Weekly Israel-Hamas war megathread - week of May 6

“You Have Been Warned”: Republican Senators Threaten the ICC Prosecutor over Possible Israel Arrest Warrants

In a terse, one-page letter obtained exclusively by Zeteo, and signed by 12 GOP senators, including Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Florida’s Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz of Texas, Khan is informed that any attempt by the ICC to hold Netanyahu and his colleagues to account for their actions in Gaza will be interpreted “not only as a threat to Israel’s sovereignty but to the sovereignty of the United States.”

“Target Israel and we will target you,” the senators tell Khan, adding that they will “sanction your employees and associates, and bar you and your families from the United States.”

On Friday, The Hague-based office of the chief prosecutor published an unprecedented statement on Twitter, calling for an end to threats of retaliation against the ICC and attempts to “impede” and “intimidate” its officials. The statement added that such threats could “constitute an offence against the administration of justice” under the Rome Statute.

The timing of this rare public rebuke now makes more sense: The U.S. senators’ letter was sent to Khan a week earlier, on April 24.

If Khan does issue an arrest warrant for Netanyahu in the coming days, it won’t be the first time he has gone after a controversial world leader over alleged war crimes – or been sanctioned for doing so. In March 2023, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for his alleged responsibility “for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children).” The Russian government responded by putting Khan on a “wanted” list.

Israeli leaders have approved a military operation into the Gaza Strip city of Rafah

Conveniently also, Israel orders Al Jazeera to close its local operation and seizes some of its equipment

Hamas says it accepted ceasefire proposal

‘If they go into Rafah, I’m not going to be supplying the weapons,’ Biden says.

“If they go into Rafah, I’m not going to be supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities, to deal with that problem,” Mr. Biden said in an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday.

In the interview, Mr. Biden also acknowledged in a way that he has rarely done that American bombs have killed innocent Palestinians. “Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers,” Mr. Biden said.

In the CNN interview, Mr. Biden said that he had warned Mr. Netanyahu against sending the Israeli military into civilian areas of Rafah. “It’s just wrong,” Mr. Biden said. “We’re not going to supply the weapons and artillery shells. I’ve made it clear to Bibi and the war cabinet that they’re not going to get our support if in fact they go into these population centers.”

Israeli military takes control of vital Rafah crossing from Gaza into Egypt (Reuters)

Israeli Army Radio announced its forces had taken control of the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing on Tuesday morning and army footage showed tanks rolling through the complex and the Israeli flag raised on the Gaza side.

Despite international appeals for Israel to hold off an assault on Rafah, Israeli tanks and planes also attacked several areas and houses there overnight. The Gaza health ministry said Israeli strikes across the enclave had killed 54 Palestinians and wounded 96 others in the past 24 hours.

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A Gaza border authority spokesperson said the Rafah crossing, a vital route for aid into the devastated enclave, was now closed. Red Crescent sources in Egypt said aid shipments had completely halted at Rafah and at the Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom crossing.

U.S. delays arms shipments to Israel amid Rafah tensions (Washington Post)

The White House and State Department declined to explain the decision, but it is the first known instance of a delay in U.S. arms transfers since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack into Israel that killed more than 1,200 people.

Since then, the United States has surged tens of thousands of bombs and missiles to its ally even as huge swaths of Gaza have been turned to rubble and the death toll among Palestinians has ballooned to more than 34,000, many of them women and children, according to local health authorities. President Biden has described the bombing as “indiscriminate,” but he has been reluctant to leverage weapons transfers to try to force a change in Israel’s behavior.

One U.S. official described the move as a “shot across the bow” intended to underscore to Israeli leaders the seriousness of U.S. concerns about the offensive in Rafah, where more than 1 million displaced Palestinians are massed in camps near Gaza’s border with Egypt.

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U.S. officials remain hopeful that a hostage deal that includes a cease-fire can forestall a full-scale Israeli invasion but those prospects became bleaker with the start of the Israeli operation.
Negotiators “should be able to close the remaining gaps” between Israel and Hamas, Kirby told reporters. “Everybody is coming to the table,” including delegations from both Israel and Hamas, Kirby said of talks being held in Cairo.

Asked how Hamas’s insistence that any cease-fire be permanent could be reconciled with Israel’s position that it would agree only to a temporary pause in fighting to secure the release of hostages, Kirby said: “I really don’t want to get into talking about the specific parameters.”

