is protest for them.”

October 2023 has been a month of many victims. Bombs are raining on civilians in Sudan and Gaza while much less reported-on crises in Syria and Afghanistan continue to simmer with periods of uneasy silence punctuated by sharp bursts of violence. Armed conflict has led to record levels of death and displacement, and a reckoning of sorts is now facing the so-called international order. Each of these crises has an individual context and narrative that deserves to be understood on its own terms, but together they have raised overarching questions about the present and the future of international relations broadly, and international human rights (IHRL), humanitarian (IHL) and criminal law (ICL) more specifically. For possibly the first time since the Rwandan genocide and the break up of Yugoslavia, everyday people across the globe are trying to understand what international law is, why it matters, and why it feels as if it is doing nothing at this moment when we need it the most.

As practitioners in this space, we have been too slow to come to a coordinated defence of this admittedly fluid and politically complex area of law. That the political leaders of some of the wealthiest nations in the world initially refused, then tiptoed around, invoking international law as a red line for the Israeli armed forces in Gaza is a bleak development that is sure to have ramifications beyond the Middle East. It has taken simply too long for the United States and many of its European allies to offer tepid, overly qualified defences the value of international law in the context of Gaza. Witnessing this choice while reading news of escalated fighting in Syria, Sudan, Haiti, and the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo caused a shiver down the spine of anyone who has ever walked into a war zone to try and help civilians while armed only with a manual on the laws of war and a flak jacket. As experts in genocide and international law have been pointing out, we are crossing a rubicon into a present and a future that none of these political leaders seem to have fully contemplated.

Those of us who work within these bodies of international law are accustomed to healthy doses of public cynicism about our chosen profession. Unlike domestic law, for example, there is no standing international police force that has the power to arrest or detain and so we are accustomed to being asked what power of enforcement such a law could have. While there are international tribunals like the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the inner workings of these institutions are poorly understood even by our peers who work in other areas of the law, who might not understand for example why the ICC can only prosecute individuals, or the ICJ can only deal with disputes between nations. And the long history of powerful nations opting out of even the most basic systems of responsibility and accountability within these bodies of law often leaves us fielding questions about whether this is merely a concept designed to constrain poor nations and not rich. There isn’t a version of these and other criticisms that you can come up with that we haven’t heard and debated at length.

But in many ways that is what makes international law a more compelling body of law, certainly for practice. It represents something that domestic law doesn’t – consensus. States agree to be bound by certain principles even if they know that there is limited power of enforcement because we have collectively experienced what life is like without these principles. States and other political entities willingly opt out of that grim reality. We have theories about why individuals obey domestic law and enter into social contracts, but with international law, we have the documented evidence through preparatory documents and conference proceedings of why states willingly agree to be bound by these ideas. It is naïve to suggest that at times it is not just a question of political expediency – many governments agree to these rules because they think they will never be affected by them. But for the vast majority of countries international law represents an ideal or an aspiration of how they would like international relations to be conducted.

It’s worth recalling that the most universally accepted documents of international humanitarian and human rights law at least are developed on the back of some of the worst atrocities in history. The Geneva Conventions came after the Battle of Solferino and the horrific suffering that soldiers and civilians endured even when they were not actively involved in the fighting. The 1948 Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide was a response to the Holocaust, and the 1951 UNHCR Convention on Refugees came after the nations of Europe and North America denied Jewish people fleeing that atrocity safety at their borders. The Rome Convention that led to the International Criminal Court was a response to the need for a permanent place to resolve the kind of mass suffering created by genocide and war in Rwanda and the Former Republics of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

It’s not that people didn’t know that they were doing bad things before these rules existed. Rather these treaties and conventions represent the need to make that knowledge explicit and to rally people around the idea that they must never be tolerated again. These bodies of international law represent the aspiration to conduct humanity in a different way from the worst ways we have behaved towards each other in the past. To reformulate a quote attributed to Dag Hammarskjold at the UN: the purpose of international law is not to get us into heaven but to save us from hell.

