Our Wednesday News Analysis | As its former ambassadors, we urge the EU to sanction Israel now

Palestinians search for wood to sell or use for cooking amid the rubble of a building which was destroyed in an Israeli military strike in Gaza City, Sunday, Sept. 14, 2025 [AP Photo/Yousef Al Zanoun]

The heinous attacks of 7 October 2023 by Hamas and others against Israeli citizens, along with the continuing detention of hostages, can never justify the retribution wreaked on Gaza,
which is becoming the graveyard of international law and universal human rights.

Reckless military assaults of the type committed by Israel on the sovereign territory of Qatar, a key player in ceasefire talks, together with the lack of effective action, will condemn generations of both Palestinians and Israelis to perpetual suffering and continue to destabilise the region and beyond.

It is incumbent on all of us, as global citizens, to demand from our leaders nothing less than the complete application of international law. The time to act is now.

Amid mounting concern about the remorseless attacks by Israel against the civilian population in Gaza, which, since October 7, 2023, have reportedly led to the deaths and injuries of over 227,000 Palestinians and the displacement, in the last two weeks, of more than 400,000 people, 325 former European Union and Member State Ambassadors and Senior Officials are calling for urgent action.

• We strongly urge the EU to immediately impose targeted sanctions on the Israeli government and suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement.
• In addition, we urge the President of the United Nations General Assembly and the Chair of the United Nations Security Council to convene emergency meetings of both bodies to adopt sanctions against Israel for the multiple violations of international law being perpetrated daily against the people of Palestine.
• The United Nations, being the established global body for peace and security, must live up to its responsibilities.

We cannot stand idly by, watching Gaza reduced to rubble and its inhabitants driven into destitution and starvation...

Read more: As its former ambassadors, we urge the EU to sanction Israel now
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GENOCIDE LABEL SPURRING FURTHER LEGAL ACTION AGAINST ISRAEL

Source: Arab News
https://www.arabnews.com/node/2616276

By Dr Ramzy Baroud
Published September 22, 2025

It is incumbent on all of us to remind Netanyahu and other war criminals that no one is immune to accountability (File/AFP)

Though Netanyahu continues to act with the same arrogant attitude that insists he, his government, and his country are above the law, including international law, it is incumbent on all of us to remind him and other war criminals that no individual, no entity, and no government is immune to accountability when it comes to the blood of the innocent.

Every day brings new indictments for Israel. Within three months of the start of its war on Gaza, South Africa was accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice. That term is now becoming an accepted legal position among international bodies and governments alike. The latest indictment was issued by the UN Human Rights Council last week.

“The Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces have had and continue to have the genocidal intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip,” a report by the council’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry unambiguously stated. While this may seem obvious to those watching the Israeli genocide unfold in real time, the step is nonetheless historic.

According to Triestino Mariniello, an international law expert and a member of the legal team representing Gaza victims before the International Criminal Court, the report is of “historic importance” and is “unprecedented.” Though previous UN commissions have repeatedly accused Israel of committing war crimes in Palestine, “they had never gone so far as to say that Israel is also responsible for what represents the most serious crime at the international level: the crime of genocide.”

Desperate to see enough international pressure to force Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist government to end their mass extermination of Palestinians in Gaza, many wonder if such reports are enough to hold Israel to account. Commission chair Navi Pillay, a South African judge who also headed the international tribunal for the 1994 Rwanda genocide, admits that justice “is a slow process,” but she does not consider it “impossible that there will be arrests and trials” in the future...

Read more: Genocide label spurring further legal action against Israel
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OPINION | THE BANALITY OF EVIL

Source: Haaretz
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025-09-16/ty-article-opinion/.premium/the-banality-of-evil/00000199-541b-d7ad-a1d9-547b3c370000

By Ahmad Tibi
Published September 16, 2025

This picture, taken from a position at Israel's border with the Gaza Strip, shows smoke above destroyed buildings in the besieged Palestinian territory on September 16, 2025, amid the ongoing war between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas militant group. Credit: AFP/MENAHEM KAHANA

There is no morality here, only institutionalized oppression. The poet Denise Levertov writes about the repeated killing of children, whose names are forgotten and sex undetectable in the ashes, rising in flames yet not disappearing.

... “the sad truth is that most evil is committed by people
who never decide to be good or evil; it arises from a failure to think... the banality of evil."

Hannah Arendt

It is the silence of the majority when people become accustomed to evil and cease to think, oppose, or refuse to participate.

The Israeli public is witnessing the expulsion of women, children, and elderly people, and it is maintaining silence. It is witnessing the ethnic cleansing and says nothing. It is seeing the total destruction of the Gaza Strip and doesn't speak up. It knows that 18,000 children have been killed in Gaza and remains quiet. It knows that journalists, physicians, emergency workers, educators, and thousands of civilians are buried under the rubble, and says nothing. And when houses and high-rise buildings are bombed, it says nothing, often demanding more, sometimes even smiling sadistically.

The atrocities in Israel's Gaza border communities, in which 30 children and hundreds of civilians were murdered, shocked Israel's public, and justifiably so. But what the government is perpetrating in Gaza, with the support of most of the public, is not "self-defense." It is not a temporary reaction but the implementation of an old plan that had been waiting in some drawer: a plan of transfer and annihilation arising from the depths of Israel's political-defense discourse. Israel's government has become an openly Kahanist one.

The day is not far off when Likud ministers will place a wreath at the grave of Meir Kahane. What was once considered abominable and outlawed extremism has become the core of the ruling consensus...

Read more: Opinion | The Banality of Evil