‘Didn’t fall from the sky’: Biden threat follows months of feeling PM ignored his warnings (The Times of Israel)

“The president and his team have been clear for several [months] that we do not support a major ground operation in Rafah where more than one million people are sheltering with nowhere safe to go,” White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said Thursday, noting that this message was conveyed publicly and privately to Netanyahu. “The Israeli government has understood this for some time now.”

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“Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which [Israel] goes after population centers,” Biden told CNN when asked “have those bombs been used to kill civilians in Gaza,” explaining his decision to hold up a shipment of high payload munitions to Israel last week. “It’s just wrong. We’re not going to supply the weapons and artillery shells.”

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As for humanitarian assistance and deconfliction, the two US officials said it took until the IDF strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen workers on April 1 for Israel to implement a series of measures to significantly expand the amount of aid entering Gaza and protect the people delivering it.

The past month regularly featured days where nearly 400 trucks of aid entered the Strip — still 100 trucks less than the daily average before the war, but the maritime route is expected to be operational in the coming days and Washington says it will cover that difference.

The uptick in aid has been difficult to maintain, though, dropping again this week as Israel began a limited operation to take over the Palestinian side of the Rafah Crossing, shutting it down for the delivery of aid.

Israel also closed its nearby Kerem Shalom Crossing into Gaza after a Hamas attack from Rafah over the weekend killed four IDF troops and wounded 10 others stationed nearby. The crossing was reopened on Wednesday, when another soldier was wounded there by a Hamas rocket barrage, but the number of aid trucks passing through has been far more limited since.

The second US official told The Times of Israel that concerns of another downward trend in aid delivery, just as fears over a potential famine in northern Gaza had eased, was on top of mind for the administration in the days leading up to Biden’s CNN interview.

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Another issue the Biden administration has harped on since the days after October 7 was the necessity for Israel to immediately begin planning for who will take over Gaza once the war ends.

“We’ll help you get [Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar,” Biden recalled telling Netanyahu during the CNN interview.

“But don’t make the same mistake we made in America [after 9/11],” the president added, lamenting what he felt had been the US’s inability to plan strategically upon invading Afghanistan and Iraq.

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Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners have called for Israel to permanently occupy Gaza and reestablish settlements in the Palestinian territory. The premier has signaled his opposition to these steps but has been criticized for blocking clear alternatives to Hamas’s rule, leaving US officials concerned that Gaza will either remain in Hamas’s hands or will be governed by anarchy.

Finally, after Biden’s threat on Wednesday, the Kan public broadcaster reported that Netanyahu agreed to hold a war cabinet meeting to discuss the post-war management of Gaza.

“We’ve been pushing the Israelis to discuss day-after from the get-go, and we’ve been completely ignored. As a result, Israeli soldiers are returning a second and third time to the same areas they previously cleared Hamas fighters from,” said the second US official.

“All throughout this, we continued regular shipments of weapons, but they knew this wasn’t going to be able to go on forever,” the official continued. “The president’s comments [to CNN] didn’t fall from the sky.”

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The US official rejected the notion that the threat was part of a politically motivated effort to appease progressives who Biden might need in order to get re-elected. The president said in the CNN interview that he “absolutely” heard the pro-Palestinian students protesting against Israel, before hinting they were far less representative than they seem.

This is old news but I personally missed it, so I wanted to share here:

More damage than Dresden

The Financial Times did a statistical analysis that compared Gaza to the Allied bombing campaign over Germany during the Second World War.

Three cities in Germany were effectively destroyed from the air during that war: Cologne, Hamburg and Dresden. In Hamburg and Dresden, a mix of high explosives and incendiary bombs created the notorious "firestorm" conditions that caused streets to melt.

Data analyzed by Scher and Van Den Hoek shows that by Dec. 5, the percentage of Gaza's buildings that had been damaged or destroyed already had surpassed the destruction in Cologne and Dresden, and was approaching the level of Hamburg.

Unrwa Jerusalem HQ closed after ‘Israeli extremist’ arson attack - https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/may/09/unrwa-jerusalem-hq-closed-after-israeli-extremist-arson-attack

Why Biden finally decided to speak out on college protest violence (Politico)

On Wednesday, Biden’s interagency task force on antisemitism gathered to discuss how to more quickly advance some of its policy items, according to a person familiar with the discussion. […] The officials expressed urgency about implementing federal policies to counter antisemitism, such as protecting students on campuses.