Similarly, in as much as those of us who study international law in university are primarily immersed in the Western canon, international humanitarian law is not a Western endeavour. In his searing speech at the Cairo Peace Forum in October, Jordan’s King Abdullah reminded listeners that Islam has long prohibited the targeting of non-combatants in the Pact of Umar, an edict issued in Jerusalem in the 7th century that prohibited Muslim soldiers from killing children, women, the elderly, from destroying the natural environment or harming priests or churches. I admit, I didn’t know about the edict before I listened to this speech, but it struck me as yet another situation in which a law may be codified or written out in a specific document at a specific time, but it actually represents a more universal underlying principle that all societies recognise and abide by, regardless. The underlying principle that unites both the Pact of Umar and the Geneva Conventions signed almost a thousand years later is that war is always a tragedy and we must do whatever we can to restrict the number of civilians who are affected by it.

The point of these bodies of international law is not universal compliance but universal aspiration towards compliance. In addition to the devastating loss of life, this underlying aspiration has been so publicly and seriously undermined by every single government and institution that has waited too long to demand that armed actors in Israel and Gaza abide by international law. These laws represent the belief that humanity is capable of better and that whatever that better is, it is worth orienting and coordinating all of our efforts towards it. If they cannot be defended in times like this then we are endorsing something truly ugly about what it means to be human. And we do this at the expense of every person who is depending on us to use them to reorient the behaviour of belligerents towards more humane conduct within the tragedy of war. International humanitarian law urges us to believe that there will be peace one day and when that peace comes, even those who are active in conflict deserve to be able to look at themselves in the mirror and not feel crushed by the weight of what they did while they were fighting.

Several governments in the global majority have rightfully drawn from these rules to try and prevent armed actors from becoming the worst versions of themselves in Sudan, Israel, Gaza and beyond. Those governments that are still tiptoeing around the issue may find it worthwhile to zoom out and look at the world in October beyond the Middle East for the bleak future we are facing without these principles. Belligerents in Sudan’s civil war have continued to bomb civilian neighbourhoods and add to the estimated seven million people already displaced in that conflict. In the DRC, rebels in parts of the east have taken to fighting again and the risk of spiralling is high as elections are planned for December. On October 22 in Ukraine, six people were killed in Kharkiv when the local post office was bombed, as that war continues. There are Yemen, Haiti, Syria, Afghanistan, fighting across the Sahel, Myanmar, and a long list of other places where we have to be able to ask people to protect civilian life, not just because they will be punished, but because we all agree that it is the right thing to do. In the same month that so many political leaders in the global minority have failed to do the bare minimum – to remind each other that these rules exist – the most fragile contexts in the world need them desperately to prevent further descent into hell.

History not learned from is bound to be repeated. These bodies of international law, for all their complexities, silences and limitations, are a prime example of human beings trying to learn from history. Those who wield power in the world have an obligation to be caretakers of our aspirations to be better. Abiding by these rules is the ideal but defending these previously agreed-upon principles is the bare minimum that we demand from governments around the world. And we who claim to be practitioners in this field have an obligation to voice this demand publicly and vocally. If we can’t achieve this bare minimum, then what are we doing? We have learned nothing and we are no better than the worst that came before us.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Al-Shifa Hospital director confirms deaths after Al-Buraq School was targeted.

At least 25 people were killed in Israeli attacks on a Gaza City school, said the director of Al-Shifa Hospital where the casualties were taken.

“We received 25 martyrs from Al-Buraq School after missile and artillery strikes targeted the school this morning,” director Mohammad Abu Salmiya of Gaza’s largest hospital complex told Al Jazeera on Friday.

While the Reuters news agency reported the director as saying at least 20 Palestinians had been killed, AFP news agency put the number at about 50 people.

Video footage shared on social media showed dozens of bodies strewn across the school in the Al-Nasr neighbourhood in the aftermath of the attack. People whose homes had been destroyed were sheltering in the school.

The Israeli army has intensified its bombardment of the Gaza Strip, repeatedly targeting schools, mosques and hospitals.

Last week, an Israeli air missile struck the Al-Fakhoora School run by the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) in the Jabalia refugee camp, killing at least 15 people and injuring 54, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

Thousands of people displaced due to Israel’s relentless bombardment of the Gaza Strip had taken refuge at the Al-Fakhoora School. That was the third major attack on the Jabalia camp.

It came hours after a deadly strike on the Osama bin Zaid School sheltering displaced families in the Al-Saftawi area north of Gaza City, killing at least 20 people, according to local media.

At least 11,078 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7. In Israel, the death toll stands at more than 1,400.

The Israeli strikes have damaged more than 50 percent of housing units across Gaza, according to officials. The United Nations humanitarian office said in a statement that if there is a “hell on Earth, it is northern Gaza”.