In addition, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, the nation’s most prominent Jewish official and the administration’s most high-profile official on combating antisemitism, held private calls last week with Jewish community leaders at Columbia University.

The central question inside the White House has been just how involved the president himself should be in responding to the protests. Until Thursday, Biden had said relatively little. The White House had issued statements earlier in the week that condemned antisemitism as well as past comments of a student protest leader and the seizure and vandalism of a Columbia University building. But they were released under the names of aides, not the president.

The White House treated the subject gingerly, reflecting the divided politics in the Democratic Party about the Gaza war. Allies argued that the protesters were a small subset of voters that ultimately would not harm the president during the campaign.

According to the people familiar with his thinking, Biden’s decision to get more directly involved came in response to protesters occupying buildings and vandalizing them. He felt the acts were extreme enough that they needed to be called out in hopes of deterring similar episodes. Privately and then publicly, the president said that the protesters had a right to peacefully make their point but not threaten violence or commit actual crimes.

Among Biden advisers, there is hope that the protests will eventually die down, not because of the president’s speech but because of external factors. Schools are soon closing for the summer. And there is hope that a cease-fire deal can soon be struck between Israel and Hamas.

U.S. offers Israel intelligence, supplies in effort to avoid Rafah invasion (Washington Post)

The Biden administration, working urgently to stave off a full-scale Israeli invasion of Rafah, is offering Israel valuable assistance if it holds back, including sensitive intelligence to help the Israeli military pinpoint the location of Hamas leaders and find the group’s hidden tunnels, according to four people familiar with the U.S. offers.

American officials have also offered to help provide thousands of shelters so Israel can build tent cities — and to help with the construction of delivery systems for food, water and medicine — so that Palestinians evacuated from Rafah can have a habitable place to live, said the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to disclose secret diplomatic talks.

President Biden and his senior aides have been making such offers over the last several weeks in hopes they will persuade Israel to conduct a more limited and targeted operation in the southern Gaza city, where some 1.3 million Palestinians are sheltering after fleeing there from other parts of Gaza under Israeli orders. Israel has vowed to go into Rafah with “extreme force,” and this week Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took a number of steps that raised fears at the White House that the long-promised invasion could be materializing.

Administration officials, including experts from the U.S. Agency for International Development, have told Israel it will take several months to safely relocate hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who are now living in decrepit and unsanitary conditions in Rafah. Israeli officials disagree with that assessment.

Biden aides are stressing to their Israeli counterparts that Palestinians cannot simply be moved to barren or bombarded parts of Gaza, but that Israel must provide basic infrastructure — including shelter, food, water, medicine and other necessities — so that those who are evacuated will have livable conditions and not simply be exposed to additional famine or disease.

Experts from across the U.S. government are advising their Israeli counterparts in great detail on how to develop and implement such a humanitarian plan, down to the level of how many tents and how much water would be needed for specific areas, according to several people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Aid groups have said safely evacuating people from Rafah is nearly impossible given the conditions in the rest of Gaza.

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U.S. officials are now working closely with Egypt to find and cut off tunnels that cross the Egypt-Gaza border in the Rafah area, which Hamas has used to replenish militarily, according to two people familiar the discussions.

I Was Once a Student Protester. The Old Hyperbole Is Now Reality. - Zeynep Tufekci - New York Times -

Gift Link

Turkey was still emerging from the long shadow of the 1980 coup. For years, protests were suppressed, sometimes with deadly force. Even a whiff of disruption could get Istanbul shut down, with armored vehicles blocking major roads. Trust me, I said, this is not what a police state looks like.

When I told my friends back home that Americans thought it was outrageous for the police even to show up at a demonstration, it was considered yet more evidence that I had been recruited by the C.I.A.

“The American police showed up to a protest and did nothing?” one of my friends scoffed. “Just watched? No arrests? No heads bashed in?” Yeah, right.

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I stayed in academia and made political resistance around the world one of my primary fields of study. The one lesson I learned above all else is that a disproportionate crackdown is often a protest movement’s most powerful accelerant.

I saw it in Occupy Wall Street in 2011, when a video of penned-in women being pepper-sprayed at close range turned a little-known demonstration into an idea with nationwide reach. I saw it in Gezi Park, Istanbul, in 2013 when people hoping to save the park from demolition were tear-gassed and arrested, their small encampment burned. It helped generate protests that rocked the nation. I saw it in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, when troopers showing up to a grieving community with armored cars and sniper rifles caused the outrage that fueled a national movement. And just think of what the photographs of police officers turning dogs and hoses on peaceful marchers did for the civil rights movement.

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Will authority figures rise to the moment and respond to the challenge with skilled leadership befitting institutions of higher learning? Or will they panic and enforce crackdowns way out of proportion to any actual threat?

It’s not looking good so far. At the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, state police officers in riot gear carrying M4 carbines — the kind of weapons used in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan — and chemical-gas launchers were called in to disperse what many onlookers described as a small, peaceful group with a handful of tents. “None of these folks showed up when I lived on campus and white supremacists with tikki torches yelling ‘Jews will not replace us’ marched through campus as I hid my three kids,” Chad Wellmon, an associate professor at the university, wrote on social media.

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As hard as this may be to believe, absent the glare of publicity, these protests might have been unexceptional — the stuff of college life, for better or worse. Just last year, students at the University of California at Berkeley occupied a library slated for closing — bringing their tents, sleeping bags and air mattresses — for nearly three months. Congress didn’t see the need to hold hearings about it. In 2019, students at Johns Hopkins occupied a building for five weeks to protest the university’s contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its push for a private police force. Four students were arrested, but the administration quickly announced that the charges would be dropped. Why? Probably for the same reason that Police Chief Laurie Pritchett of Albany, Ga., once quietly arranged for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to be released from the city’s jail — against King’s wishes. He knew the clamor would subside and the protest would roll on to the next city.

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The truth is, protests are always messy, with incoherent or objectionable messages sometimes scattered in with eloquent pleas and impassioned testimony. The 1968 antiwar protesters may be celebrated now, but back then a lot of onlookers were horrified to hear people chanting in favor of a victory by Ho Chi Minh’s army. During the Iraq war, I attended demonstrations to which fringe political groups had managed to attach themselves, and I rolled my eyes at their unhinged slogans or crazy manifestoes.

Masha Gessen, whose essay on the Israel-Palestine conflict from the perspective of contemporary Europe caused some controversy late last year, was on Haaretz Podcast this week. It was as refreshing and clear eyed as you'd expect from them. It's worth a listen, if you have the time.

Shibboleth - Zadie Smith in the New Yorker - archive

I thought this essay interesting because it has clearly stated ethical principles that might sound good at first, but are foreign to my own:

I understand the ethics underpinning the protests to be based on two widely recognized principles:

1. There is an ethical duty to express solidarity with the weak in any situation that involves oppressive power.

2. If the machinery of oppressive power is to be trained on the weak, then there is a duty to stop the gears by any means necessary.

The first principle sometimes takes the “weak” to mean “whoever has the least power,” and sometimes “whoever suffers most,” but most often a combination of both. The second principle, meanwhile, may be used to defend revolutionary violence, although this interpretation has just as often been repudiated by pacifistic radicals, among whom two of the most famous are, of course, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. In the pacifist’s interpretation, the body that we must place between the gears is not that of our enemy but our own. In doing this, we may pay the ultimate price with our actual bodies, in the non-metaphorical sense. More usually, the risk is to our livelihoods, our reputations, our futures.

I'm struck by the importance of symbolism in this ethics. I don't really believe in utilitarianism in the sense that I don't think that making a spreadsheet and plugging numbers into it would be useful. But, I do believe in weighing costs against benefits in some way. Actions need to have some chance of success. I'm willing to take getting publicity as a real-world action, but it seems like you should know what you're going tell people once you have their attention.

By contrast, this ethics seems to be about real costs and symbolic benefits? The "gears" are rhetorical gears in a giant worldwide metaphorical machine. The connections between different parts of the system aren't really dwelled upon.

And it seems like that's how you get people blocking traffic about something happening on the far side of the world?

Smith calls herself weak for being unwilling to get arrested over climate change:

I was asked by my fellow-protesters whether I’d be willing to commit an arrestable offense—one that would likely lead to a conviction and thus make travelling to the United States difficult or even impossible—I’m ashamed to say that I declined that offer. Turns out, I could not give up my relationship with New York City for the future of the planet. I’d just about managed to stop buying plastic bottles (except when very thirsty) and was trying to fly less. But never to see New York again? What pitiful ethical creatures we are (I am)! Falling at the first hurdle!

Visiting New York City is important to me only to visit family. I'd be unwilling to give that up either. But I wouldn't even consider it unless the result seemed "worth it" in some respect.